Tag: China

Getting ‘The Right Stuff’ Again in American Manufacturing: NASA needs a lot more than bold talk to beat China to the Moon

The recent interview between Fox News host Jesse Watters and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, which aired amid the high-stakes momentum of the Artemis program, captured more than just technical difficulties with an earpiece that briefly cut out audio during a live segment. It encapsulated a deeper tension roiling American aerospace ambitions: the urgent race to establish a permanent lunar presence before China, set against decades of bureaucratic drift, cultural shifts in the workforce, and policy choices that prioritized social engineering over raw engineering excellence. Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur and commercial astronaut who assumed the role of NASA’s 15th administrator in December 2025 after President Trump’s nomination and swift Senate confirmation, has injected a dose of private-sector urgency into the agency. Yet the exchange with Watters—where questions about beating China to a sustained moon base prompted the glitch—sparked immediate online speculation about whether it was a genuine malfunction or narrative control. Those who follow space policy closely understand the subtext: the United States holds a lead today, but sustaining it demands confronting uncomfortable truths about how DEI-driven mandates, union-influenced work cultures, and regulatory bloat have eroded the very foundations that once propelled America to the moon in under a decade during the Apollo era. 

To appreciate the stakes, one must revisit NASA’s trajectory since the glory days of Apollo 11 in 1969. That achievement, born of Cold War necessity and a national commitment to excellence under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, saw the agency operate with a singular focus: land humans on the moon and return them safely. The program succeeded through relentless innovation, round-the-clock engineering, and a workforce ethos that tolerated risk in pursuit of national objectives. By contrast, the post-Apollo decades brought complacency, budget constraints, and the rise of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station as routine operations rather than frontier-pushing endeavors. Human spaceflight stagnated, with the shuttle program ending in 2011 after the Columbia and Challenger tragedies highlighted safety concerns but also exposed layers of bureaucracy. Enter the Obama administration in 2009, which inherited a Constellation program already strained but pivoted sharply. In a 2010 Al Jazeera interview, then-NASA Administrator Charles Bolden articulated what he described as one of President Obama’s top priorities for the agency: reaching out to the Muslim world to highlight historic contributions to science, math, and engineering. The White House quickly clarified that this was not NASA’s foremost mission—emphasizing inspiration for children and international partnerships instead—but the remark crystallized a broader reorientation. Funding for human exploration was curtailed in favor of commercial partnerships and Earth science, while SLS (Space Launch System) development, mandated by Congress as a jobs program across multiple states, ballooned in cost and timeline. By 2012-2013, as the administration emphasized diversity and inclusion initiatives across federal agencies, NASA and its contractors began integrating DEI frameworks into hiring, training, and performance evaluations. Executive performance plans incorporated DEI metrics, and contractors faced pressure to align with equity action plans that emphasized demographic targets over merit-based selection. 

These policies did not emerge in isolation. Across aerospace and manufacturing sectors, similar mandates proliferated, often tied to federal contracts worth billions. NASA’s 2022 Equity Action Plan, for instance, embedded DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) requirements into mission leadership selection, mentorship programs, and supplier diversity goals. While proponents argued that diverse teams foster innovation—as evidenced by claims about the Mars Curiosity rover mission, where varied perspectives allegedly enhanced problem-solving—critics pointed to measurable performance drag. OpenTheBooks analyses from the period revealed NASA allocating tens of millions to DEI-specific contracts and training between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, even as core programs like Artemis faced delays. Boeing and SpaceX, major NASA partners, navigated these pressures amid their own unionized workforces and supplier chains, where compliance sometimes trumped speed. The result? Extended timelines and cost overruns that dwarfed Apollo’s efficiency. Artemis I, the uncrewed SLS test flight, finally launched in 2022 after years of slippage; Artemis II, the crewed lunar flyby, occurred in early 2026 following further postponements linked to technical issues, hydrogen leaks, and integration challenges. Cumulative costs for the program through 2025 exceeded $93 billion according to NASA’s Office of Inspector General, with SLS launches now priced at around $4 billion each—far beyond initial projections of $500 million. These figures reflect not just inflation or complexity but systemic inefficiencies: multilayered oversight, “safety-first” cultures that sometimes masked risk aversion, and a workforce environment where political correctness and work-from-home mandates during COVID exacerbated disconnects between salaried administrators and shop-floor technicians. 

From an insider’s perspective in aerospace manufacturing—where physical hardware must meet unforgiving tolerances for flight—the cultural erosion becomes glaring. Large primes and their tiered suppliers adopted elements of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in the 1980s and 1990s, inspired by Japan’s post-war industrial miracle. Taiichi Ohno’s lean principles emphasized waste elimination, just-in-time inventory, and the Andon cord: a mechanism empowering any line worker to halt production upon spotting a defect, triggering immediate problem-solving by cross-functional teams. In Japanese facilities, this system thrived on a cultural bedrock of exceptional work ethic—deep bows at convenience stores, meticulous attention to detail in every task, and a societal emphasis on collective diligence rooted in post-war reconstruction values. Workers viewed line stops as a matter of quality and the customer, not as excuses for downtime. NUMMI, the 1984 Toyota-GM joint venture in Fremont, California, demonstrated that these principles could be transplanted to American soil, transforming a dysfunctional GM plant into a high-performing operation through rigorous training, respect for workers, and a kaizen (continuous improvement) mindset. Yet scaling this across U.S. aerospace proved elusive, largely due to entrenched differences in labor culture. 

American manufacturing, particularly in union-heavy sectors like aerospace and autos, evolved differently. Labor unions, while securing wages and protections, often fostered adversarial dynamics that prioritized job security and grievance processes over rapid resolution. The United Auto Workers (UAW), for example, navigated the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009, yet patterns persisted: when issues arose—defective parts, process deviations—responses frequently involved slowdowns, Netflix viewing on phones during waits, or leveraging downtime for personal pursuits rather than pursuing aggressive root-cause fixes. This contrasts sharply with TPS’s “stop to fix” ethos, where Japanese teams swarm problems relentlessly. In aerospace, where suppliers cascade behaviors from primes like Boeing or Lockheed, the ripple effects compound. During the COVID-era mandates, remote work for administrators clashed with the impossibility of “building stuff” from home, revealing the fragility of cultures detached from physical production. Safety protocols, essential after historical tragedies, sometimes became pretexts for caution that bordered on paralysis, inflating costs and timelines. A recent tour of NASA facilities underscored this: late on a Saturday night, parking lots sat half-empty, with activity levels insufficient for the compressed schedules needed to outpace rivals. Contrast this with SpaceX’s Hawthorne and Boca Chica operations, where engineers and technicians work extended shifts, holidays included, driven by founder Elon Musk’s “hardcore” ethos of iteration and urgency. The Falcon and Starship programs demonstrate that meritocratic, high-engagement cultures can deliver reusable hardware at a fraction of traditional costs, pressuring NASA and legacy contractors to adapt. 

The geopolitical dimension amplifies these internal frailties. China’s lunar ambitions are no secret and proceed with authoritarian efficiency. Having landed robotic missions on the far side of the moon and established the Tiangong space station, Beijing aims to achieve a crewed landing by 2030 using the Long March 10 rocket, Mengzhou spacecraft, and Lanyue lander. Follow-on plans include an International Lunar Research Station (with Russia) by 2035, featuring habitats, resource utilization, and sustained presence near the south pole. Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar program, has outlined aggressive resource-development goals, unhindered by the democratic debates or union negotiations that constrain the U.S. As of April 2026, NASA’s Artemis architecture—post-Isaacman’s overhaul—targets crewed landings in 2028 via Artemis III or IV, pivoting from the canceled Lunar Gateway to direct south pole infrastructure: habitats, pressurized rovers, nuclear power, and ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) for oxygen and construction. NASA’s Ignition event in March 2026 laid out a $20-30 billion, multi-phase plan over seven to ten years for a base that supports month-long crew stays, leveraging commercial partners like SpaceX and Blue Origin. Yet without cultural acceleration, China’s state-directed workforce—operating under conditions that Americans might deem “unhealthy” but that yield results—could close the gap. The lead is “too great” only if maintained; hesitation invites reversal. 

