Tag: corruption

Golf and Guns

My problem in the world is that I enjoy too many things. But to be successful, traditionally, we have a culture that values specificity, where we immerse ourselves into one particular thing. For instance when it comes to this blog site, there is a political context and a narrative that has to be fulfilled for it to work. And since my audience is largely Trump supporters and Second Amendment advocates, going off the rails too far on a tangent doesn’t fulfil that market necessity. So I talk about guns and my love of Cowboy Fast Draw a lot as opposed to other kinds of sports, like baseball and golf. But to my mind they are all the same. In fact, I view Cowboy Fast Draw as another kind of game not at all unlike golf or bowling. We make games at life to represent our culture in various ways and to me they are all the same. The gun and their use is purely a sporting activity and are directly applicable to other sports. Truth be told, I enjoy every sport though. When I go to a sporting goods store, I am absolutely in heaven because every section is something I enjoy. I love baseball, I love football, I love the outdoor section, I love soccer, golf, I love everything. And to me they are all one big story.

I do resent being put into a classification with people who are limited in their scope of enjoyment of life though. I understand their limits and I hope that at some point they overcome them, but it certainly isn’t my task to yield myself to their handicaps. This is an issue that has come up more than once recently among several people. A politician friend recently asked me to take them out of a video they appeared in many years ago because their life had changed and they now had a much higher social profile, and political enemies were using it against them. One of the weapons that was used against this person was that I am a “gun advocate dressed to kill” which is shown on this blog site quite audaciously. But that’s not how I see it. To me a gun and holster rig with the gunfighting garb of Cowboy Fast Draw is no different from a group of people hitting the golf course with a dress code that would otherwise be laughed at during a visit to any local mall. Or a baseball player stepping off the field and without changing going to a nice restaurant. The baseball outfit would be considered odd in any other public setting except for a game. So the gunslinger outfit to me is something of an American heritage, no different from the Japanese reverence for their samurai or some other warrior reference that a culture wants to remember honorably. If you take away the politics all these sports are fun and have their place and I enjoy them all.

I was thinking about all this while I was looking for a nice golf bag and I found one, a really cool red, white and blue patriotic golf bag that I thought was really cool. Then I found a great baseball bat that was all decked out in patriotic colors, and so it went for several hours that day, I had a great visit to the sporting goods store. But I was also thinking about the objectives of those games and how they fit culturally into our society. And also specifically, they have a very unique style of dress for each of them. Something we have culturally come to accept. Except somehow the way I dress on this blog site was considered by some to be politically dangerous, and divisive. But the game of golf wasn’t? Both sports had the object of hitting targets. In shooting there are obviously targets to hit and you are measured by your success or failure in hitting them. And in golf the whole point of the game is to hit the target in as few strokes possible. Where is the problem with guns, other than they have been made politically volatile by a political class that has sought them out for their own purposes? In America guns are a sport like any other sport and I am personally offended that its even an issue.

One of my very good friends, an old radio guy, who was very talented had to completely erase his social media imprint into saving the Republic of America, which he felt very strongly about. But to work for this company they made him make a choice. A six-figure income or he couldn’t be promoted into this new position and as I held that American flag baseball bat I couldn’t help but think of how dangerous that offer really was. I understand the decision he made; he picked the money. A lot of people would. I obviously haven’t. I’ve had similar offers and I picked the blog, my books, my guns and the generalities of my life because in the end those are the things that the people who really matter to me care about. But such a choice should never have to be made, and honestly, we have been stupid as a civilization to let people make such divisiveness over anything, especially among our sports.

A visit to a sporting goods store shows just how rich our American culture is. I’d love to explore them all but unfortunately there is only time for a few of them. However to allow politics to ruin any of them is what I consider reprehensible. To allow a censorship of some with an emphasis on others is a further hypocrisy. Golf especially in the business world is considered a game for upper management, and I can see why. The goals of the game are very similar to those in the business world. Get to the goal in the shortest way possible using the various tools in your golf bag to get there. We don’t think about the people who actually kill other people with golf clubs every year when we play the game even though often the number is higher than with rifles. Yet liberals want to ban rifles and the game of golf is promoted, especially in business as if the two were radically different. But they aren’t different. Both sports, guns and golf are all about hitting targets. Both represent aspects of culture that are valuable and metaphorical, yet one is attacked and one is supported and that standard is very hypocritical.

I think we should enjoy everything, and I do. And I personally resent any judgments cast against me when what I do is part of the sport of shooting. The views that I value about an America that predates this liberal censorship trend that is going on in our media, companies and our politics is dangerous. That it is even considered radical to proudly display a gun rig that I am very proud of is a disgrace. Now if I was in a picture with that new golf bag which would cost about half as much as the gun and the holster rig then the world would be happy. That is not how things should be and it’s a shame we’ve let it become that way. I’m certainly not going to change the way I do things, but it’s a shame that so many people are forced to, just to fulfill a social norm that has been shaped by anti-American forces. It is my assertion that we shouldn’t have such limits.

Rich Hoffman

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No Inflation and a Booming Economy, What’s Not to Like?

Yes Larry Kudlow, no inflation. And everyone was wondering why Facebook was and other social media platforms along with Twitter were starting to ban conservatives. Well, it’s for the same reasons that all banning occurs, it is to continue pretending that things are one way when in all reality they are quite another. Banning people who know otherwise is a feeble attempt to control the flow of information. In this case the United States was set up by a political class that wanted global socialism and was trying to redistribute the wealth of the United States into other countries. And while they were doing it they didn’t want anybody to figure out how the game was really played. Heck, in college economic classes they were teaching this idea that America was on a declining cycle and that everywhere else—such as communist China were on the uptick. But that’s just not the truth. In reality the virtues of capitalism is why America had wealth in the first place and it all it would take to rekindle it would be to give credit, and jobs, where it had been from the beginning. What it would take was a presidential administration who understood the basic economic principles of deregulation, and pro growth management to unlock it, and the Trump administration has certainly done that and the results are obvious. But the biggest number of all isn’t the 3.2 percent rise in the GDP or the addition of 263,000 jobs in April 2019 or even the unemployment rate of 3.6%. The biggest stat of all is that it was all done with no inflation and maintaining the value of the American dollar.

We’re not talking about economic theory here, but statistical facts that have been well-known for many years. But there has been an agenda and most people have been following it in the United States. Most schools teach it, and it has certainly slipped into our mainstream entertainment. The measure of an economy has been to the limit that we measure such things and it has been mixed with all these altruistic causes. In politics the measure of economic success wasn’t in the wealth that economic activity produced, but in how it was distributed. More or less, instead of focusing on the food on the table, the measure has always been on the amount of table scraps that end up on the floor feeding some quadruped tag along. As I’ve pointed out before the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana long ago made up their mind about communist China. They have a whole exhibit they’re preparing the next generation for the ultimate reality, that China would be taking over the United States and that their version of communism would be coming here. Cities like Seattle are already well on their way as well as the states of California and Illinois. That was of course until we elected Donald Trump.

