Tag: entertainment

The Anti-Woke Message of Deadpool: It’s all about regeneration and healing

I always have learned a lot from young people.  Yes, adults have lived long lives and have much to teach based on experience.  But kids are freshly created and don’t have assumptions yet baked into their thought process.  So I listened when one of my grandsons wanted to see the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie doing big business at the theater.  It’s one of the rare movies these days to hit over one billion dollars, so that’s a significant financial triumph that is at least good for theater owners.  I want theater owners to survive all this World Economic Forum wokeness, so I was interested in why so many people liked Deadpool.  I’m not a Deadpool fan. I don’t want to see Marvel characters cursing and talking about sex and drugs, and the Deadpool movies are R-rated experiences filled with a lot of bad stuff.  So, up to now, I have had zero interest in anything Deadpool.  However, my policy with my children and grandchildren is to take the edge away of any forbidden fruits in society with guidance.  So when he asked me to take him to the movie theater to see the movie, I didn’t hesitate.  We made it a somewhat family affair, with my daughters going along to watch the film with us and make any commentary about it that needed to be made from an adult leadership perspective.  All the world needs is another kid out there speaking in a trashy way with F-bombs and drug references.  And this was a Disney production now, so here was Disney, who used to get criticized for making too many G-rated movies, putting out an R-rated horror of sin and indulgence.  However, after watching the movie, I noticed much worth seeing, which became apparent quickly.  And I could understand why my grandson liked Deadpool so much.   I have always liked Wolverine from the X-Men, so I thought I could at least like that much of it.  But in the end, I liked Deadpool & Wolverine for many unexpected reasons.

So here’s the lowdown I have talked about extensively throughout the previous decade: Disney is dead.  They have mismanaged the company and are only surviving now because they are too big to fail.  But they have lost their core audience.  They enjoy decades of brand building, and roughly 50% of all adults are willing to go into serious debt to take their kids to Disney World for a vacation.  That trend will not pass to the next generation, so once these current kids grow up and become adults themselves, they will not follow that path.  I am happy I could take my kids, their kids, and their husbands to Disney World last year, which was extraordinarily expensive.  At least my family had a chance to see Disney before it declined into oblivion, and the Deadpool character is very much a cultural symbol of that. Part of what makes Deadpool movies so funny is that Disney is aware of its decline, and that’s part of the strange joke in the film.  Deadpool used to be a 20th Century Fox thing, but after Bob Iger, as the CEO, bought up that media property, they acquired several Marvel characters, such as Spiderman, the X men, and, of course, Deadpool, among other things.  But it was like bringing in Kamala Harris for president over Joe Biden for Disney.  It was a sugar high at best and only delayed the inevitable decline of a media company that had gone global woke and lost its domestic audience toward family value.  It’s hard to become a leader of the global citizen movement as an anti-family provocateur of sexual grooming of children and still be the bastion of family values that it’s known for.  That is why theme parks still get so much respect from parents who want to give their children a good life and think a vacation there will do the trick.  But it can’t; once you lose that reputation, it’s gone forever. 

Yet that is the theme of the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie.  Both characters are about regeneration; when wounded, they heal almost like reptiles.  So, the movie and the characters are more about second chances than anything else.  And in a social context, that is the same thing the nation and world are going through.  Most people can relate to Deadpool and all his mistakes because, at his heart, he is a person who wants to do good and be respected.  Ultimately, Deadpool wants to become a respected Avenger and to be one of the good guys, which I found surprising given the R-rated nature of the content.  However, the movie is very self-aware of its situation in society; it is essentially an anti-woke movie in the style of an old 80s film that checks all the boxes of the World Economic Forum investors who require excessive wokeness to be produced.  There are a lot of gay references in the film and discussions about drugs, but not in a way that promotes them as much as Deadpool has to overcome them to be who he wants to be.  But yet, the plot is filled with overt references, which, of course, the wokesters out there love.  I don’t support any of that, but as a running commentary on our current social status and the position of Disney as a media company that is undoubtedly headed on hard times ahead, it is an interesting observation of itself. 