Isaacman’s leadership signals a potential inflection. A veteran of the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn missions, he brings entrepreneurial grit, having overseen infrastructure demolitions at the Marshall Space Flight Center to modernize for Trump-era goals. The Watters interview, despite the glitch (deemed technical by most accounts, not evasion), highlighted Artemis II’s successes and Mars-forward experiments. But sustaining momentum requires a broader resurrection of the American manufacturing base. This means rejecting leniency toward policies that dilute merit—hiring, promotions, and evaluations rooted in competence rather than quotas. It demands seven-day operations, holiday shifts without complaint, and full parking lots at 3 a.m. Safety must remain paramount, but not as a shield for disengagement; engaged teams, as SpaceX proves, reduce errors through vigilance rather than bureaucracy. Unions supporting political shifts (many backed Trump in recent cycles) face a reckoning: adapt to competitive realities or risk irrelevance as smaller, agile players—Firefly, Blue Origin, and commercial upstarts—overtake sluggish giants. Suppliers must follow suit, cascading urgency downward rather than mirroring top-down complacency. 

Historical parallels abound. The original space race demanded Apollo-era grit: engineers sleeping under desks, welders iterating prototypes until flawless, a nation unified against Soviet threats. Today’s competition, while economic and scientific rather than purely military, carries strategic weight. Lunar resources—helium-3 for fusion, water ice for propellant, regolith for construction—could dictate cislunar dominance, influencing satellite networks, planetary defense, and future Mars missions. An American flag on the first sustained base is not symbolism but necessity, setting norms for celestial governance amid rising multipolarity. Sacrificing lives recklessly is unacceptable, yet charging forward with calculated risk mirrors historical precedents: D-Day assaults or Pacific island-hopping campaigns where objectives justified intensity. NASA’s suppliers, from avionics to propulsion, must internalize this; half-asleep workers awaiting problem resolution or LinkedIn job-hunting administrators undermine the mission.

My book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (2021), anticipated these manufacturing and cultural crossroads. Hard-learned truths from COVID—when intent behind policies crystallized as micromanagement and reduced output—demand a return to basics: merit over mandates, engagement over entitlement, innovation over regulation. Trump’s second term, with Isaacman at the helm, has already accelerated Artemis restructuring, but longevity matters. Republican continuity post-2028 ensures that policies endure beyond a single administration, preventing a reversion to pre-2025 drift. This is not partisan rhetoric but pragmatic necessity for a workforce revival that dusts off “the right stuff”—the toughness, curiosity, and dedication that defined mid-20th-century America.

In aerospace, where atmospheric or orbital flight shares the same adventurous DNA, success hinges on compressing timelines rather than extending them. Japan’s lean techniques succeeded not through rote imitation but cultural alignment; America must forge its hybrid, leveraging individual initiative within disciplined systems. Parasite-like drags—DEI overhead, union-enabled slowdowns, safety-as-excuse—must yield to vitality. Recent conferences with major manufacturers reveal lingering Toyota envy without the execution; presentations touting incremental lean gains ignore root cultural mismatches. Smaller innovators will force adaptation, as they already do via commercial crew and cargo.

Ultimately, the moon base vision—sustainable habitats and a continuous presence akin to the ISS but extraterrestrial—demands more than hardware. It requires human capital aligned with purpose: passionate, grid-tough teams working around the clock because the frontier calls. China pushes aggressively, accepting trade-offs for primacy; the U.S. can lead by reclaiming its edge without mirroring authoritarianism, simply by unleashing latent American ingenuity. The Watters-Isaacman moment, glitch and all, reminds us that the stakes are real. With policies favoring merit, excellence, and intelligence (MEI) supplanting prior frameworks, and commercial pressure from SpaceX et al., NASA can reclaim leadership. The American manufacturing base, long crippled by self-inflicted wounds, stands poised for resurrection—if leaders and workers alike embrace the grind. This is the undercurrent of the current space drama: not mere technical hurdles, but a call to cultural renewal. Sustaining it ensures not just lunar victory but a broader renaissance, where adventure, innovation, and unapologetic excellence propel humanity outward. The 2030 deadline looms; meeting it—and beyond—restores what decades of deviation nearly forfeited. The right stuff awaits rediscovery, and the time is now. 

Bibliography and Footnotes for Further Reading

1.  NASA Office of Inspector General. Artemis Program Cost and Schedule Overruns. 2025-2026 reports detailing $93 billion+ expenditures through FY2025.

2.  Bolden, Charles. Al Jazeera Interview (July 2010), as documented in Reuters and CBS News archives on NASA outreach priorities. 

3.  Isaacman, Jared. NASA Official Biography and Confirmation Records (December 2025). NASA.gov. 

4.  Planetary Society. Cost Analysis of SLS/Orion Programs. Updated 2026.

5.  Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press, 1988 (foundational TPS text, including Andon system).

6.  Adler, Paul S. “Cultural Transformation at NUMMI.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 1994. 

7.  OpenTheBooks. “NASA’s One Giant Leap Toward DEI.” Substack analysis of FY2021-2024 spending. 

8.  Reuters. “China’s Crewed Lunar Program Eyes Astronaut Landing by 2030.” April 2026. 

9.  NASA. Artemis Ignition Event and Moon Base Plan. March 2026 announcements. 

10.  Hoffman, Rich. Gunfight Guide to Business (2021). Self-published insights on manufacturing resilience and cultural factors in industry.

11.  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Advancing DEIA in Competed Space Missions. 2022 report (context for pre-2025 policies). 

12.  U.S. Government Accountability Office. Audits on NASA project overruns, 2025.

13.  JETRO Surveys on U.S.-Japan manufacturing challenges (labor and workforce data).

14.  Nature. “China Planning Lunar Landing and Base.” April 2026. 

15.  Fox News Archives. Watters-Isaacman Interview Transcripts and Clips (April 2026). 

16.  Lean Blog. Analyses of Andon cord and Japanese vs. Western implementation. 

17.  CSIS. Reports on U.S.-Japan economic ties and workforce development (2026).

18.  Additional historical: Logsdon, John. John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 (Apollo context).

19.  Musk, Elon, and SpaceX public updates on operational culture (various 2020s interviews).

20.  Trump Administration Executive Orders on Ending DEI Programs (January 2025 onward). 

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

The Bad Guys Deserve Punishment: Destroying Iran to free people from tyranny

I’ve been watching everything unfold in real time. It feels good to see some real aggression from the top, finally. Everybody’s talking about how Trump’s inspiration is driving this new level of toughness—hitting Iran hard, taking out Maduro in Venezuela, and setting up hemispheric shielding through Kristi Noem’s new gig as Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas. It’s exactly what we needed. We’ve lived through a very dangerous time, and we had to have justice for what was done to us. So when people whine, “Why are you being so aggressive? Why treat Venezuela like this? Why talk so tough on Iran, China, the cartels?”—I point to the big picture. We tried playing nice when we could, making deals, but the bad actors never stopped scheming in the background. Iran’s always been problematic, bragging about nuclear warheads and funding terrorists. Trump couldn’t walk away from negotiations with them, thumbing their nose at honest attempts at peace in the Middle East. If they’re going to keep sponsoring terror, you cut the head off the snake. That’s what’s happening now, and it had to happen.

Obviously, the Democrats support that kind of insurrection—they want the downfall of the United States. Peel back the layers, and you see China behind so much of it: property acquisitions here, buying up media companies to steer narratives their way. It’s been ugly, nasty, nasty, nasty. After what they did with COVID, the lockdowns, the global economic sabotage—Bill Gates, the whole crew—people get mad if they’re not in jail or tied up somewhere. They have too much money; they buy courts, buy freedom. They don’t get in trouble. And yeah, I still think Jeffrey Epstein’s alive out there. He’s too rich to die that way. Body double, bought-off guards, elements of law enforcement—it’s not hard with that kind of cash.

Trump doesn’t have the constitutional power to round them all up and jail them—he can’t do it directly—but he can attack their mechanisms of evil. The way bad guys use countries like Iran, Venezuela, Mexican drug cartels, North Korea, and even Russia, stirring up Ukraine—they hustle agents, cause chaos, turn everybody in the wrong direction. But Trump’s clear: no boots on the ground for forever wars. We never should’ve been doing that. I joke about it half-seriously, but what was the Iraq war really about? Oil? Securing prices and American interests? Weapons of mass destruction, they never found? Or was it about raiding the Baghdad Museum right after the invasion, grabbing ancient DNA or artifacts from Gilgamesh’s era to mess with human genetics, or hide giants like in Kandahar? Those conspiracy theories floated around podcasts after retirees started talking. People have lost faith in institutions, in the nightly news narrative: “We’re going to war to save people from communism,” or whatever. Yet the bad guys propped up maniacs for decades—Fidel Castro, the Iranian Revolution in the late ’70s as a Marxist movement hidden behind religion, so you couldn’t criticize it without attacking Islam. That’s how they sold it here: don’t criticize our communities, even as they shuffled in socialism, lined people up for food stamps and welfare, turning dependency into modern slavery to the government instead of plantations.