It’s not that Trump was filled with magic or anything. But as a business guy, he understood what the rest of us already knew, that we were being crippled by our politicians to intentionally fail so that the economic effort the world desired at this present time could be filled by European and Asian economies. Personally I have no problem with those economies having a strong presence, but what they have had was artificially created politically. Their gains were United States loses, and it was in America that the economic foundations were created, because that is where the buyer’s markets were generated. But Trump knew better, he was already rich and knew how the sausage was made and was able to attack the economy rather easily. But what was different for him was that he didn’t rely on advisors to guide his thoughts on the matter, like all the previous presidents before him did.

I knew when I was pushing so hard for him during the last election and even standing by Trump over these first contemptuous years in office that the key to his success was his independence from the political class that was well-trained to take America down a dark road letting its wealth along the way so that socialism and communism could be propped up and countries that had done very little by way of economic growth could suddenly be rock stars. As long as the political class was advising top politicians like presidents what could and couldn’t be done, and they listened, the restrictive economic activity could flourish in the grand scheme of it all. There is a similar scam going on in the business world, the world of consultants keep companies from seeing their true growth by fitting their scope of work into confines of established practices. The same with presidential advisors. They would say that you can expand the economy with deregulation, but that there will be a cost, a loss of jobs or you will inflate the dollar. The choices were never you can have this, and this and this, but only that you would have to choose between this or that as if some artificial limitation existed that everyone had to conform to. Only that limit was created by the political class of advisors to satisfy a global vision that they came up with long ago.

I can say I certainly knew better so that was why I supported Trump early on and very enthusiastically, and I still do. All the stuff against Trump has been made up by that political class, for which entertainment is a big part of. And their desire in doing so was to avoid what we are seeing. An economy that has no signs of weakening, its only going up. At some point we will run out of people to do the jobs that are being created, which is why robotics and A.I. are so important to our continued growth. But Trump understood from the very beginning what makes wealth, and it’s not governments. Its people free to go out and create it. I never believed the business cycles that they taught in college, I always felt that growth was a choice not a limit. But we just never had a politician in the White House who understood that. Bush Senior was too interested in global expansion, Clinton was a socialist loving globalist, Bush Jr. was a drunk who tried to make up is lack of knowledge with false bravado and lots of advisors. Obama was a socialist from Indonesia who again was policy driven by advisors, who were also socialists and communists. My favorite, Reagan was an actor who had learned enough about economics to get by, and his policies of deregulation and low taxation created the 80s, which I remember very well, a vibrant, thriving culture. But I always felt we could do better and now under just two years of President Trump, we certainly are—finally.

All those numbers mentioned are good, but the reason the no inflation indicator is so important is that the down players out there—the consultant class—have always said that if you get growth in the modern context that you will spike inflation. Well, that just isn’t true and this quarter shows that. I remain convinced that if we could get all the consultants out-of-the-way, especially those who work in the news industry because they aren’t good enough to do the gig on their own in real life, that we can push our GDP up over 5% and 6%. And others are beginning to see that as well, which is why there is a panic now on social media, a hope that the message can be controlled and people won’t understand just how good the economy is. But it won’t work, that cat is out of the bag and its only going to get better. The momentum is certainly in the favor of Larry Kudlow’s handling of things. Our best days are in front of us and quite frankly I’m very proud to have played my part of it. It certainly wasn’t easy and it pissed off a lot of people. But then again, why did it piss them off? That is the real question that has a rather ominous answer. To that I say “so what.” Enjoy the great economy and everything that comes with it. We deserve in America everything. We should be proud of it, not ashamed. Other countries could have it too, if only they embraced capitalism instead of other failed methods. The evidence is quite clear now.

Rich Hoffman

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The Demon Democrats and their Below the Line Thinking

It’s one thing to have political differences, but something that was obvious about Joe Biden’s first campaign rally, which I didn’t think was very effective, was that it was a battle for the soul of America. Only for his Democrats, they were like demons inhabiting the body of America and the rest of us were exercising it out so we could go on to live our lives. The demon had become a parasitic entity, as they often are into our political life and this election, like the last one in 2016 was essentially an exorcism. And the differences are stark, and irreconcilable. A demon can’t share a body with its host, it has to be driven out conclusively, and with conviction. In saying all this, I don’t think Joe Biden will make it through the primary process. I think Democrats have moved too far to the left and the reason is really a simple one, it really comes down to above the line and below the line thinking. And the two do not mix.

I’ve had more exposure lately to below the line people than I’d care to, but the experience was conclusive in that it articulated this Biden situation and his attempt to appeal toward the union vote, which is as a culture a very below the line activity. When we talk about below the line thinking we are of course reflecting back to the great book, The Oz Principle which is a book on business that quite effectively defined these elements. Essentially below the line thinking is a victimization status, where the participants do not feel connected to their fate, whereas above the line thinking feels that fate is well within their control. This is why I say that the two are not compatible. Proactive measures and victimization do not go together—they cannot coexist successfully, so in that regard Joe Biden was right.

They are easy to see, these below the line Democrats, everything to them is the fault of someone else or of circumstances beyond their control, and they are quite happy about that. Their direct descendants are the rock chuckers and the rain dancers who as natives across the face of North America, Africa and just about everywhere south of the Equator attempted to appeal to the gods so that their crops would grow. It wasn’t up to them to grow good crops, it was up to the whether and ultimately the gods who controlled it, and thus, the Democrat mind was born otherwise known as a (liberal). Of course we can have sympathy for that age of people because they didn’t yet understand science and a means of overcoming droughts through irrigation. If a month came along that didn’t bring much rain we have learned as a species that human sacrifice on an altar ripping out the beating heart of some poor sap didn’t really help. Irrigation could easily solve the problem once an above the line approach to the occupation of agriculture was introduced. And that is pretty much how it is with everything. Science and thought can replace victimization and mystical input.

I would say I’ve known a lot of Democrats over time and something they all have in common is this tendency to blame everything but themselves for their circumstances and problems. And that is what defines their politics. They can be quite good at identifying their victim status, but they are terrible about overcoming them, because that is not their nature. If they were to ever become a different thinking type, they would evolve into conservatives. Conservative values are not Nazi or Jew hating. They do not hate Muslims and are not the actions of white supremacists which are all traits present in the Biden launch of his campaign, that he is out to stop President Trump on his remaking of America into a nation of white nationalism. None of those traits are of conservative values because they are all victim statuses. History if looked at honestly has all these answers if people would only look. How could Trump be antisemitic if he has been in full support of Israel, or even Trump supporters? They can’t be Nazis and Jew haters at the same time. But that doesn’t matter to Democrats because the only way they can see the world is through the lenses of victimization. It gets them off the hook for any responsibility and places it into circumstances beyond their control.