The Marvel films had a plan that started with a series of movies in the last decade that were very traditional heroic enterprises.  I loved the Captain America movies, and the Civil War between Captain America and Iron Man, with all the tag-alongs, was terrific cinema.  But then we entered the overt woke era of the most recent movies, and there are a lot of horrible decisions made, starting with Captain Marvel and moving into The Eternals, which I thought was a horrendously lousy movie with overt gay characters in it that just made the whole thing no fun to watch.  Disney continues to make horrible decisions, such as what they are doing with their Land of the Villains announcement for Disney World, their closing of Tom Sawyer’s Island, which is my favorite part, and embracing villains in their family offerings because these days, so many people see themselves as Deadpool sees himself.  They can’t relate with the good guys anymore.  But at least with Deadpool, he wants to be a good guy, even though he’s been essentially a bad guy.  Marvel is trying to do as the characters in Deadpool & Wolverine: regenerate themselves and heal.  Their new Marvel movies are trying to get back to the basics.  As America tries to make itself Great Again as a country, media companies are also trying to do the same.  Everyone is looking in the mirror and asking if this is where we want to be.  That is what the new Deadpool movie is all about, asking those essential questions.  So it was pretty good.  Too late to save Disney.  But it’s a good thing to talk about as a patient lays dying on an operating table as a last thought and sentiment.  There is a humanity in Deadpool that people are clinging to, which surprised me.  And I certainly understand why young people would be attracted to that message.  They want to have hope that their future can be better than the past.  Because for them, they don’t have any memory of the good ol’ days.  Just the days of woke losers and political hacks who have ruined the world with bad decisions and tried to sell the mess as redemption.

Rich Hoffman

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When Too Many Rules Destroy Happiness: Observations from a Disney World vacation experince

For most of September, I have been traveling. It has only been recently that travel restrictions regarding COVID-19 were lifted in places I needed to go professionally, like Canada, and Japan so these needed visits had been stacked up and a long time required. That was also the case for a family vacation to Disney World, which I had intended to do for the last three years while my grandchildren, mostly close in age, were prime for the experience. Covid restrictions and mask mandates ruined all those plans, so we waited for them to be removed before committing to anything. In September 2023, a slight window opened to do everything, so I stayed swamped catching everything up. By the end of September, I got off a flight from Tokyo, parked my car, hooked up our RV, and towed it to Florida for a week in Disney World to stay at their wonderful campground, Fort Wilderness. We almost canceled it again because of all the new policies at Disney, but we determined that this was the time if we were ever going to take the family to Disney World. Because as I have said many times over the last decade, I don’t think Disney will survive as a company. And after going there again and comparing the experience to just three years prior when my wife and I went there to see some of the new options they had, there is no question, that Disney is failing everywhere behind the veil of happiness, and I can see the entire thing completely falling apart for many reasons they will never tell you about in the media. But the Fort Wilderness Campground, an official resort for Disney was fantastic, at least from the façade of a vacation experience, and I was happy we went when we did.

From the area I walked around in my video of Fort Wilderness, we could take the boat over to Magic Kingdom and get to all the other parks, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and Epcot Center with the park hopper option. It was all costly, but I could show my children and grandchildren many exciting things over three days, and camping at the Fort Wilderness Campground was one of the best experiences I have ever had. It was comfortable, luxurious, convenient, and splendid in everything you expect from a lifetime vacation experience. When I think of Disney I think of a media empire built on family values, and of Fort Wilderness itself, I think of the Davy Crockett television show and Zorro. These days, Disney is more of a princess place, but there are still all the excellent references to Americana that I found very refreshing, such as the clear statement at the entrance to Liberty Square, “The hope for freedom for all. And the courage to fight for it at any cost.” Walt Disney never wanted people to forget what a miracle America was, and he dedicated several parts of his amusement parks to that very service. I wanted to take my family there while the parks were still in their heyday. As for what I wanted out of the trip, I am thrilled with the results. The children were happy even though we averaged about 6 miles of walking daily with the park hopper passes. We saw a lot, experienced a tremendous amount of information, and we had a great six days at Fort Wilderness Campground going to the pool, hanging around the restaurant and trading post, and enjoying camp in one of the best in the world. We purposely picked the 100 loop, which requires a lot of advanced planning so that we were a close walk from the boat dock which had us coming and going constantly.