The same thing’s happening with radical Islam—thorny alliances everywhere, causing needless harm—cartels in Mexico, Venezuelan aggression, and China behind it all. China was built by the deep state; they never would’ve had the money without investment firms funneling stolen Federal Reserve wealth, Wall Street manipulations, modern monetary theory tricks at Jackson Hole conferences. It sounds wild because the media calls it crazy, but listen to those talks—it’s out there.

That’s why everybody’s upset about these moves. Iran’s economy is a dying fallout on the couch—they can’t fight a real war. No ships, no missiles, no planes of any worth. They’ve been de-industrialized by sanctions. Trump bombed them because they poked the bear with radical Islam and ideology issues tied to the Democrat party, which clearly represents America’s destruction in so many ways. Obama gave them billions to keep their economy afloat so they could buy terrorist toys; now Trump’s taking it all away. As an elected official, we put him in office to do this job; he’s doing it. We don’t want radical losers causing trouble worldwide. We don’t want cartels running Mexico—pulling people over for bribes, corruption everywhere. We want to vacation or do business there without fear. We don’t want Venezuela screwing our energy markets. We don’t want Iran sponsoring terrorism. We want peace in the Middle East—Jews, Christians, everybody getting along, building lives.

This is what Kristi Noem’s Shield of the Americas is about—stabilization in the hemisphere. She’s moved from DHS to Special Envoy, focusing on dismantling cartels, securing the Western Hemisphere, working with Rubio and Hegseth. It’s hemispheric shielding: choke off the bad guys economically and militarily without endless occupations. Trump’s not putting boots everywhere; he sends precision strikes, missiles as compliments of capitalism—paid for by the best system in the world. That’s how you win now.

All these characters in the background—COVID planners, great reset pushers, China feeders—they used distractions like Iran to usher agendas through while we fought shadows. Peel back the onion: destroy the disguises, pull off the masks. That’s happening in Iran right now, Venezuela (Maduro captured in January, U.S. overseeing oil rebuild), and Mexico (cartel disruptions). It’s great. I highly support what Trump’s doing—I want to see a whole lot more. He’s actually being too nice in some ways. The world deserves this reckoning for 2020: stolen elections, COVID as a weapon, great reset leashed to lockdowns, all attached to global control plots. Epstein, Gates, Russian honeypots, Chinese labs—it’s out there.

If you think that’s all a conspiracy, it’s in the open now. The people crying loudest about Iran are the ones who used these characters to cause trouble. Forget the courts, UN nonsense, and treaties that neutralized America so bad guys could thrive. Time for punishment. Show the world it happens. Use capitalism for upper mobility, freedom in Hong Kong, Venezuela, Mexico, England, and Europe. Lead by example: take away the hostiles causing trouble. Iran had no other intention but trouble since the late ’70s Marxist infusion feeding communism, China, Russia, socialist Latin America—all anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-upward mobility. They played their part in lockdowns, freedom theft, and using COVID to destroy economies into a great reset.

This isn’t theory anymore; it’s action. Trump’s crushing them economically, stripping them of their covers, exposing them. The attacks on Iran neutralize them as a threat—they tried rational peace, but they’re hostile. Venezuela’s aggression, Mexico’s cartels—all choked off. No more hiding. Democrats and the media cry because Iran was their Marxist disguise, a haven, a proxy to break America down. Now excuses stripped away, masks off—nowhere to hide. They don’t like it, but too bad. It’s great, the bad guys needed to be punished.  And now they are.

Footnotes

1.  On Operation Epic Fury and Khamenei’s death: Strikes targeted nuclear sites, missiles, navy; civilian casualties reported (e.g., girls’ school in Minab). Trump urged regime change without full occupation.

2.  Maduro capture in January 2026: U.S. raid framed as anti-narco-terrorism; plans for long-term oil oversight and revenue split.

3.  Kristi Noem’s role: Appointed Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas (Western Hemisphere) in March 2026, focusing on cartel dismantlement and border security partnerships.

4.  Iran’s 1979 Revolution: Marxist influences blended with Shia Islamism to avoid direct criticism of leftist elements.

5.  Iraq Museum looting: Over 15,000 artifacts stolen post-invasion; fringe theories link to ancient DNA/Gilgamesh,/giants myths.

6.  Kandahar giants: Persistent online legend from alleged U.S. military encounters; widely debunked but symbolic of institutional distrust.

7.  China-media investments: Documented stakes in U.S. outlets; fentanyl precursor supply to Mexican cartels well-reported.

8.  Obama’s Iran payment: $1.7 billion settlement for pre-1979 arms deal, not direct “terror funding” per official accounts.

9.  COVID/Great Reset conspiracies: WEF initiative twisted into global control narratives; Gates-Epstein links fueled speculation.

10.  Epstein “alive” theories: Persistent despite official ruling; tied to elite protections.

Bibliography

•  White House Fact Sheet on Iran (2026). https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-addresses-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-iran

•  DHS Announcement on Noem’s Role (March 5, 2026). https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/03/05/thanks-president-trump-and-secretary-noem-america-safer

•  TIME on Shield of the Americas (2026). https://time.com/7382975/kristi-noem-new-job-shield-of-americas

•  Marxist.com on the Iranian Revolution (historical analysis).

•  Various: Axios, Politico, The Hill, CNN reports on 2026 operations in Iran/Venezuela.

•  Reuters Institute on Chinese media influence.

•  BBC on Great Reset conspiracies.

•  Brookings on Obama-Iran cash transfer.

•  CSIS/NBC on China-cartel connections.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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

The Cannibals of China and their Democrat Party Friends: Collectivists literally want to eat the living

The recent shooting of National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national with ties to intelligence networks, underscores a profound ideological divide in American politics. The incident was not merely an act of violence; it became a prism through which competing visions of governance and societal order were revealed. While some sought to frame the tragedy as a consequence of deploying the National Guard—a measure implemented to restore law and order—others attempted to deflect responsibility by invoking narratives of provocation and systemic grievance. This rhetorical maneuver, blaming the presence of security forces for inciting violence, reflects a deeper philosophical orientation rooted in collectivist ideologies that have historically justified chaos as a means to consolidate power.  Democrats, like Mark Kelly, who have recently found themselves in a lot of trouble due to attempts at seditious behavior against President Trump’s administration, are showing a much deeper problem with their entire political ideology that traces to ideological roots from the home country of their movement, Chinese communism.  And the cannibalistic nature of that country and its general philosophy of life, compared to the West. 

Empirical evidence demonstrates that the deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., during periods of heightened unrest significantly reduced crime rates. Under Trump’s administration, violent crime in the District fell by approximately 35% between 2023 and 2024, with homicides declining from a peak of 274—the highest since 2005—to markedly lower levels in subsequent years. Even in 2025, violent crime decreased by an additional 26% compared to the previous year, signaling the deterrent effect of a visible security presence.¹ These figures stand in stark contrast to earlier trends under Democratic leadership, where policy emphasis on police defunding and social work interventions coincided with escalating urban violence.²

The paradox of Democrat lawmakers advocating stringent gun control while privately securing concealed carry permits further illustrates the inconsistency of their position. Representative Anna Paulina Luna recently highlighted that numerous members of Congress, including those who champion restrictive firearm legislation, have obtained permits to carry weapons in the District.³ This duality—publicly opposing individual self-defense while privately embracing it—reveals a pragmatic concession to the realities of urban crime, even as ideological commitments demand the perpetuation of vulnerability among the populace.

To comprehend this contradiction, one must examine the intellectual lineage of collectivist thought. Marxist theory, which informs much of the progressive agenda, posits that individual identity is subordinate to the collective good.⁴ Within this framework, personal sacrifice is valorized as a moral imperative, and systemic inequities are construed as justifications for redistributive violence. The logic underpinning such views is evident in the rhetorical claim that the Afghan assailant’s actions were provoked by the presence of the National Guard—a formulation that shifts culpability from the perpetrator to the state apparatus tasked with maintaining order. This inversion of responsibility is not incidental; it is symptomatic of a worldview that privileges structural explanations over individual accountability.