The union types who do support Democrats no matter who they are live their lives like the little birds in a nest waiting for mother government to show up with a worm to give it to them for sustenance. Conservatives go and get their own worm. I don’t see politics as a division of ideas as much as I see them as an evolution. Democrats to whatever degree they present themselves are unevolved and not yet ready to take command of their lives. In some cases they never get there and like those baby birds, they end up food for some other animal because they never learn to fly and do for themselves. They stay in the nest too long waiting for that worm from the mother to come, but at some point the mother stops coming and they are left to fend for themselves.

That is what Biden is trying to appeal to, he is essentially offering to let America stay in the nest longer and that he will feed them worms if only they’ll vote for him. Democrats desire more than anything to keep all their constituents in a victimized status because it’s essentially all they have to offer as a philosophy, dependence fulfillment. Trump’s message is to get out of the next and to get moving on your own life. Those two thoughts just aren’t conducive. The Democrat does not bring forth an equal point of view, but a parasitic one, they are looking to be taken care of, they want the world to come to them and to be responsible. They want nothing to do with personal responsibility. They must remain victims of their own fate otherwise they stop being Democrats which is why union membership is down all across the country from where it was. People learned that to be in the labor unions they had to surrender parts of their own self initiation toward life. It’s not a political point of view as much as it’s an emotional evolution of their own souls.

To that effect it is that simple and that is what this upcoming election is all about, is America going to retreat into a victim status, for which it never really has been? Or is it going to direct its own destiny and free its people to migrate above the line and to unleash the potential of life that is found there. We can’t have it both ways, and clearly I would say that this election is more above the line than the previous one. People are better off now than they were four years ago and that is going to be a tough sell for below the line Democrats to convince people otherwise. Yet that is their real fear, that they are losing that victimization appeal to the realities of above the line thinking that is emerging more and more politically. I’ve been at this stuff for a long time and I see a drastic difference. I understand that it takes sometimes a long time for regular people to see the same thing, but the shift is here now and Joe Biden hopes that nobody really notices. His way of looking at things is like that exorcism that we were talking about, and his grip on the soul of the host is about to give way and for him and them, it is truly terrifying—because when there is nobody to blame but themselves that crisis is something they are not equipped to handle.

Rich Hoffman

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Ron Chernow at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the Reason for Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom

I am a fan of Ron Chernow’s historical books, I enjoy them immensely. In that regard I did make a point to watch him speak at this year’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner and the result of that entire evening I think warrant’s the attendance of the President next year. I certainly understand why he didn’t appear this year due to last year’s major abuse of the 1st Amendment by comedians. I thought it was a classy pick to put Chernow as the headliner. That isn’t to say that I agree with everything that Ron Chernow says or his point of view on it. I am personally not a fan of Alexander Hamilton. As I have made it well-known, I think the Anti Federalist Papers are far superior to the Hamilton driven Federalist Papers, which I have studied both extensively. To say I enjoy them as a great work of philosophy in Western Civilization is an understatement. But I respect the work Chernow has done, especially in his latest book on Grant. And I believe very strongly in the First Amendment and also think to his argument that the Bill of Rights are paramount to any debate of American concepts. To that effect I must remind everyone that the 2nd Amendment protects the 1st. And both are hands off completely in any legal consideration, and I find it ironic that many of the journalists in that room cite the 1st Amendment as paramount to defend but seek to change the 2nd. It just doesn’t work that way.

Chernow I thought was respectful to that group of radicalized media contributors, and in the context of history he was correct. But they had become a weaponized faction of political diatribes and that is another problem all its own. Yes we need a media to check the powerful and to keep them honest. But we also need competition to keep the media honest, and in this present time we don’t have it. Many people ask me, weekly and dozens of times at that, why I write so many articles every day of every week month after month after month, and I don’t think they ever really understand the answer. Which is fine, I don’t really expect anybody to. But the foundation of it goes back to a discussion I had with Michael Clark who used to work for the Cincinnati Enquirer but now works for the Journal News as a softball advocate for big government positions. I always knew he had liberal leanings, but we had a good relationship in the beginning until I started this blog to effectively pound the Lakota Levy in my community into the ground. I was a little shocked when he told me that he found my blog as competition for his newspaper articles. It shocked me because I viewed them as separate media, but that’s not the way it was for him.

When I first got involved in this whole 1st Amendment crusade it was fresh off a recent trip from Hollywood where I was working as a stunt advisor for a project and had just got a fresh taste of West Coast liberalism. While sitting among Hollywood’s finest leading stars and listening carefully to them, some were the stars of the television show Beverly Hills 90210, and the Twilight series of movies that were so popular. Some just came off the set of Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and there were even more there to watch the production of this hot new RealD 3D technology that was going to revolutionize Hollywood, I had a really good introduction to what would become the liberalization of the entertainment industry. They put up with me because I had something they wanted, but they were certainly not tolerant about my Ohio conservative beliefs. I certainly didn’t hate them for their thoughts, but they obviously didn’t like me. What ended up happening with that project was they filmed my work and used it for computer animation in films like The Immortals and Iron Man 2, and they did that because they simply didn’t want to call me back for the live work. Not that I cared that much, but I thought it conspicuous that they felt that strongly about their political beliefs that they would make business decisions based on them. But that was clearly the case.

I came back from that trip and saw in my home town a Republican Party being torn apart by a changing tide. Many Republicans were being forced to publicly support the massive Lakota Levy in Butler County even though the concept of it was very liberal. So they felt caught between a rock and a hard place so I offered the strength of my name branding to help them out. I had the experience working in communications so I thought I could string that thread in just the right way and I did. But the deeper I dug the more filth I found, so in that process I decided to start my own kind of opinion column and this blog site was born. However, at that time the newspapers were trying to divorce themselves because the opinion letters to the editors were getting out of hand with the Tea Party movement and they wanted to get back to the message of staying on the liberalization of America agenda which was very important to them. I had seen it first hand in Hollywood itself, in the producers, directors and actors working in the business. And I was seeing it first hand in our local media. Not everyone mind you, but certainly a majority.

Of course I knew lending my good name to such a thing would cause trouble but I had that covered too. I mean who is going to physically accost me, which they did try. But I’m an expert bullwhip handler, and a handler of many other things. I put myself in that position to help out my GOP friends and it worked for several years before many members of the media stopped appreciating the spike in interest in their newspapers and wanted to get back to the plan, which meant they had to eliminate me. Their attacks were so vicious that it severely pissed me off and the rest is history. I will probably write these articles forever. I can write more than they can, and more intelligently and I think the 1st Amendment does need to be protected, even from the press who clearly had a monopoly on the subject. Who checks the checkers? Well, citizen media, and its very much-needed so that is why there is an Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.