Yet, to my eyes the mistakes were obvious. Disney, because it’s a giant corporation with many thousands of employees to maintain has destroyed itself by the weight of its own success, like many major corporations do, and this goes way beyond the recent woke policies from BlackRock that have seriously destroyed their business model for good. The current park attendance will soon be a thing of the past because of their killed market share worldwide. Bob Iger, the current CEO should have never returned, and I’m sure he’s realizing that now. Disney needs to constantly produce fresh content that makes a billion dollars each at the box office, and those days are mostly over for them because of the status of the current youth, YouTube options, and their alienation of conservative Americans. For instance, most of the vacationers are Trump supporters at the Fort Wilderness Campground. However, the employees are mostly Democrat-leaning and to offset this discrepancy, Disney has a lot of rules they impose on their workforce to keep everyone lined up correctly. But what they end up with is something much like their rides, everything is great so long as you stay on the rails. But the illusions fall apart quickly if you step out of the boat.

And that became most obvious when we were all exhausted one night. Nobody felt like cooking, so we went to Crockett’s Tavern and the Trail’s End Restaurant to get some pizza. On one of them, we asked for a half and half, one side being deluxe, the other completely cheese because none of the little ones like toppings yet. You’d think that we asked those Disney employees to commit murder, they had a meltdown that involved discussions of being fired and all kinds of drama. It was like being in West World where the robots suddenly started shooting the customers. It was odd, but that wasn’t the only time. What was clear to me was that the expensive façade of the Disney vacation experience was thinner than it had ever been and it wasn’t taking much for that illusion to be shattered for the consumer. Disney had adopted many rules to keep their radical workforce in line and on the message that they had destroyed that personal touch that happy individuals bring to work with them. I’ve been to Disney World many times, and this most recent time showed clear signs of stress behind a radicalized workforce that was coming out against the customers such as we saw over that simple pizza. The pizza was good, and we had a fantastic time with our family. But after some old timers still working at Disney are gone, the next generation is not there to pick up the task and carry it into the future. Disney could hide this from the world so long as they could throw money at the problems. But they can’t even do that anymore. In the news this week, right after we left, Disney had to raise their ticket prices to their parks and there are reports that the CEO is seeking a peace treaty with the Republicans of Florida. The woke battles have left Disney permanently damaged as most people inclined to spend a lot of money at Disney World are also MAGA supporters. Disney joined the wrong politics in a volatile economic environment, which has been costly to them. We enjoyed ourselves. I am glad we made the trip now for the historical value of such a Disney experience in American culture. But given many of the things I observed, it won’t be there forever. It’s failing even worse than I had thought it was.

Rich Hoffman

I Don’t Like “Rich Men North of Richmond”: Crying about how unfair the world is won’t fix it

At first, I thought the Oliver Anthony song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” was interesting.  I watched people rally to him in private concerts with great enthusiasm and was impressed that the song communicated to them in ways that good art does.  Great!  But the looters have climbed on over the last few weeks, especially at Fox News, where they thought they had found that populist connection with their audience again when they played it at their 2nd Place Debate for the under 10% presidential candidates.  And Oliver Anthony was featured on Disney-owned Good Morning America, the Joe Rogan Podcast, and many other outlets.  The world is in shock over this song, which I could call the kind of song that might have been featured on The Dukes of Hazzard years ago.  I liked it, but what was all this shock, and what did I think about it?  I like the young man, Oliver Anthony; it was wise for him to turn down several record labels and do his best to keep his music small and private—authentic.  That is, after all, what people like about it, and the moment he loses that, it’s all over.  Authentic is better than financially successful, I would say in most cases.  But as I heard the song a few times, I felt more like Oliver Anthony was just another slack-jawed hippie singing about how unfair the world is, as is typical in any bar on a Friday night as people ten beers into the evening throw darts and shoot pool drowning in cigarette smoke and cheap cologne laced with sweat, complaining about how corrupt Washington D.C. politicians are.  Complaining about how unfair life is does not solve the problem, and Anthony Oliver has made no claims to being a conservative.  He’s much more of a liberal, so, interestingly, many are accusing him of being an icon of the political right.  I would say, far from it. 