Historical analogues amplify the gravity of this ideological orientation. During the Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961), precipitated by Mao Zedong’s collectivist policies, an estimated 15 to 55 million people perished.⁵ The obliteration of market mechanisms and private property rights engendered conditions so dire that cannibalism became a widespread survival strategy.⁶ Archival records and eyewitness testimonies recount instances where families consumed the flesh of deceased relatives, and concubines reportedly volunteered for slaughter to sustain their households.⁷ These macabre episodes were not aberrations; they were logical extensions of a system that negated individual sanctity in favor of an abstract communal ideal. The psychological residue of such practices persists in cultural norms that valorize self-abnegation, reinforcing the collectivist axiom that the organism of society supersedes the autonomy of its constituent cells.

The resonance of these historical patterns in contemporary American discourse is disquieting. When policymakers suggest that victims of crime should acquiesce to dispossession for the sake of social harmony, they echo the same moral calculus that sanctioned atrocities under communist regimes. The proposition that one’s property—or even life—may be forfeited to appease the grievances of the marginalized is not merely a policy stance; it is a philosophical commitment to the erasure of individuality. In this schema, the Afghan shooter is transfigured from a culpable agent into a symptom of systemic dysfunction, and the act of violence becomes an indictment of order rather than chaos.

Such reasoning is inimical to the principles of a constitutional republic. The sanctity of individual rights, enshrined in the American political tradition, is antithetical to the collectivist dogma that animates these apologetics. To capitulate to narratives that rationalize violence as a byproduct of structural inequity is to invite the dissolution of civil society. The deployment of the National Guard, far from constituting a provocation, represented an affirmation of the state’s obligation to safeguard its citizens—a function that cannot be abdicated without imperiling the very foundations of governance.

The Afghan shooter incident is not an isolated tragedy; it is a harbinger of the ideological contest that will define the trajectory of American democracy. The attempt to reframe culpability, the oscillation between public disarmament and private armament, and the invocation of systemic grievance as exculpation—all bespeak a worldview that esteems the collective over the individual. History admonishes us that such a worldview, when operationalized, engenders not utopia but barbarism. The cannibalistic horrors of Maoist China are not relics of a distant past; they are cautionary tales inscribed in the ledger of human folly. To ignore these lessons is to court a future in which the logic of sacrifice metastasizes from metaphor to corporeal reality.  And that is what Democrats are proposing for our society when they speak of defunding the police, or yielding to crime with chaos, and in suggesting that gun control should be a priority when crime is used to perpetuate their power through fear by the ruthless and aggressive.  They want the crime because they literally feed off it. 

I was eating with some friends the other day at a nice Chinese restaurant buffet in West Chester, Ohio, that had a lot of great options.  I reminded everyone that all this nice food would not be typical in China.  In China, they actually eat just about anything that moves: dogs, cats, turtles, moms and dads, and body parts.  In most places in the world, where collectivist politics reside, the food is not as sanitized from the violence behind death as you will find in Chinese restaurants in the United States.  The standard of individualized thought is enough to affect how we eat.  Let alone process government functions.  But make no mistake about it, if it were up to the Mark Kellys of the world and their seditious function as communist insurgents, they would drive a society into cannibalism because that is the unspoken party platform.  They represent in America the Great Leap Forward that all academic leftists in the world, and especially in America, have been yearning for.  They aren’t trying to preserve society.  They are trying to eat it and gain the power of their enemies from the literal consumption of flesh and the destruction of the living.  And the Afghan terrorist, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who shot the two D.C. National Guard members just a block away from the White House, serves their aims at the destruction of society for the consumption of its contents, just as their home country of China would be very proud of.

—

Footnotes

1. Metropolitan Police Department, “Annual Crime Report,” Washington, D.C., 2024–2025.

2. U.S. Department of Justice, “Crime Trends in Urban Centers,” 2023.

3. Luna, A.P., Congressional Briefing on Security Measures, 2025.

4. Marx, K., Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875.

5. Dikötter, F., Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 2010.

6. Yang, Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, 2012.

7. Chinese State Archives, Oral Histories of the Great Leap Forward, 1961.

Rich Hoffman

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The Success of Operation Midway Blitz: Pushing communism under the door with illegal immigration

Happy to report that Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago has been very successful, with over 1500 arrests since the start of September.  The Department of Homeland Security has been targeting alleged criminals like pedophiles and gang members with some of the arrests spilling over outside of Illinois.  ICE agents have been very successful in removing the criminal elements that have been deliberately put in place by Democrats to serve progressive causes, and it has the radical left very upset, which is good.  That’s what happens when you start solving problems that want to exist so they can exert power over all society.  The high crime in Chicago was deliberately placed and left alone, and it’s time to clean up that city, even if the mayor, Brandon Johnson, and Governor J.B. Pritzker have been doing everything they can to facilitate the continuation of the high crime.  Why, because they know, as all Democrats do, that the key to their insurrection party is illegal immigration, who bring with it criminal elements to destabilize society in detrimental ways and convince people to turn to big government for safety and security.  Governor Pritzker has to have high crime to justify the kind of personal intrusions and government growth that the Democratic Party intends.  Otherwise, the whole premise of their existence falls apart. Trump pushing for Operation Midway Blitz exposed this strategy for what it was, and it has now been very successful.  Crime is down, and that started before the blitz because caution was in the air as criminals realized the game was up and their free roam of the city streets was at an end.  There is more going on with Chicago than just this latest issue; it was built to be a progressive invasion in America, and if we want that to stop, the city itself and its politics have to be attacked.  So this is more than a symbolic exercise; it’s a strategy that should have been implemented long ago.

Chicago is one of the great American cities, located in the heart of the Midwest.  I interact with Chicago a lot, and it has been part of my story for many years.  Not that I meant to, but I worked for several organized crime groups early in my life, who were centered out of Chicago, for one, the Chinese mob.  And the second was a money-laundering outfit that operated car dealerships to launder money.  I started in these enterprises through the usual application process: getting a job and earning money straight away.  But because of my personality, I was quickly sought out to do the things other people are scared to do, and I learned, up close and personal, how the life of crime worked, always in the background.  I did not become a criminal, but I did get into a lot of entanglements, some of which were very violent and dangerous.  But let’s just say I have first-hand knowledge of the kind of world Governor Pritzker is trying to protect and maintain.  I was so outraged by everything I learned that I have dedicated my life to eradicating that evil, which is why I do many of the things I do for free.  I don’t like evil, and I really don’t like crime that spawns from it.  And with all that said, I am thrilled Trump has declared war against this terrible tyranny always looming in the background.  Chicago wasn’t always the crime-ridden pit that it is today.  It was made that way on purpose, and we should all be insulted by the intention, which is now finally being corrected.

If you fly into O’Hara, you’ll see miles and miles of communist style apartment complexes where people have been stacked on top of each other for as far as the eye can see.  There is quite an attempt right now to show China as the example of what communism can bring, with its centrally planned efforts producing great architecture and technology, all the while in America using that same centralized management approach to depress Americans away from free markets and free enterprise.  Even the positive effects of a supposedly democratic system, where people pick their representatives in a republic-style government.  In both cases, centralized governments used their power to prop up one international standard over the other.  Globalist elites drove the push toward Chinese communism.  And it has been they who have shaped Chicago into the crime-ridden hell-hole that it is.  The downtown areas are not too bad —deliberately so —especially around McCormick Place and Soldier Field.  The northside isn’t too bad once you get well past the city.  But to the south and west of downtown, it’s pretty rough.  If you get gas anywhere in those zones, you can expect an engagement with crime, and all that is on purpose.  Crime doesn’t just happen; in this case, it was invited in with the purpose of illegal immigration.  And the Democrat party knows they need crime and illegal immigration to fulfill their communist plans of pushing people away from capitalism and into outright Chinese communism.  Chicago and its crime were always part of the plan of suppression.  To save the great American city, the push was for America to adopt more Chinese communism so we could be more like their shining example. 

The way that Chicago set up its neighborhoods tells the whole story of why they have crime now; it was always meant to.  Free enterprise was never part of how the modern city was put together; it was meant to bring in and hide illegal immigrants who would funnel the drug trade in behind the chaos and destabilize polite society from behind a political firewall.  While society was debating the proper pay for women in the workplace and abortion, criminals were undercutting one of the great American cities with grotesque violence occurring every day to the point where it was normalized, and people expected a suppressed environment.  It wasn’t just about Chicago; it was about pushing communism under the door of the Midwest and bringing down America from the inside out.  Poisoning the highway system to all the other big cities with crime, and those destabilizing attempts started with illegal immigration hidden in the apartment slums of west Chicago, to the point where the crime spilled over into the outside world to destroy the American dream like a Trojan Horse in the middle of the night, to slit all our throats while we slept.  That is why Democrats are so upset about Operation Midway Blitz.  And why it’s so good to see it succeed, no matter how long it continues.  Democrats need illegal immigration to pull off their communist scam.  And instead of just accepting that, as we have for many decades —essentially an entire century —we are fighting back and taking Chicago away from the criminal elements, which is leaving Democrats in a panic as to what to do next.  Pritzker, unable to shake Trump off the trail, turned to gambling to pump up his already deflated image.  But his political hopes are being cleaned away, too, in all this.  He took a stand to protect illegal immigration, and Trump is ripping that away, leaving Democrats helpless as a result.  And for the first time in many decades, the truth about Chicago is finally being seen.  And a lot of people will live, who usually would have been sacrificed to the need for crime by Democrats who have been cheerleading communism all along.