My name is a good one for a reason, and I do protect it for obvious reasons. I never yield to a challenge, which has also pissed off more than a few people over the years. But I never start the fights. I do finish them, and that will continue. I have more energy than they do so that isn’t going away soon. And that is a cornerstone to the preservation of the 1st Amendment. Having energy and a literate approach to things in life I think is a good thing. I am not a fan of big government Alexander Hamilton; I am much more Jeffersonian. If I lived in that time I could have easily have been Arron Burr except he was kind of an idiot. But I understood his hatred of Hamilton so a duel to the death was something I understand and think would be good in our current time. There would be a lot less backstabbing if we had that kind of culture still. Yet what does remain is a need for positive discourse that is literate in its approach and that is what I set out to do. So I am in agreement with Ron Chernow that the 1st Amendment is needed and should be protected. But the press in that room is also part of the problem because they have attempted to use it the way a terrorist has abused the 2nd Amendment. And the best way to keep them honest is by methods such as what I have used in my own life. There are thankfully lots of good people doing just that, and it is helping restore in America many of the needs that our republic requires. Ironically, that is how Trump was elected, by this honesty from the American people finally getting out. Competition has brought forth the truth which is what we are all supposed to be going after in the first place.

The great hypocrisy is when those same media types hide behind the 1st Amendment but then decry the 2nd is where we get into trouble. The 2nd is just as important as the 1st, they are both needed to have a proper government and more countries should be learning from America how to do things in their own countries. If they learned from us they could advance as cultures as well. The Bill of Rights is a great work of western philosophy that should be duplicated around the world. But you can’t pick and choose, one supports the other. And while those media outlets present at that dinner were mostly nodding in agreement with Ron Chernow, they were also working to undermine the 2nd Amendment. And that is simply not an option. So long as that is the case, I’ll do my part to protect what I consider in the original works of the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers to be some of the finest thoughts on government discourse so far created in the long line of historic consideration from any known culture. My ambitions go far beyond politics, which is why I don’t mind lending my good name to the effort, it goes to the concepts explored in the great James Joyce classic, Finnegans Wake. I love the concept of America so much that I don’t want to see it fall to the Vico Cycle. It needs to live on forever as an idea that others should follow, and not be allowed to be destroyed hiding behind the shield of the 1st Amendment as a means to destroy the entire Bill of Rights in one, giant sweep of oppression and crime ridden anarchy.

Rich Hoffman

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Above The Line Politics and the White House Correspondence Dinner

I had some strong thoughts while visiting the Republican Headquarters in Butler County at Bridgewater Falls the other day about the nature of politics and the temperament of our current culture. The headquarters is at the back of the shopping complex and faces the highway there and I actually caught myself looking both ways to see if anybody was watching for a moment and instantly caught the ridiculousness of the issue. Sadly we have allowed politics to become such a dividing issue and the burden again has fallen on Republicans to make all brand of liberals feel more comfortable with their thoughts, and that just has to come to an end. There is nothing wrong with visiting the Republican Headquarters in the middle of a fine day, or even people knowing that you are a Republican. It wasn’t that long ago that knowing those kinds of things wasn’t considered so taboo, such a closely held secret. As usual it is the result of the liberal side of things that have sought to make such things so, largely because they are so insecure with their thoughts that they can’t stand to have them measured against other ideas. Its their way or the highway and that has gone on for a long time, and Republicans have yielded, at least until President Trump has been refusing to go to the White House Correspondence Dinner and instead holding his own events on those nights such as the one shown below.

I’ve been very conservative all my life. There has never been a time when I wasn’t. I worked as much as I could at the time for the Reagan campaign as a 7th grader, doing debates with other students for extra credit and even giving interviews from a student’s perspective to the local newspaper. And as always I have been able to 100% of the time sit down with people who didn’t think the way I do and talk to them in a friendly way. As a matter of fact, unless I am first attacked of course, I can’t ever recall having disagreements in conversation that were ever cantankerous, where I have had a political fight with anyone. I can talk to anyone at any time about anything and I have always been respectful to other people’s opinions. I may not like them but I don’t beat them over the head to change them either. My thoughts have always been to allow people to come to their own conclusions about things and that usually if given the tools of thought, that most everyone comes around to my way of thinking eventually. So why make an enemy of them? Now if they choose to be an enemy, that’s perfectly fine with me as well, but I never seek to make them that way. That’s on them, completely. And once they are an enemy, I treat them that way—especially on these pages.

That’s my experience on how Republicans generally behave, they typically live and let live—to a fault. Republicans have not stuck up for themselves near enough, and this has allowed liberals to believe that they are equal at the table of thought by insisting that their below the line victimization status can sit at the table with the big kids and be validated as they cruise through life with the training wheels on thinking they can win the race. They can only win if Republicans cripple themselves and join Democrats below the line. The premise as it is stated by them, and I have a lot of experience with this as well, is that all people and all thoughts are equal and that they have an equal say at the table. Well for those who have followed me on these pages over the years, before Trump was even a consideration for public office, I exposed this lunacy quite openly. I had several debates about local issues from a truly conservative point of view on WLW radio and television all the time. I was quoted in the newspapers nearly every week and the other side couldn’t beat me in any debate so they did what they do to every conservative, they try to personalize and destroy the person who is in front of them, then ostracize them from group activity as if to punish their behavior forever. My enemies who made themselves that way, lobbied all the news outlets begging them not to have me on anymore because they couldn’t beat me. But it was their intolerance that caused all the anger because their positions were so weak that they knew they couldn’t hold up to real competition which is the core of their problem and it persists to this day. The problem is completely theirs. People of different opinions should be able to talk, but that is not the liberal position. They want to destroy opposition, not work with it. And we have seen to what extent. What they have tried to do to President Trump and the people who elected him is every bit as bad as what I described, and then some. It’s now obvious to more people why, Democrats don’t have anybody who can beat Trump in an election. They are losing everywhere. They picked up some House seats this year because many Anti-Trump Republicans left the party and retired leaving open seats that were filled by Democrats. It didn’t really matter because those Republicans were RINOs anyway. It was good to finally get to see who was who on the battlefield, so it wasn’t considered a tactical loss, more of an intelligence gathering exercise. And Democrats are losing because they can’t compete if they have to run a race without training wheels. In reality their political philosophy falls apart. Their philosophers, Sir Thomas More of Utopia, and Immanuel Kant, eventually leading up to Karl Marx had some thoughts that have not held water over time and that is the facts of it. That is also why I don’t go around body slamming Democrats all the time. I generally wait them out. If they are smart people, they will eventually think the way I do anyway. But that tolerance is completely one-sided.