I’m a big tent Republican Party kind of guy, and if people who like Anthony Oliver’s music want to join the fun of a President Trump Republican Party, that’s fine with me.  I might look at their politics while we’re all in that big tent and shake my head.  Very few people are alive on earth as conservative as I am, so I am usually disappointed with people’s politics.  There is nothing new there.  But I am also one of the most tolerant of other people’s opinions.  The key to a future Republican Party is that many people are coming to it.  After the Trump mug shot, many from the “hood” are now converting from Democrats to Republicans, and I’ll happily hold the door open for them as they walk by with marijuana smoke streaming from their mouths, which I find objectionable.  But this is about winning, not so much converting everyone to my version of conservative politics.  There are union members who love Trump, and suddenly, we are all rooting for the same political figure, which is weird.  But it comes with a big tent.  If everyone wants to go camping and talk over the weekend, likely at the end of it, I will convert people over to my way of thinking, so I’m not worried about values.  But first, the right people must be elected to have the debate.  The Republic must survive as something we can all agree on.  So, I welcome all the drunks from the Friday night beer binge as they play Oliver Anthony turned up on their car stereos while driving around with the windows down. 

I’m not with Glenn on this. Don’t be weak in the first place. Life works much better.

The problem with Democrats, or people heading in that direction, is that they are typically victims in life, and victimization is dripping off that “Rich Men North of Richmond” song.  Republicans are can-doers, typically, Democrats are can’t be dones, so they seek the power of government to do what they can’t do for themselves.  So, from the outset, the two sides aren’t even functioning from the same planet, and if we want peace, everyone must at least want to achieve the same things.  And what’s going on with the Oliver Anthony song and the people drawn to it is that it correctly identifies why people feel like victims.  But I would say they don’t need to be victims because they have everything in their power not to be.  The American Constitution limits government power so people don’t have to be victims.  The Rich Men North of Richmond became that way because there were too many people at the bar on Friday drinking too much when they should have been paying attention to what was happening in the world.  The rich, powerful men in Washington became that way, not because they were the best or brightest.  But because, they were the most unethical and willing to take advantage of people who were too lazy to manage their own lives.  So, singing about it or drinking about it doesn’t solve a thing.  And the sad thing about that song is that so many people can identify with it.  They can relate because the music does speak to them.  But in a healthy society, it shouldn’t.  The song’s existence as a work of art is great because it gives us some measure of culture.  But the reality of that culture is pretty pathetic and passive.  It’s not the kind of stuff that inspires greatness. 

I’ve expressed my comments about this song to several people who have instantly taken offense to my opinions, something about me not having compassion for the “down and out,” whatever that means.  For people who have known me for a long time, they know what I’ve been through in life.  It was never an easy road, and I have lost everything many times over.  But there has never been one day where I have not woken up to make that day better than the day before.  I know pain, deep pain.  It’s much worse pain than Oliver Anthony is singing about—life-crushing pain.  But I’ve never felt the way about it as he does, to cry about how unfair it is.  I’ve always been a turn-lemons-to-lemonade person, a positive thinker who can turn even the fires of hell into drinkable ice water.  I’d love more songs like that.  If there were, then we could say those are the ballads of the Republican Party.  But this “Rich Man North of Richmond” is just more people complaining about how unfair the world is without having the courage to do anything about it themselves.  And that’s what makes a great nation.  Not a bunch of crybabies.  But people who can deal with the pain and make something good happen.  I can’t identify with what Oliver Anthony is singing about because I’ve never felt that way.  Not because it’s been an easy life but because I’m not wired that way.  And rather than yield to those emotions, I would say not to cry, don’t drink your problems away on a Friday night listening to that song.  Instead of being sad, read a book, do something constructive, and continually work to improve yourself and the world around you.  And I think the result will be impressive and something you can feel good about.  Complaining does not help.  And Oliver Anthony’s song is all about complaining when everyone should be getting to work to make the world a better place, starting with themselves. 