Rich Hoffman

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

China Got Caught Tampering with the 2020 Election: How communism takes over countries

Well, it’s official now.  During June of 2025 FBI Director Kash Patel declassified documents showing the Chinese Communist Party scheme to interfere in the 2020 election to mass produce fake U.S. driver’s licenses and ship them to the U.S. to facilitate fraudulent mail-in ballots in favor of Joe Biden, these fake IDs were intended to create voter identities for Chinese residents in the U.S. to cast illegal votes.  The documents are now in the hands of Chuck Grassley in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and it is also noted that former FBI Director Christopher Wray recalled the initial report, as he was aware of the implications.  That means that when we look at the margins of victory of Joe Biden in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, the total votes that Biden won by were less than 45,000. Biden won by only 20,682 in Wisconsin, by 154,188 in Michigan, and by 11,799 in Georgia.  Arizona was won by only 10,457 votes.  So that’s how close it was.  In Pennsylvania, the winning amount was 80,555.  And that’s obviously why Christopher Wray didn’t want that report out, because it shows with evidence what the Chinese were up to in order to get just enough votes over the top to elect Joe Biden.  We are now aware of several other methods of voter fraud that involve the use of mail-in ballots.  But this driver’s license scam is complex, irrefutable proof of how China planned to install Biden over Trump for their self-interest.  And looking back on it now, the reason the election took weeks to resolve is that those swing states were allowed to continue counting mail-in ballots until Joe Biden had just enough votes, as shown, to be declared the winner.  This raises numerous significant legal issues. 

Even worse, this same method of election tampering has also occurred in presidential and congressional races.  Most of the close races that we have been watching over the last decade could be attributed to the same kind of election tampering.  Even in states like Kentucky, between Matt Bevin and Andy Beshear, the total vote difference was 5,136 out of over 704,000 votes, less than 0.37 percentage points in 2019.  And when they got away with it, the opposition parties connected to communist governments around the world, for which China is, they expanded it in a mass way during the 2020 election using the bioweapon of Covid as the cover story for mass election fraud.  Everyone needs to get this through their thick skulls.  The 2020 election cycle was a major crime against the United States that killed people and installed a puppet government from a hostile foreign actor, and many accomplices.  So, as we go out and buy fireworks for American freedom and celebrate all the significant military engagements that were put forth to make America victorious in the fights for freedom, understand that our elections have been under attack by lots of foreign actors who have been quite explicit in funding our destruction.  And in 2020, they were successful, and they got caught.  And they have to be punished.  It’s not a question of if, but to what degree.  Additionally, what this means is that Joe Biden’s entire presidency was illegal, meaning that everything he signed, or that others signed for him with an autopen, was also unlawful, including the DEI hire of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court in 2022.  A lot of people were asleep at the wheel, and the bad guys in the world were tampering with our elections, putting Democrats in important seats, in the Senate, in Governor roles, in the House, and certainly in the White House.  The government we have today is essentially not the government we voted for; it’s the constructs of election fraud on a mass scale, with this Chinese scam being just one of them. 

In the first half of 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized nearly 20,000 counterfeit driver’s licenses coming from China and Hong Kong with the apparent intention of laying the foundation for election fraud.  Given the size of this discovery, the operation was much larger than what they actually caught and easily falls within the voter total that Biden won the election by in 2020, all by itself.  When you add all this to the other known election fraud methods, it is easy to see why Joe Biden won in 2020, and that once election fraud was more difficult to conduct in 2024 because everyone was watching carefully, Democrats could not repeat the 2020 performance.  Because many of the election fraud methods were incredibly frustrating.  In 2024, Trump received 77.3 million votes, while Harris received only 74.9 million after many weeks of counting, falling short of the 2020 totals by 7 million votes.  Simply put, the crackdown on the mail-in illegal votes was the difference in the gap.  Add to that all the voting machine irregularities, that also traced back to China, and we have significant problems in our elections, and it would not be hard to prove that many of the tight races that made the House and Senate so close along party lines are that way through similar forms of election fraud, in all close races where Democrats won by a slim margin, election fraud, like the election between Matt Bevin and Andy Beshear in 2019 took place. 

The reluctance to admit it, and the reason the declassification of the report by Kash Patel is so essential, is that it reveals the complicity of many people domestically in facilitating the tampering of a foreign government in American elections, as they benefited from the chaos.  So they let it happen, and those same idiots will be out buying fireworks and flying the American flag on July 4th just like everyone else, even though what they did was treasonous and overt acts of legal sedition.  And they were caught with hard evidence.  No, don’t kid yourself, America has also participated in election tampering through the CIA and other means in other countries around the world.  So when China does it, they do so for their own interests, and we were the dummies who let them do it to us.  We should expect hostile countries to try to topple us.  We are not all friends.  The lesson here is that many of our elections have been tampered with, and that the government we have had was not the one we chose through free elections.  The kind of House and Senate majorities that we have had were not actually as close as we have been led to believe.  And this evidence is very inconvenient to those who have allowed it to happen, because the blood is literally on their hands.  As we approach the next election in 2026, we need to tighten our election laws and make it significantly harder for China and other countries to exert influence over our elections.  If we do that, many Democrats will not be able to beat their Republican rivals because Americans do not like communists.  And communism is what the left has on the menu.  And they want to infiltrate the world in any way possible.  For them, stealing elections is much less violent than military engagement.  It’s what just happened in South Korea, where we fought against the spread of communism there half a century ago.  And now, people just had an election where the communist party sunk deeper roots into running that country.  And they want to do it in America, and have been getting away with it, until now.  Now we have the proof.  But what we do with it will decide the fate of all our futures, for better or worse.

Rich Hoffman

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

Putting Out the Fires of War: No, there won’t be a World War III

You have to see the big picture here and understand the motivations that are being exposed, as we speak.  I was surprised that Benjamin Netanyahu was so bullish on attacking Iran’s nuclear capability and taking out the heads of the Iranian revolutionary forces.  In the chess game of war, it’s a pretty bold one, and when you add to that the antics of Ukraine and Russia, and China moving in on Taiwan, there is a lot of talk about World War III.  And about the United States getting dragged into it.  But lurking in the background of all this chaos are the forces of globalism, who are starting these fires to cover up their many crimes.  And they are looking for a diversion.  All these characters didn’t just get these warlike ideas on their own as single-minded personalities.  Numerous factors are at play in the background, and many global crimes are being brought to light for consideration.  So the hope here is that wars, even if it means World War III and mass casualties everywhere, can’t be avoided. Suppose the bad guys out there can start a war and destroy the world to cover their many, vast crimes.  You can bet that they will do it in a New York minute.  We are dealing with a vast evil that is as malicious as the human imagination could consider.  And it has always hidden itself through death and violence.  So, while there is a lot of concern about America getting pulled into a war, remember, this is just another Covid story, an attempt to derail the news cycle and hide the perpetrators of evil who move the mouths of the characters involved.  And hope that nobody notices.  But of course we do see, and are onto the truth of the matter.

In Israel’s case, I don’t feel that enough revenge has been put in place for the malicious attack that occurred against Israel at that music festival.  The way they were attacked was reprehensible, and to say that America can’t get dragged into a Holy War is ridiculously insufficient.  Globalism is a layered topic in this case because Israel was a creation of globalism, of the forces being realigned after World War II.  There are forces of the western world who want to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and the ancient fight with the residents of the Land of Canaan, and of the Mesopotamian Valley feel they are fulfilling a prophesy the same as Jesus riding a donkey into the ancient city as the Son of God to be the King of Kings to a chosen people.   There is no peace in this process because there are more than terrestrial forces at play, blowing on the winds of war that have been present for many tens of thousands of years, if not millions.  Not to become distracted here, but you have to understand the level of evil in the Middle East that we are discussing, which has been chronicled in literature as long as humans have been able to record their observations and thoughts.  So with all that in mind, I love Israel, I love the Jewish people, and I think that it’s essential to understand why that part of the world was chosen to be a Promised Land.  There is no way to appease the Iranians and their history against the Jewish people, going back to the beginning.  To have peace with them, they will have to be destroyed.  And they showed those fangs when they attacked all those kids at that music festival, and raped all those poor girls, and tortured those family members.  We can’t tolerate that kind of evil in a world of mass communication, where people have a responsibility to be aware of these things.  We can’t turn away from evil, and I tend to think that the Jewish people should rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem for the third time. 