For the first time in years the White House Correspondence Dinner didn’t have a comedian making fun of the sitting president. Trump refused to go because he wasn’t going to participate in a below the line activity. As a businessman Trump understands the game and he knows how to lead. And leading isn’t participating in the blood sacrifice that liberals want from their leaders. Republicans and Democrats for many decades going back to Bob Hope have attended this White House Correspondence Dinner and taken the jabs from the celebrities who attended with good heart and not allowed it to be personal. But the essence of that activity has been to allow all the participants to function with the training wheels of thought on, so nobody really challenged each other anyway. This is the same below the line thought that goes on in most group-oriented activity, where individual traits are made fun of so that group protections are sought out for cover. Such as making fun of a person’s weight, or their hair, or the way they talk so that conformity into group assimilation takes place, which is how liberals like things. That way individual thought yields to leaderless consensus. When presidents went to such events and allowed people to make fun of them as individuals that satisfied the ancient city-state need for a blood sacrifice of a king for the benefit of his constituents, which is the foundation of all liberalism. And of course every society since the dawn of mankind has failed when those sentiments are yielded to. It may take a few thousand years to get there, but they all fail eventually. Trump is changing that presently making this latest Dinner much more conducive to above the line thinking, which is and will always be leadership driven by individual responsibility and behavior.

The answer to the question is that it is not Republicans who have to do anything different. We should not hush our mouths or look both ways before going to the Republican Headquarters as if we were going to a speakeasy in the 1920s. And the media should not have been allowed to become so liberalized. That is one of the reasons I started this site was my experiences with working in Hollywood, and through the local media channels showed me that yielding to pressure from liberals to keep my thoughts to myself or else weren’t going to fly with me. I’m not going around beating people up who don’t think like me. But don’t think for a second that you are going to threaten me just for having opinions. Opinions I might add that have the backing of all human history behind them and are quite relevant. And we all have in President Trump a guy willing to stand up for our beliefs on a big stage and that is really good to see. The changes are happening, and we can see them making the world a better place. But we have to understand that it isn’t our task as conservatives to make liberals feel better about themselves. Only they can do that and often what they discover is that they have always been wrong. It’s just a matter of time for them to realize that and join the rest of us above the line.

Rich Hoffman

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The NRA Meetings in Indianapolis–All is right with the world

It was a great day, the temperature outside was ideal, the sun positioned just right in the sky. I had met my family at Kings Island for dinner and to have some of their great potato wedges by the train at Rivertown. Then to end it all I was able to watch President Trump give a magnificent speech at the NRA Annual Meetings in Indianapolis. Additionally, a few days ago my latest edition of American Rifleman arrived in the mail and I was eager to read it, so I did as Trump gave his speech to cap off the evening. It was a version of a perfect day that was like a warm blanket to wrap in that let you know that all was right in the universe.

I can understand that a love for these kinds of things is regional, and traditional. I came from a family of farmers in a part of Ohio that is essentially the buckle of the Bible Belt. Everyone I ever knew had guns, shot guns, cleaned guns, and traded guns, so to me they are a fundamental part of American life. Critical even which is why liberals are so eager to get rid of them. If you want to redefine America and make it into something else, you must take away this whole concept of a 2nd Amendment. Liberals after all want more than anything to have a ruling class that centrally controls everything, and gun ownership is all about individual liberty. Those two things don’t go together. That makes it exceptionally joyful to have all those liberal elements removed if just for an evening so that you can just enjoy the things that make life better, and the culmination of the Trump speech in Indianapolis at the NRA event was just such an occasion.

Its one thing to be accepting of other points of view. Most NRA members that I know are very accommodating of other sentiments. Personally, I have been around the world more than once and know people from many countries and I understand their beliefs and cultures where guns are not part of their daily thought patterns. It is inherit in most cultures to believe theirs’s is the best based on their own point of view because they are functioning from a lack of knowledge which paints their world view. However, as I’ve said there is a right way and a wrong way of thinking. Not all concepts of thinking are correct or lead to a successful civilization. So my joy of the NRA events have more weight behind them than just hometown sentiment. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it thousands of times, guns in a culture are the means to freeing it from the tyranny of the mistakes that have plagued mankind from the beginning of time. They are a philosophic contribution to the mechanisms of freedom which ignite all culture as an original thought, not some reflective diatribe passed down through the ages. What is needed in all life-giving exercises is imagination and the platform to think freely. A culture of guns takes away the premise of oppression and paves the way for a mind not concerned about authority figures, but for its own survival and fruition, which therefore becomes the boost for cultural contributions. Therefor, the gun and the ownership of them are a basic epistemological necessity for any successful culture not living off its warlike past but building a bridge into the future with new ideas and approaches to the challenges of the universe.

They usually don’t explore these needs at the NRA events such as the one that President Trump spoke at. Mostly they tip toe around them and it comes out in their need to rebel against static government approaches to culture building. Slogans toward such efforts are sufficient to rally up the crowd but it is never really considered just how important guns are to the creation of a free society and that is where the real value of civilization resides most. It’s not the back in the train government types, Plato’s philosopher kings which universities promise you can be if only you pay over $100,000 in tuition to their liberal professors to get the Oz certificate that says you have a brain and therefore ruling power over the earth. In order for that scam to work guns have to be removed from society so that those types of people can then rule, and justify all the cost they spent to acquire that leverage. The hatred of the gun by such people traces back to their basic problem. The gun is the great equalizer and if all things are equal, those types of people just can’t compete in the world and that is their real fear. That’s why they want guns removed from society, so that their world view can have a chance. But they need the power of government to give them that leverage. They don’t get it from the natural world.

Trump is the right kind of president to have such a speech at just that type of event. Trump isn’t exactly the kind of conservative that was born in Ohio, he’s from liberal New York. Like a lot of people who are successful in life he has learned along the way what works and what doesn’t. Not all thoughts are equal, there are right ways to think and wrong ways, and through his life he has come to the right way of thinking. Because to be successful at life he has had to. There are liberals who have done well. They have managed their businesses conservatively and turn toward socialist action to prevent competition from nipping at their heels, but at some point in their life they had to think correctly about things to become successful. And that is Trump’s story. He wasn’t lucky like I was to get a head start in correct thinking by being born in a place where they had it right all along. President Trump had to get there on his own, which is a common occurrence for most aging people. There aren’t many people like Bernie Sanders out there who arrive at old age as bleeding heart socialists who just never learn the right ways of thinking in life. During the speech Trump announced that he was withdrawing from the UN Arms Trade Treaty which was a pretty big deal symbolically. Doing so assured an artificial value system from a global perspective would not be adopted in the United States, but that a recognition of gun rights would be solidified in legislative thinking which then would be implemented domestically. In short, we would rule ourselves as a country and not revert back to the Vico Cycle of global mess which is plaguing the world currently with all that hinders it.

As a gun owner and advocate I naturally have to spend a lot of time putting up with people who don’t yet get it, and it does wear you out. It’s not nice to rub people’s face in it, I think its good to let free minds be free, which means they need their time to come to the values of conservatism the way that Donald Trump obviously did over the years. Sometimes it takes them many decades to arrive there, but I believe in letting people figure it out on their own. If they want a guiding light, I’m happy to help them. But I’m not willing to yield value for conformity to a system of thinking that clearly is wrong in its foundations. So personally, an evening with President Trump and the NRA is a welcomed treat, a chance to be free of all the slow thinking dysfunction which swallows up so much global potential by following the paths of the past back into the hells of Dante. For one brief day and just a few hours at that, all was right with the world.