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Why I Don’t Dance: Of course, there are lots of hostile forces looking for devices of mind control, and music for them is easy

It was one of those weird conversations you have with people who ask unusual questions that do not have usual answers. I was having dinner with some people from the East Coast on the river in Cincinnati, and small talk was the qualifier for many reasons. There was music in the background, which naturally provoked the question of what kind of bands I liked and what music I liked to listen to. And from me, that does not get a usual response to a band listing my favorite music. Most people do have a few musical groups that they enjoy a lot, but I’m not one of them. I have always viewed music as a device for psychological warfare and a fundamental element of mass mind control. And for that reason, it answers the big question, why I never dance to music, anywhere, ever. I do not allow myself to be moved to the beat of music in any way, shape, or form, which is an unusual position to take in any kind of society because music is often seen as a unifier and a bridge builder, which is why it came up in that dinner conversation. I’m not a wet blanket on music when people play it. I don’t point to certain types of music and decry it as “the work of the devil.” But I don’t trust the music to my mind in any way. In a world where many maniacal forces desire the subtle rule of everything, music is an all too tempting playground for the occult to rule in ways they have desired from the beginning of time. Of course, it’s happening now to people in ways they cannot relate to. I only mention it now because I see many people realizing that there is a lot more to the Wizard of Oz of our culture now that the curtain has been pulled back on lots of mass mind control through election fraud, Covid tampering, and politics in general. It’s hard to know who the bad guys are and the good guys are when we see how top-secret documents were handled by the FBI for Trump, for instance, as opposed to Biden. We see there is something wrong that is beyond our grasp, and our trust has been violated, yet we aren’t quite sure how or why. 

If you want to believe that all there is to reality is just the visual spectrum that you can see or the audio waves we can hear, I understand. It’s hard and complicated to reach beyond a human’s perceptual reality and to ask hard questions or not to assume that those who want to rule the world wouldn’t be obsessed with controlling all perceptual reality from the means of strategies that exist outside it. For instance, there is a plant known to the Arabs as the Golden Plant, called Baaras which is supposed to grow on Mount Libanus, underneath the road which leads to Damascus. It flowers in the month of May after the snow melts. At night you can see it with torchlight, but in the day, it’s invisible. Does that mean it doesn’t exist if you cannot see it? Or does it mean you do not have the biological sensitivity range to detect it? I would say that humans have evolved into seeing and hearing what they need to, but there is a lot of outside perceptual reality. All those lifeforms compete for attention in a hostile universe motivated by its transgressions. And that it should never be assumed that reality can be trusted only by what you can see or hear. Many dogs and other animals can see things beyond the hearing range of human beings, and they react to those noises often, barking out the window at what we would call “nothing,” but to them, there is something there. 

What often bothers me about music and those who write music, and knowing something about the entertainment industry over time, and how governments do like to tamper with mass populations, as they were caught doing with Covid and elections, is that drugs often assist songwriters, under the influence, all kinds of elements can be brought into the matter as what is considered an inspiration, but might actually be mind control by hostile forces. How many bands brag about how straight they are while playing music or writing it? Often drugs come into the mix or some other chemical element, and as I have reviewed the matter of Ayahuasca a great deal, I believe those people. I think what they see is not just hallucinations produced by an overly stimulated brain but a glimpse into what we call the spirit world. The correct way to reference it is as “competing” life forms on several dimensional realities. Do we really understand the lyrics to the songs that are sung? There are many references from thoughtful people who look at the concerts of Katy Perry or Madonna, who openly offered free oral sex to anybody who would vote against President Trump, occult references that many suspect point to an Illuminati influence over the music industry. Based on the behavior of most musical artists, people would not be crazy to draw that conclusion. So knowing what we do about corrupt governments and how they would lie to us about Covid, election fraud, and even the importance of classified documents from presidents or former presidents, why wouldn’t we assume that published music released to mass markets isn’t attached to deep occult rituals designed to invoke spirit world help from beyond the grave? And suddenly, innocently, we find ourselves mouthing the words and tapping our feet to a catchy tune that might be trying to invoke some ritualistic menace intent on destroying all humanity. Yet we rationalize it as just “entertainment.”