However, we are also discussing the majority of the known world being in a perilous circumstance, from Russia to China, which threatens to disrupt chip manufacturing and, in turn, impact the American economy.  Trump has done a great job getting on the phone with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and maintaining a relationship with them that would make waging war difficult in their minds with free justification.  The winds of war were being blown on by globalist forces trying to hide their crimes as Trump took away the embers with diffusing telephone calls that only a top executive would understand how to do.  Thank goodness Trump is in the White House because I don’t see World War III happening in the way that most people fear it will, with a ground war and mass casualties all over the earth.  As I look at it, the world can’t afford to be at war.  The world is broke, and they can’t maintain war as it is traditionally viewed.  All they can afford to do is sponsor various elements of terrorism.  Russia is broke.  China is only propped up with globalist money, trying to hide itself behind a wall of communism.  And in Iran, they hide Marxism behind Islamic Fundamentalism, but the truth is that they are the top sponsor in the world of terrorism.  Or as they define it, “revolutionary support.”  When they talk about revolution, they are talking about the fight of indigenous people to push out the Western world from their ancient practices that go back to the time of the Tower of Babel.  And they will never stop.  But they have also been propped up by globalism, remember all the cases of money that Obama left on runways during his administration to sponsor the terrorism of that region against the Western World.  Against the Christianized West. 

However, none of those countries can afford to go to war; what we are seeing on the news are the attempted fires of those forces hiding within the policy of those places, trying to throw everyone off the scent.  But without globalist money, Iran can’t maintain its regime.  The Ukraine War falls apart.  And China can’t do anything as they are completely attached to the greedy hands of the World Economic Forum as their government of choice for corporate manipulation.  And America doesn’t need to get pulled into any war.  It’s perfectly fine to shoot down the missiles going into Israel and to run Iran dry.  And let the people rise and overthrow the Revolutionary forces there in Iran, and install a new government.  America doesn’t need to lift a finger, only to support the fight against evil wherever it shows itself.  However, a ground war is not in the cards, as it’s not necessary.  Trump has already discharged the steam, leaving the globalist forces exposed and desperate.  And we have to realize that’s what is going on.  The world that doesn’t want peace is losing its hiding places, and they know that America is going to outpace globalism and make them irrelevant.  All the talk show pundits are getting the war talk wrong because they don’t want to admit the economics of the situation.  There isn’t money for the kind of war they fear, due to the way globalism has entangled so many forces.  They can’t afford such a fight. Instead, the bad guys have been stripped naked, and their marionettes have found themselves talking peacefully to Trump, putting out the fires faster than they can be started.  Leaving them all exposed without any hiding places, in full view of a public waking up massively, perhaps for the first time, in the history of this world.

Rich Hoffman

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

Let’s Be Clear, Elon Musk Did Not Win the Election for Trump: The tempers of a dejected woman

Let’s get something straight: Elon Musk did not win the election for President Trump.  I like Elon Musk, and I want his companies to succeed.  But he’s a political lightweight who still has a lot to learn.  The money he spent, primarily on President Trump, around $290 million, was in his own best interest. If Trump had lost, it would have essentially cost Elon Musk many billions of dollars in lost opportunity cost.  So this big head idea he has that he won the election for President Trump, and that he put a Republican House and Senate into the majority, is ridiculously wrong.  I have a news flash for Elon Musk.  Trump was going to win, and so were those majorities going to happen, with or without Elon Musk.  We don’t owe him anything.  We welcomed his help.  But we were going to win regardless.  Trump was poised to win as far back as 2022, and I said so all the way.  Everyone knew what the internals were saying; Trump was never going to lose.  And I hate to say it, but that money Musk spent was mainly worthless.   People had already made up their minds about Trump, and they wanted him, because election fraud was the problem in 2020.  Elon Musk was a Democrat who helped other Democrats feel like they could switch over to the MAGA base and be a part of it.  However, the numbers were already in place long before Elon Musk became involved.  And to whatever degree Elon Musk has deluded himself with a power play to turn against Trump in the way he did, which will have a permanent impact on the rest of his life, it’s essential to clarify the truth of the matter.  President Trump would have won the 2024 election with or without help. 

There is a part of me, and it might yet be somewhat true that the calls for war that China and Russia have been beating on, making negotiations very difficult, were why Trump and Musk went into a tag team kind of Big Time Wrestling event where the world was temporarily distracted by the most powerful person in the world getting into a fight with the world’s richest person.  Trump has done that kind of thing with Vince McMahon before.  Those kinds of acts are what WWF wrestling is all about, and off stage, all the guys are friends.  But I think Trump is legitimately hurt by what Elon Musk did, and that what happened was a permanent condition.  I would place it among the stories of Omarosa, Michael Cohen, and Anthony Scaramucci, people who were once close to Trump but fell away in disgrace.  That’s a whole topic of its own, but in this case, it takes courage to stand by a person like President Trump, and some people just don’t have it.  Is it President Trump’s fault that there are so many people like that in his life, and extending well into the past?  No, I would say that influential people attract people who want to be near power.  And as people of their own, they have fantasies of being able to manipulate influential people into doing things they want, because they lack the courage to do it themselves.  So they fly too close to the sun, their wings melt, and they fall back to earth.  Elon Musk is just the latest to experience that. 

As it looks, Steve Bannon was probably more right than wrong about Musk being a Chinese asset.  China is Tesla’s second-largest market, behind the United States, with sales growing by 8.8% in 2024.  And state-controlled banks in China gave Tesla a $1.6 billion loan from Chinese state-owned banks in 2019 to build their gigafactory there, with a reduced 15% corporate tax rate.  I think the pressure on Elon Musk to exit politics was significant due to his numerous entanglements.  I was amazed that he was able to do as much as he did.  Like a lot of people, Elon Musk got caught up in seeing the extreme wrong behind the assassination attempt of Trump, and he joined the crusade out of a moral imperative, like so many others did.  But China has been using globalist money to buy people with leverage for many years, including most of our current government.  And they are trying to undermine Trump, as they did when they released the COVID-19 virus during an election year.  We cannot ignore the role China played in election fraud in America, but also in other places, such as Brazil, and most recently in South Korea.  Doing business with China is a tricky proposition; they can and will hold everything over your head if they decide to call in a loan.  That seems to be a common practice in the world these days, so I can certainly understand the pressure on Musk to distance himself from the White House and return to running his companies, which, unfortunately, involves being a political chameleon.  Most businesspeople have to adapt their approach depending on the country they are dealing with, and with a company like Tesla, China holds significant influence.  It’s nice that it’s an American car company and that it represents a necessary export.  But at what cost? Usually, it means that at the very least, the CEO of the company can’t have political opinions that work against the country they are building and selling cars to, when they are effectively a communist run enterprise hell bent on authority control over mass society.