Rich Hoffman

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Nothing is Too Expensive

With all this talk recently about capitalism and socialism, which is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about, there is another component to the puzzle for which nobody ever speaks about, and that is the driving force of ambition. What makes a society better or worse than some other is the amount of people who exhibit, and act upon their ambitions. And for that I would argue that a capitalist society has more people in it who are ambitious which drive it forward, and are therefore critical to the success of any culture. To that sentiment, there is a good way to measure that type of health and that is in how people spend money and how they measure themselves against the value of money.

When a person says, “well, that’s too expensive” what they are really saying is that they lack the confidence or gusto to step up and put forth the ambition to gain access to something of value. What I’m not saying is that you should spend yourself into oblivion to have something just so you can show off and pretend that you have value among your peers, and that you fake ambition with credit. But when it comes to a house, a certain car, a vacation—or in my case guns that you may want to get where the temptation is to say that the item is too expensive and not worth the effort, what you are announcing to the world is that you do not have the ambition or desire to obtain that object.

To me nothing is too expensive in the world. The question is, do I really want to put forth the ambition to obtain it? It’s not whether or not the object is out of my reach. The question of whether it is or isn’t is the path to the socialist side of things because it assumes that only certain classes of people can have the wealth to buy that certain house, or certain car. But in the capitalist society if I want to buy a golf course or a skyscraper, I should be able to, and have the freedom to. So when I hear that someone thinks something is too expensive what they are really saying is that they lack the will to do the work necessary to obtain the goal.

I have heard really good people I’ve known all my life say these kinds of things. I come from a family of farmers on both sides, and that is to say people of humble means. They said all the time that this little thing or that little thing was too expensive. Much of that came from their Christian backgrounds where meekness, and humble recognitions are traits to pursue so by saying that a new Mercedes is too expensive for them to drive they are really trying to advocate what good people they are in Biblical value, compared to the materialist who works all day and night just to have a fancy car. A lot of the values we have about material wealth and the acquisition to it come from these types of beliefs, and socialism is always there like a lusting demon to siren song all of society into the crashed rocks of a lack of ambition. By saying something isn’t worth the money even if an individual yearns for it, is to declare that they do not have the value or confidence to pursue the object. The object only represents pent-up desire. The effort to obtain it is the fuel that drives culture. And when a society functions after such pursuits then we can say that we have a society of values because the material objects then represent effort.

When we rob ourselves of such value as a civilization, we are then declaring that the here and now is a transitory phase and that death is our ultimate goal. Such people say, “why bother, you can’t take it with you.” That is a person and a society that is on the decline and often they try to mask such efforts behind their religious beliefs aimed at the afterlife. After all, how can they be penitent if they are working their fingers to the bone to have a new 85” flat screen television? They may want the object but in all reality they like thinking about death more so their aim is to dig one more shovel full of dirt closer to their own grave to hide their inherit laziness. And that is the way of things.

I don’t buy things for status symbols and most of what I do spend money on is for things that I do with my family. But the things I do spend money on, that have value to me I never say it’s too expensive and let that be the guide that drives me away from an object. There are of course times where things are too expensive because the seller is trying to rip you off, which is a different discussion. But in planning a big trip with a family, or buying that new gun, which are the types of things that I personally value, cost never enters into the picture. I’ll do whatever I have to do to get what I want. I’ll work any amount of hours so that I can have the privilege of obtaining the object. I never see something as too expensive, even if its millions of dollars. If I want it, it’s up to me to get it. Not some excuse like religious meekness, or social structure assumptions. Capitalism frees us of these limits and those who are scared to have their laziness revealed are the same ones who decry capitalism—because of it. There is no class structure limiting us under the flag of capitalism.

In American culture even if your father was a loser and your grandparents were idiots, you are not confined to follow in their path. If you want you can work hard, gain some money, and buy an SUV decked out with all the goodies, the same way that a top executive for a big company can. The question is do you want to match the efforts it takes to obtain such a thing. In my personal life as much as I talk about individualism, I pour a lot of that effort into my family, because ultimately if you really care about them, your influence leadership is to their benefit and that makes me happy. I don’t care what others think of me, but I care what I think of me. So when it comes to family I spare no expense. Not at all, because my value for them far exceeds any limits of effort on my part. There simply is no limit and it shows the way I live and spend money. Of course you have to decide if you want to spend money on this thing or that thing because money isn’t infinite. But if you focus your efforts, you should be able to buy anything, nothing should ever be considered too expensive.

It’s just a little thing to consider but I hear it all the time and it’s always wrong in the context of the individual pursuit of obtaining material objects. When people say something is too expensive what they are really saying is that they don’t think themselves worthy of that effort and their own ingrained meekness is speaking as an excuse not to even try. And that is how you get a declining culture, when people stop trying.

Rich Hoffman

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We Need Guns for Civilization to Work Properly

The Democrats continue to propose this notion of impeachment of President Trump and to be honest, this makes the best argument for the Second Amendment that could be provoked. President Trump was elected by an honest election process, and with all the legal scrutiny that could be generated against him, he was found innocent of any wrong doing, yet the calls for his removal from office continue on, and have even increased as Democrats realize they are losing power at a rapid rate. It is a reminder why we must have the Second Amendment, because if a president of the United States can be abused the way that Trump has been, it can happen to any of us and the only way to defend ourselves truly is not in a court of law, but with the barrel of a gun, as is obvious by the antics of our present circumstances. I put my message to those who want to impeach President Trump on Instagram and for me it would be a last resort but its safe to say, that if Trump were to be impeached, I would consider the law and order of our governing system to be too far gone to hold any merit, and the only thing that would hold our society together would be our guns.

Not having guns as the foundation of our country and our entire legal system is simply not an option. I will never trust anything mankind proposes by way of justice without a gun being somewhere nearby. People are fallible and they often abuse words on paper if they can get away with it to obtain power at someone else’s cost, and that is just not permissible. I’m not going to allow it, and the only way to enforce that is with gun ownership. Guns are the stabilizing factor of western civilization which keeps us free. Without them our society would have fallen apart a long time ago. Guns keep everyone honest and that has been a good thing. But let’s face it, the Second Amendment isn’t for hunting, it’s for taking back our government from the powerful, if we need to. And if Trump is impeached, then when would we declare that everything is too far gone to deal with things without violence? There are elections every four years, and that is the time where the opposition can knock out someone from power if they can. That’s how our system is supposed to work. But if someone cheats and tries to do it with legal gymnastics and an abuse of the law, which is clearly what happened to President Trump, then what other recourse do any of us really have?

I propose that guns should be a greater part of our lives, we should wear them openly and allow all those we are dealing with to know that we are all functioning from an equal footing. Guns are the great equalizers, they are what makes us respect each other, not some words on a page. Guns are an invention by mankind that have brought in the notion for equality in the first place. Without guns, we would not have had many of the social revolutions that we have had in the United States. Guns have played a much larger role than many people give them credit for. There has been no political figure that we’ve had in the world that would convince me that guns were not needed to keep everything balanced and in order.