One of the most ancient conflicts that have been recorded was the one between Yahweh in the Christian Bible and his archrival Baal. Millions and millions of people were killed in this conflict, and it all came down to those who followed the Ten Commandments or worshipped at the altar of Baal. And with all our technology and the noise of modern society, I would say that the point of the noise is to saturate our minds with nonsense so that we don’t pick up on the intent of those who would otherwise call themselves our enemies. The music industry has always been suspected of having motivations beyond just making money. Whether it was playing records backward to detect hidden messages or the ritual nature of mass drug consumption at a rock concert to the beat of seductive music that takes people out of a conscious state of decision-making and makes them artifacts of desire, I think music is a vehicle for mind control by lots of forces, whether they be governments wanting to invoke a compliant sheep-like society, or maniacal demons of the underworld looking to make their mark in the world in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have the power to do, my answer to the music question is that I don’t trust any of it. I don’t think it’s possible just to enjoy entertainment without considering its motivations and the impact on the psychology of the listener. So for all those reasons, and many more just hinted at, I don’t dance to music. Not at weddings. Not at sporting events. Nowhere. When my daughters were married, we did not do the “daddy-daughter” dance because I don’t dance. Anywhere, with anybody, ever. Responding to things, not in your control is not healthy, fun, or smart. 

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Liberalism Behind ‘Avatar Way of Water’: It won’t turn out the way Disney hopes

Usually, the people reading the tea leaves on television and radio get it all wrong because the leaves they are reading aren’t the right ones. I would suggest a different approach: to read the leaves of media currents themselves and to study what the public likes and doesn’t like as a much more accurate measure. And to that effect, much of where the world is going by way of populism, corporate control, and the way many treacherous characters hide their acts of malice behind liberal causes are on a crash course with destiny and collapsed diabolical intent. With that in mind, I’m talking about the new Avatar film, Way of Water, as if the world is being steered back to nature, into some oriental wisdom from the ancient past to reveal to our modern selves how far we have fallen from the tree. Because the tea leaves that Jim Cameron, the director and writer of the film, and the parent company of the new Avatar films, Disney, are reading the tea leaves of a wilted plant from the past that has long died. The world is a much different place from when the first Avatar movie came out, which earned a record-breaking 2 billion dollars at the box office. I was doing some work with Hollywood then, specifically with RealD 3D, so I knew what many producers and distributers wanted to do with 3D to convince movie goers to put their butts in seats instead of staying home watching movies on their magnificent home theater systems. And the first Avatar movie benefited from a good story, a great filmmaker, and outstanding cutting-edge 3D technology. But people at that time were comfortable with their lives; they trusted that America would always be there and that government wasn’t nearly as corrupt as we know it to be now. And the World Economic Forum was something that nobody knew much of anything about. People lived their lives and were open to strange ideas about environmentalism because there was room in a comfortable life to accept such ideas, so long as they could go home in their gas-powered car and had a full bank account. Church on Sunday put their minds to ease about what would happen tomorrow. 

It will be interesting to watch how audiences accept this new Avatar movie, released over a decade after the first. Disney hopes it will make a lot of money like the first, but I think it will be far short of the original. As will the subsequent films that are already planned will be. People will go see the movie for the same reason they are waiting in line for more than two hours to ride the magnificent ride at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom because they want to step out of their lives and into a unique experience. The Avatar ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida is one of the most outstanding technical achievements I have ever seen for human imagination. The whole Avatar land there is a monument to what the human imagination can produce, and I think it’s great. But, the cat is out of the bag now on Disney and Jim Cameron, who are both much more liberal than they used to be, and the country of America isn’t that liberal. The Desecrators of Davos “back to nature” message is not the priority for the people living in the world. With an overt message of environmentalism versus technical achievement, humans tend to cheer on the products of their minds, not the pagan superstitions of the past, which is the true intent of liberalism and its desire to reset the Vico Cycle into anarchy and back to a theocracy where nature is worshipped as the modern Earth Goddess. The first Avatar walked a very fine line between overt lectures about the terrors of corporate greed and the majesty of nature’s wisdom. And that redeeming message is the heart of the Desecrators of Davos plan to unite all the corporations of the world behind their pagan religions and to drag everyone in the world who uses those products with them to the Liberal World Order priorities for existence. 