I think the pressure got to him. There are a lot of leftists who work in executive positions at Musk’s companies, and they weren’t happy that he was suddenly one of the key Republicans in Washington D.C., attached so intimately to the Trump administration with direct, and open friendship.  For Trump’s part, it was good to have Musk as a friend.  In business, you keep your friends close, and if you can, you keep your enemies closer.  If you have your arm around them, it’s hard for them to stick a knife in your back, because your arm can control their movements to a greater extent.  But for people like Musk, and the long line of individuals who have tried to be close to Trump, to control him in some way, and then found out things didn’t go the way they wanted, it’s like the woman who marries a man to change him.  And after all the sex and laughing at his dumb jokes, he still doesn’t willingly cut the grass on Sunday, the woman feels dejected and angry.  And I think Elon Musk is like so many women who try such a thing only to realize they weren’t able to change the man they married, leaving them embarrassed and regretful.  And Musk wanted to make a clean break to get his companies back on track by using the protest against this Big Beautiful Bill as an excuse.  Because if you did want to help the Chinese stay in power, you would like to stop the Trump campaign bill from passing the Senate.  Passing the bill, as expensive as it is, essentially reduces China’s influence over American politics.  That’s why it’s so costly.  Debt can be leveraged to advantage.  But to make it work, you have to have something valuable to work with.  China has been trying to destroy that value, so this Big Beautiful Bill of Trump’s is all about leverage.  Not actual debt.  And Elon Musk found himself caught between those two worlds, and he had to pick.  And I don’t blame him.  It takes a lot of guts to stick to these kinds of things.  And it’s challenging at best, especially if you have a substantial amount of money and want to maintain it.  But let’s be clear, Musk didn’t win the election for Trump.  He was just lucky to have been a part of history.  He certainly didn’t make it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Defeating China and the Linkedln Losers: The gunfighter at the bar with their back to the room

Let me say it again about China; I’ve been saying it for a long time.  That’s why my LinkedIn account has been suspended, and I don’t use it.  I don’t like LinkedIn, Facebook, and a lot of social media sites because of their globalist intentions and dedication to the construction of China, which was to make them into a superpower and compete with the United States on the world stage.  China is a dump.  I don’t like the communist country, and I don’t like getting things from them.  By default, many of the products we used to make in America were, by policy, pushed over into China for many reasons, most of them not good.  And I have never thought of it as a good idea.  So when I wrote my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and I did press for it, I was very critical of China because some of the people most attracted to my book were people who also supported the decoupling movement from China, as we had grown too dependent on a sworn enemy, and that needed to change.  The Chinese are propped up enemies, which could be said to be most of our enemies over modern history, including Hitler.  They are made villains, not the type of people who, through cunning and diligence, leaped onto the world stage and suddenly became relevant.  No, they were made, China was made, by wealth redistribution to be villains who would drive the back door effort at a one-world order run by the United Nations with socialist governments.  So I explained in my press how to defeat China in a decoupling effort, one that appeared on the LinkedIn platform, which is grotesquely pro-China, and they were so upset about it that they banned me from the platform.  Up to that point, I had reluctantly maintained a LinkedIn page. I get a lot of offers to do a lot of consulting work, and I do what I do.  But LinkedIn to me has always been a den of thieves and con artists who prop themselves up to be fluffier than they really are, and I don’t find those types of people who use the service very valuable in real life.  They are usually propped-up caricatures, just like China ironically. 

After interviewing with a decoupling PAC out of Los Angeles, who were very interested in my book and plastered it all over their social media, the LinkedIn people banned my page and demanded that I apologize for what I said about how America could trounce China in a new war.  I said the next war in the world would not involve tanks or troops but control over finance.  And Larry Fink and the gang of thugs at BlackRock were funneling looted Wall Street money from a Modern Monetary theory Federal Reserve straight into China to make them look better on paper than they actually were, and that they were highly vulnerable.  About that same time, I gave a speech to a bunch of Tea Party types of early MAGA supporters about the Gunfighter at the Bar theory, which is pretty much my summation of all business transactions.  When you have the leverage of something someone wants, you don’t have to be an appeaser.  And that stupid professional site of LinkedIn is designed for the appeasers in life, not the gunfighters at the bar.  And I further said that anybody who exploited that trait would have leverage over their enemy no matter how big they were.  China is a paper tiger propped up by the LinkedIn losers, and we don’t need either of them. 

I control the social media I use, which is how I am with everything.  I like to be in charge.  I don’t like hand-holding consensus building, and that’s all that LinkedIn is good for.  When you are the boss, you don’t need to network.  When you have something people want, your phone never stops ringing, and my phone never stops ringing, all hours of the day, all days of the week.  I have to be a little mean to people to get some time to myself, so I don’t miss the LinkedIn Losers and won’t ever ask them to restore my platform to me.  I said what I said about China and I meant it.   And now Trump is doing exactly what needs to be done to end China as a superpower and threat to the American economy.  And I’m enjoying the spectacle quite a bit.  Ironically, I didn’t write The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business for all the boot lickers of the world.  I wrote it for the gunfighters at the bar with their back to the room, because they can afford to do so.  It’s geared to a smaller audience, but it’s meant for the right people, and the fundamental business rules I learned the hard way.  It is not the kind of fake accolades from resume padding that are typical on LinkedIn.  Then once you hire those people, you find out they can only do a fraction of what they promised and are only one or two trick ponies when you need out of them 20 to 30, just like China.  So, to all those people worried about China cutting off deliveries of Boeing airplanes or cell phones and electronic equipment and upset at Trump’s tariffs, don’t worry.  Don’t be a boot licker.  China can’t win this war, and they know it, which is why they are crying so loudly now. 

Never forget what China did to us with Covid.  They released a bioweapon from a lab in Wuhan, and they killed people with it to destroy the American economy and help the World Economic Forum establish their Great Socialist Reset by shutting down the global economy with stupid work-from-home policies, while China kept chugging along uninterrupted.  They have over a billion people, so losing a few here and there wasn’t a big deal to them.  They are a communist country; they could afford the casualties that they created in the first place.  They were intent on ruining Trump during an election year, and they played their part in that rigged election that put Joe Biden into office.  China had their direct guy in our Executive Branch to directly control American policy, all of which were hostile acts of war.  And that’s precisely how China sees it, just read the book from China called Unrestricted Warfare.  That’s how they approach everything.  They declared war on us, not the other way around.  Trump is just playing the game to beat them in a way that they can’t defend themselves.  Without globalism propping up the Chinese, they are just a backwater country of massively starving people and a communist philosophy that they adopted from Europe in Karl Marx.  And they need to be exploited as the frauds that they always were, just like 99.999999999999999999999% of the LinkedIn losers who use that stupid platform to sell themselves to other losers to fluff themselves up to look smarter than they really are.  I won’t be restoring my LinkedIn account, and I very much support what Trump is doing with the tariffs against China.  They are not our friends.  We don’t need them.  And it’s time that we remove them as the hostile friends ready to stab us in the back at every moment.  And in this action, China can’t win.  And LinkedIn has been hostile to pro-American policy and is garbage now and forever in my opinion.  And I will never forgive them for what they tried to do to our country, Reid Hoffman and the rest.  Bad people deserve to be punished in the most severe way possible.  That’s why I’m not on LinkedIn to answer the questions of those who keep asking.  And that’s why what is happening to China is a great thing!  I do like Chinese food.  But I don’t like the communist country of China as a globalist superpower or any supporters of that movement.

Rich Hoffman

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

Why Trump’s Tariffs are Great: China was built completely off stolen money, and that is coming to an end

It is stunning how stupid so many people are, especially regarding Trump’s tariffs.  People need economic lessons.  I majored in economics in college, which I hated.  I thought it was boring, that the professors were stupid, and that the students were even worse.  I probably read too many books before I ever stepped into a college classroom for my good because I couldn’t get into the going through the motions thing to endure so much stupidity.  But I knew, even thirty years ago, that they were teaching Marxism in all the economic schools, which was surprising, given that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations should have been the entry textbook.  Nobody in America should be studying economics without understanding Adam Smith and putting their arms entirely around capitalism.  We aren’t a communist, socialist, or Marxist nation with a parasitic economic system, and all those traders on Wall Street have fallen into the schools of Marxism as their reference point, and that’s on them.  I’ve known about the influence Marxism has had in our political and economic fields for a long time, but this stupidity even shocks me.  People should know better what Trump is doing.  And thank goodness he is doing it.  Our trade imbalances were put in place for one reason: to redistribute America’s wealth to other nations, to loot the only real capitalist country in the world and feed it to all the crazy lunatic communist and socialist countries of the far east and Europe.  Yes, China, to those who don’t know, which appears to be most people working in the finance industry, is a communist country that has made all of its money off stealing it from the United States.  China did not create wealth and become the powerhouse it is today because it did something better in the world than everyone else.  They did it because they were built off stolen money, and Trump’s trade tariffs are designed to take that money back, as it should have been all along.

Go ahead and mark it on your calendars, these renegotiated trade deals from Trump will immediately infuse the American economy with trillions of dollars of new revenue, which has been part of our exporting portfolio.  The price of oil is coming down.  We will soon be shipping energy all over the world again, which will be worth trillions more.  And on the frontier of DOGE, we are going to address many of the assumptions about the size and cost of government that will pave the way for the future, where running our economy in the black will become the norm.  This is how you get there, and everyone should understand that.  They should have known this all along.  This should be taught in our colleges.  It’s basic economics from the perspective of Adam Smith’s capitalism.  I have several copies of Smith’s Wealth of Nations that I have read through so many times that the pages are nearly falling out of all the copies.  I have one in my office that I recently purchased because it comes up so often that people want to see it, and those older copies weren’t in a condition to be looked through without falling apart in their hands.  So, why isn’t that the case with everyone? Because it should be, otherwise we can’t even have a foundation discussion on economics unless that essential reference point is understood.  All these traders who focused on stock value should have seen the signs; it’s not like we didn’t tell you what was happening.  What they have been dealing with was fake value.  What they will be dealing with is actual value, reset by these tariffs, which puts the power position back into the United States, where it should always have been.