The shame of it is that we’ve allowed a political class to define gun ownership and their use as dangerous and a safety hazard, as if they were in the same category as tobacco and alcohol. From a government perspective they know they can’t truly rule over our society without having guns removed from the discussion, and truly, deep down inside, that is what “government” as an entity wants to do, they want to control us. That’s sort of their job title. But what keeps the tendency for human failure from harming us? Well, it’s the fear that if government abuses its power that the people they rule over will shoot back. I would contend that without guns or at least a culture of weapons, that no foundation of law and order would persist in any culture.

I have been around the world a few times and visited some of our greatest cities on earth and I can say honestly that the lack of guns have made most of them armpits. In order to have a gun free society work the intellectual aptitude of the inhabitants must yield themselves to the weaknesses of their culture because that is the only way that peace is achieved. Whereas in cultures where guns are openly worn and discussed, the intellectual curiosity of the world around them tends to go up. As I write this I’m thinking of England, a place where they clearly don’t understand gun ownership in a personal way. They love their institutions in England and they are willing to trade their personal freedoms and security away toward a trust in their authority figures. But at a cost, they are a declining culture that is limited to the whims of their government, and that is a dangerous place to be.

Then there is the example in Paris, which I have called many bad names due to their present state chaos. They have their yellow vest protests which have been going on for a long time and are the result of the failed socialism there for many years. After the fire at Notre Dame over 900 million dollars were contributed to help restore the cathedral prompting many of those weekend protestors to question why similar contributes didn’t flow toward their pockets. After all, it was gas prices and taxes that were keeping them poor and middle class. Why couldn’t “the rich” just give them all 900 million dollars so they could sit around their homes all day and play video games? What isn’t understood by these people was the value Notre Dame had to so many people around the world, and that value was reflected in the contributions. Notre Dame had value. A bunch of dirty, stinky, lazy socialists do not have value, so nobody wants to give them 900 million dollars to sit around complaining and playing games all day. It is that lack of understanding that can often make governments dangerous because they seek to appease those types of dumb, shortsighted people in elections which means that the mobs of the angry can then confiscate the wealth of the hard-working. In Europe this is a real problem, which is why more people don’t have more things. A culture that embraces gun ownership tends to be one that also understands the nature of value and it prevents more violence, it doesn’t act as an agitator of more instances.

Gun ownership I consider to be the foundation of civilization. Without it governments and the people they are supposed to represent fall apart quickly. So it’s a great benefit to have more guns in more places in any culture. And it’s what keeps the bad guys away. It’s also what keeps the temptations to impeach presidents from getting out of control because we know from history that people in power will do just about anything to stay there. And when they feel they can abuse others to keep their power, or to advance it, they certainly will. What I can say is that if my president is impeached, I’m not going to be very happy about it, and I will look toward the Second Amendment to restore balance, and order. Yielding to authority is simply not an option. I never see a day where guns aren’t the center of civilized discourse, because of their equalizing effect. It puts everyone on equal footing which should be encouraged, not discouraged. But then again, people who want more gun regulations are not really interested in peace and equality. They want power and they want us disarmed so they can have their way with us. And that is the deep, dark secret nobody wants to talk about.

Rich Hoffman

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The Democrats Can’t Win in 2020, Which is Why They are Worried

There are two reasons that Democrats are so obstinate regarding the failure of the Mueller Report to give them a smoking gun regarding the Trump administration, the first are the reasons I mentioned on Easter Sunday, the classic control mechanisms of institutionalism. The second is much more immediate. The Democrats just don’t have an answer to Trump for the upcoming election. Their leading contenders are Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, both men in their middle 70s who even if they did win would be in their 80s after their first term. Everyone else is a lunatic of fringe socialism with no message but more victimization and administrational control, which is not an appealing message. But its all they have, and they know it. So all they could really do is pray over this false accusation, which they have been doing to Republicans for years. What makes Trump great is that he refuses to play along, which has exposed this whole game for what it always was and there isn’t a single Democrat who is going to be able to go head to head with Trump in a general election. The Democrats knew it during 2016, they can’t win an election without cheating, and they certainly can’t beat Trump, so all they had was the hope that the Mueller investigation might find something that might end Trump for them. And when it didn’t come, they panicked, which has now erupted into an all out mental breakdown, collectively. The world is changing away from their controls, and they are terrified.

Like politics I out grew religion a long time ago. It’s not that I find either of them useless, but the current definitions are designed by people not very intellectually curious. They’d rather talk about the new grill they bought at Home Depot for backyard cookouts than to talk about whether the Gnostic books of the Bible should have been included into the official Bible of the Christian religions during the 1st and 2nd century A.D. As a person I don’t waste time on the dumb stuff, and most people are addicted to dumb stuff. I only am really interested on the big scale epic ideas about the nature of existence and I write about those types of things every day in hopes that it might inspire others to think about big things too. And it takes understanding big things to understand President Trump and his value. There isn’t anybody on this earth that I find deserves worship or following. I don’t need someone to follow in my life, I do all the leading. What I need out of a president is a proper chess piece. He or she doesn’t need to be a moral character. Everyone fails my expectations, so I don’t even include them when I vote for someone. I just want someone who will stand against the levers of control that have been with us since the beginning, the desire of power to manipulate those who don’t have it.

Someone reading an article of mine a few days ago referred to it as a piece of Nazi propaganda, which of course is all kinds of wrong. I’m about as far from a Nazi as anybody could get. Nazi’s were socialists and big government guys. They were way to the political left of where I am and only modern interpretations made by stupid people could even attempt to draw a line connecting those positions. But I saw in the person an individual who was trying to understand things, so I didn’t get all bent up out of shape over it. People come to the truth in their own ways and must overcome all their own personal demons. They assume that they need institutions to function, so they need all these checks and balances that are in place to keep everyone honest. There are people believe it or not who think that Bob Mueller and James Comey were card-carrying Republicans. Yet what is missed is that those definitions were created by the conquered, those who were willing to carry the sins of all mankind on their backs as a political party and allow Democrats to have a seat at the big table, and allow socialism to become part of the American way. My brand of conservatism isn’t even on a chart anywhere. I certainly wouldn’t call it “right winged” or “alt right.” I would simply call it normal, and of the type of minds who wrote the Constitution. I do not see advancements of human thought and achievement as progressing in politics, I have watched it regress into this laughable condition. I see advancements in the sciences and in art, but those attributes have not yet made it into our political world. That is why when the Nazi party did come along, the western world didn’t know what to do with it. Neville Chamberlain and his globalist tea drinkers didn’t know what to do with this popular socialist who used the ten-thousand-year-old symbol of a swastika to attempt to bring in a new age of humanity. They were too busy talking about dumb stuff, like what the name of a particular wine was and what part of France that it came from rather than understanding how dangerously left leaning the politics of Hitler was and how to stop him. Modern Republicans have had the same problem as Neville Chamberlain. Mitt Romney was a joke in 2012. John Boehner, who lives down the road from me and talks to a lot of the same friends as I do was far from a conviction driven conservative. He was a terrible Speaker of the House, just as Paul Ryan was. Boehner is now a pot advocate which is all types of bad news for me. These are not people who share my values, that’s for sure, they are way, way, way too far to the political left for me.