I want to mention a couple of things as a reminder of how we arrived at this point.  They are conspiratorial, but certainly not untrue.  Not convenient for people who would rather not know.  But Covid was a bioweapon created and released in China, which was accelerated to the world stage to knock Trump out of office during an election year.  COVID-19 was released shortly after Trump implemented the tariffs against China in the first months of 2020.  The free money was coming to an end for them, and they conspired with a lot of forces, especially at the World Economic Forum, to release a pandemic in the world to allow for the desired Great Reset of the global economy into a fully micromanaged Marxist perspective where China would rule the world from that position.  If you don’t understand that, go back and review all the evidence, and you will see that it was clearly what happened.  The other thing that happened was the conspiracy of the Federal Reserve to prop up radical leftist losers like Larry Fink at BlackRock to essentially use him to artificially prop up the stock market with a balloon that was always going to burst.  But they thought that by the time it did, the dollar would be gone and we’d be on a digital currency, and they’d never get caught for what they’d done.  The Fed and Wall Street conspired to print phony money with no gold backing, using it to inflate the market with cash that would be laundered through the stock exchanges, thereby creating entirely fictitious value. 

That’s what we do in real estate all the time, where we built a house for $ 50,000 30 years ago.  The house is the best house it was ever going to be when it started.  As it ages, it starts to fall apart and requires frequent renovation.  But our expectation of that value increases.  Today, that house is worth 200K or 300K, that same house, because we expect a Ponzi scheme where the future will pay for the profits of the past, until, of course, you hit the brick wall of diminishing marginal returns, which is where a lot of young people are today.  They can’t afford to pay $300,000 for a house that is still only worth $50,000 in absolute value. That’s what the Fed and BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard did to the world’s money supply, and they thought they would get away with it because the world would switch to a digital currency before the balloon burst.  However, instead, we elected Trump, and he was intent on correcting this mess because he understood it from the inside out. He promised voters that he would do precisely what he is doing now: bring the value of the world’s economy home, which is what is happening now.  All those jobs shipped all over the globe because of horrendous economic policies will come home for their survival.  Prices in America will decrease due to increased competition.  And our economy will be awash in cash, lots of it.  And quickly.  The only people who will suffer are those who were betting on the demise of America, which includes many traders on Wall Street.  That is on them.  They were warned, and they placed their bets against America anyway; so, no amount of crying about it now will put the genie back in the bottle.  I am very proud of Trump.  But what he’s doing isn’t strange or unusual.  I’m just happy he had the guts to do it, and now everyone will see for themselves what they should have learned in school – how the economy works.  And Karl Marx was a slack-jawed loser that nobody should have listened to, ever.  And for all those colleges who taught all these young kids who are now grown adults Marxism, they should be giving back what those educations cost, because they crippled people, they didn’t help them, and now they are too stupid to function in the world. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Why Even Try: That was the message behind the ending of the ‘Yellowstone’ television show

I wanted to like Yellowstone, but I am so sick of all these dumb Indian stories where they are portrayed as some superior but victimized race of people who had their land stolen from them.  That whole line of dialogue was signaled from the beginning of the five seasons of Yellowstone, the popular television show that has been streaming for a while now.  But Taylor Sheridan, the writer, and director of the show, as well as the producer, did some experiments that pulled the show in a direction that looked to be a love letter to the MAGA movement at times, and I thought it was pretty good after I finally sat down this year and caught up to the whole thing.  It’s a story of the value of land ownership standing up to those who want to take it in the realm of big business, making it a classic Western story.  And it had its moments.  But the way it ended predictably fell back to the ridiculous Indian narrative, and after all that fighting, the show ended with part two of season 5 with John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, dying at the hands of his jealous, adopted son, and the family giving the land back to the Indians.  And those same Indians went to the family cemetery and knocked over all the tombstones as if to erase that the Duttons were ever there.  This is significant because a series of spin-off shows have led to this main show of Yellowstone, which tells the story of many generations of the Dutton family fighting for their land, only to have it all gone in such an unspectacular way.  The show’s central theme then was not about property rights but about reconciling a loss that the Indians experienced because the Duttons moved there in the first place.

The truth is, and we are about to see this worldwide under the next Trump administration, the world wants to be protected by American ideas.  And that was what winning the West was all about in the first place.  The Indians were a global culture of backward-thinking nomads who were anti-civilization.  And some of them, at the time that Columbus arrived in the New World, wanted very much to be a part of that American experience.  And that was certainly the case in all these Taylor Sheridan stories about settling the Dutton family in the Yellowstone area.  The Indians weren’t evil, but they weren’t doing much to help themselves until Western civilization came along.  Reservation life might have come across as unfair, but so is a harsh winter with no shelter.  It all comes down to perspective, and for political motivations, we tend to romanticize the Indian lifestyle in unrealistic ways.  And that is certainly the problem with Hollywood writers who discover late in life the lavish lifestyle of Western life once they can afford to buy ranches of their own and get into the cowboy life a bit.  Taylor Sheridan certainly fell in love with Western life.  But coming from a Hollywood perspective, and this is obvious when you visit places like Jackson, Wyoming, where many celebrities leave Hollywood and set up homes in that area, the messages often get mixed.  And they try to bring their Hollywood liberalism to the rough and tumble Western lifestyle, and those two things usually don’t go together, which was the case with the entire Yellowstone television series.  Do you want to make a show that people want to watch, or do you want to make a political statement that changes from season to season?  And unfortunately for Yellowstone, it ultimately came down to a political statement about Indians and how we took their land from them unfairly. 

The indigenous people’s argument goes back to the invasion of Canaan by the Hebrews and persists to this day, and it’s the way that global socialists argue against their capitalist rivals.  And in America, the socialist movement latched on to the Indians and made them into an argument that America should have never been formed.  Under this next Trump term, we’re going to find out that many places in the world want to join the American idea because it’s good for them.  And it was good for the Indians, too.  But as we know from history, they weren’t the first to settle in America.  There was already an empire of very tall people who were part of a global pyramid-building culture that predated the Maya and Aztecs to the south, down into Mexico.  Off the coast of Cuba, under a lot of water, are buried cities that predate the Indians of the plains by many thousands of years.  I would say that the Indians are part of a failed culture that had its light put out long before the arrival of Columbus or the start of America as a nation and a set of ideas that freed the individual from the clutches of collectivism.  And the Indians were collectivists, which is why modern Marxists like them. However, from a historical perspective, they were a failed people from a society that tried but failed to emerge to build their own version of the city-state, leaving them mostly at war with each other when Columbus arrived.  Actors like Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner want to believe that, like the Chinese, the people from India and all over the East have superior knowledge about how to live with nature instead of imposing human will over it and that the key to happiness is just preposterous.  And every Western these days, because Hollywood has so many broken people, Westerns are made with that perspective, which gets irritating. 

And Yellowstone as a show just wasn’t very good without Kevin Costner.  They killed him off in the first episode of the second half of the season, and from there, the show just tanked.  Taylor Sheridan got too big for his pants and thought he didn’t need Costner.  So, the two parted ways over creative disagreements.  Costner was going through a divorce and wanted to make his own western series for the movies. A lot went wrong in everyone’s lives, and it showed in the show.  But Taylor Sheridan didn’t help himself by throwing gas on the fire with Costner, and instead of working with him to finish the show, he just killed him off, thinking the rest of the cast could carry the show.  Which they couldn’t.  And left to finish the show without Costner, they retreated to the Indian subplot and made that the moral of the unsatisfying story.  And it turned out to be garbage, not worth watching.  And that’s how Yellowstone ended in a political climate where the world is seriously thinking of becoming states of America, such as in Canada, Greenland, and Mexico.  After all, a country is just a set of ideas, and many places in the world want to have the same ideas as America because it’s good for them.  And it was good for the Indians, too.   What was bad for the Indians was a socialist political movement that wanted to exploit them to undo America’s creation as a capitalist country.  And at the end of Yellowstone, which started as a quest for land and capital, the dream of a family was broken and sent back to the heathens, the failures of world populations and society as if to say that none of it was worth while in the end.  So why even try? 

Rich Hoffman

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