So where does that put President Trump, he’s certainly not somebody who will win awards for good morality but what does make him good and someone worth having in the White House is that he gets one important ingredient that is desperately needed in politics. He gets using the Executive Branch to push people above the line, which is so critical to any sort of change agency. Rather than making excuses for why our people and politics reside below the line, Trump insists that everything stay above it. And the line is that invisible set of targets we all set for ourselves. If we are below it, we accept various attributes of victimization, and if we are above, we are taking responsibility for ourselves and our role in the universe.

For me the line stops at the basic foundations of our Constitution which I view as a work of art that took about three thousand years of western civilization to develop. When after the Mueller Report came out that there were some on the Democrat side of things who still wanted to impeach the guy I helped put in office, well that’s where the line was crossed. I’m not going to put up with any below the line stuff. I’m just not going to do it. I don’t want to return to a political world where it is run by a bunch of Neville Chamberlain types who empower Democrats with their lack of will to fight. I will take Trump flaws and all because at least he gets the above the line needs of the Executive Branch. He wears a suit and tie every day. He has a good-looking wife. He doesn’t apologize for whatever wealth he has acquired. He likes gold. He likes golf and runs wonderful golf courses. He’s an above the line guy who doesn’t feel guilt or a need to apologize for it, and that makes him the best president possible in this day and age, and Democrats can’t beat him because they must appeal to below the line thinking to have a shot and if given a choice, people will aspire to above the line needs most of the time—if someone will lead them there. And yes, it is that simple.

Rich Hoffman

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The Exciting Cultural Promises of Galaxy’s Edge

I realize that many of my daily readers cringe when I do a Star Wars article, but its important that it is understood cultural trends as they emerge and how those new ideas will shape the world of tomorrow. I have enjoyed the last week or so in witnessing all the many aspects of modern mythology that are exploding onto the scene. We are talking about more than just a little influence culturally, which will eventually build up the political mentality and philosophy of the next century, that is emerging in our various art forms, particularly in movies, television streaming, table top gaming and video game options. We are experiencing a very rich culture of thought that is emerging and is shaping the world right under our feet so I consider all these things to be very important. I will have to say that my ability to predict events and understand the deeper meanings of every day observances come from my love of global mythology, the stories of humanity that transcends time and space. In that regard the things that happened this past week with the release of Episode One of the Game of Thrones and the Star Wars Celebration in Chicago unleashed a different kind of hope that I found extremely encouraging, which I wanted to share here.

As I’ve said before I work in an industry full of very, very smart people who have a great love for technology and innovation. And among them I was even surprised how excited they were to watch Game of Thrones and how many of them were live streaming the events of the Star Wars Celebration from their office work areas. It used to be that I was the only one who cared about things like that, 20 to 30 years ago, but now its quite a common thing, especially among intelligent people. Fans of these entertainment options are looking for intellectual fulfillment that they aren’t getting from regular life. It’s not escapism as it was classically defined, it’s a hunger for new ideas to see in conceptual reality the things they are naturally thinking. But even saying that, it has been the news of the new Star Wars land at the Disney Parks titled Galaxy’s Edge that impressed me the most.

When Disney first acquired Lucasfilm and the Star Wars property way back in 2012 I made my predictions on what impact that would have on the future. Since then of course Universal Studios had taken the Harry Potter experience to the next level of reality based mythic involvements, where consumers weren’t just passively enjoying the product and the stories of the product, but were now part of the story themselves. From a mythology perspective I see this as a huge leap in human experience, which comes at a good time. The human race is at a point where it has more options to build from than ever before, so our mythologies naturally need to grow to deal with those concerns at a pace more rapidly than those experiences are occurring. So knowing that this construction of Galaxy’s Edge is just remarkable because it’s not just about visiting an amusement park and reliving some favorite movie, and looking at movie props to rekindle the memory of the experience. What Disney has done is build as close to a living breathing off-world outpost that puts the consumers in the story of mythology itself in real-time and what impact that will have on human mythology for the future has some very exciting prospects, and I’m very excited about it.

When I was a kid and first went to Universal Studios in Los Angeles I found if very thrilling to see the real movie props of my favorite movies. I was so impressed with it that for the last thirty years or so those initial impressions stayed with me as very good memories. I can say that when I had a chance to see the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios in Florida it was a magical experience for me, which should be evident by the pictures in my “Who is Rich Hoffman” blog posting seen on the sidebar. I have always enjoyed movies and when there was some kind of Star Wars exhibit that showed the real movie props from the films I have always found the experience stimulating and as a family we have gone to as many of those things as possible. So I am very aware how little kids fresh with ideas feel about these kinds of things. Even as adults, the feelings don’t go away which is quite evident as the participants of the Star Wars Celebration in Chicago was not geared for children, but many of the adult fans who really want to immerse themselves into the Star Wars mythology. Knowing all that, Galaxy’s Edge in both Disneyland and Disney World this year will allow visitors to get museum quality props and to accept the Star Wars universe as a reality not just a nostalgic recollection.

Specifically the two rides that are going to be featured, Smuggler’s Run where everyone will have a chance to ride in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, or the Rise of the Resistance ride where participants will actually be in the middle of a Star Wars battle are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the details of buying and building droids, constructions of personal lightsabers, and the acquisition of real Star Wars merchandise purchased as if it really existed in that galaxy far, far away—Disney has gone way over the top and far exceeded my expectations. They are going for a level of authenticity that has experimental results not yet measured culturally and I think it’s very healthy for all of us. To not only ask what if, but to say, “how about that” in the context of a simulated reality can really have a dramatic increase in our technical expansion and that is very exciting.

I’m also not one who believes that growing up is such a great thing. I personally think we are at our best as people before the age of 10 when our minds are growing and fully alive. Our stories in society are sort of based on the very old or the very young, but not so much for those who have reached puberty and are in the realm of career building and procreation. I have seen so many people who just don’t know what to do with themselves in that large in-between age but to pursue a course of self-destruction. But that is changing and has dramatically over the course of time that I have conducted this blog site. Entertainment and mythology are better merged together than they ever have been and I see that increasing the quality of the human condition, not regressing it. It’s impossible to tell what impact Galaxy’s Edge will have on future engineers and space explorers, but one thing’s for sure, there will be growth and it will move in a very positive direction. In the past many of these kinds of things weren’t talked about much, people didn’t binge watch shows like Game of Thrones for entire weekends, and those types of options weren’t even available. But now they are and it is changing everything in a positive way. Which is very, very exciting.

Rich Hoffman

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