It’s not that the new Avatar film The Way of Water will be boring. I’m sure that after ten years of making the movie, Jim Cameron has done some great things in film. But the message itself, this Dances with Wolves in space concept of rejecting technology for the idea that we are all cells within the body of something greater than ourselves, is a political message that people don’t want to hear. It’s been crammed down their throats for a long time now. Since the first Avatar movie in 2009, we’ve been through the Obama presidency and all the terrible things that happened as a result. That led people to vote for Trump in 2016. And when the great America that came from the Trump administration was taken from people in 2020, the Desecrators of Davos through their election tampering, especially with Facebook, they gave us Joe Biden, an embarrassment who has declared war on fossil fuels and represents the forces which essentially want to create Pandora, the land from the Avatar films, here on earth and as a political platform. Through public relations trickery, they can attempt to show that elections are close in America, just as in other places worldwide, such as Brazil. But in reality, people do not vote against their best interests, and this evidence shows in other aspects of our culture the kind of things people choose to be entertained by.

And that’s ultimately the problem with the new Avatar films; they are essentially the Biden political platform, the new religion of the globalists around the world of earth worship, presented as entertainment behind top-level special effects and all the magic a movie theater experience can provide. There are movies scheduled all the way through Avatar 5 that I think are getting way out over their skis. If they were just entertainment, people might enjoy them. But if you have read Klaus Schwab’s books from the World Economic Forum, you would see that Avatar and Disney’s production of them is essentially the world they want to get to hear on earth; it’s a political platform and their goals for the transformation of the world. They want us all to strip down naked, make love to our animal powers, get right with nature, and bend to its will, like the characters in Avatar do. And because of that, I think people will reject the films aside from their initial spectacle and the lack of anything else to see at a movie theater. I predict that all the hard work that Jim Cameron has put into these films will ultimately be lost on a public that is sick of the politics of liberalism being pushed into their lives from every direction, especially in their entertainment. And the results will be embarrassing for Disney and Cameron in the end. It is one thing to visit the Avatar World at Animal Kingdom and to marvel at the technical achievements that essentially attempt to make a primitive life great again in the minds of the Desecrators of Davos. But when you get tired of it, you can go back to your nice hotel, get a nice meal, sit by a very modern pool, and enjoy the world of technology and business with all the audacity that American capitalism can provide. But the point of the Avatar films, and the liberalism behind them, is to get rid of that comfort and to return mankind to a primitive state, so there is nowhere else to go. And people don’t like that message at all, and it will show in the box office results and, ultimately, Disney’s stock.   

Rich Hoffman

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No, It’s Not Time to Move On from Trump: Nobody has unified American politics more, and that’s why “they” hate him so much

To make something very clear, I have heard from numerous Republicans on the matter, many of whom I respect a lot, that it is time to move on from Trump and start getting behind someone like DeSantis for 2024. They reason that Trump is in the news every day and that he is a distraction from the politics at hand. If we moved away from Trump, we could move away from all the negative news coverage but still get a good executive in the White House who gets it. After all, sending illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard was a good, bold move to protest the open border policies of the Chinese-bought Biden administration. It was a very Trump-like thing to do. Yet, DeSantis doesn’t come with all the negative daily news splashes, especially with the DOJ pressing down to abuse their authority and indict Trump on fake charges of anything just to keep him from running again in 2024. All this is a distraction dividing the country in painful ways, and many Republicans just want it all to stop. They hope that if they sacrifice Trump to the media gods that perhaps they will then leave DeSantis alone, or whoever fills in that massive political void of the “Trump” character, and we can all live happily ever after again. I’ll remind people that I warned about how things would be going into the Midterms. The Democrats have lied, cheated, and stolen power because they desire to abuse that power for power’s sake, and they won’t give it up easily. They have created an FBI in the intelligence community, a vital arm of the Liberal World Order, and they are playing for blood. And their constant attacks on Trump are to protect their long-established plans for destroying American sovereignty and to redistribute everything into the United Nations-controlled New World Order. If you think you have seen bad now, wait until the oil from the strategic oil reserves is gone. They are being depleted as we speak, and the lower gas prices are meant to borrow time until after the Midterms to trick voters into voting for some Democrats. 

And what they fear most is the kind of influence that Trump recently had over the Pennsylvania rally, then the Ohio event to pump up J.D. Vance. I have watched a lot of Trump rallies, and his event in Pennsylvania was undoubtedly one of his best. Very few people in the world could do what Trump has done, to become independently wealthy with a family business, not connected to all kinds of shady characters around the world. Or a personality who has dominated the media in the way Trump has over the years, writing so many best-selling books, creating top-rated television shows, and having a social persona that is so magnetic that people will show up to hear him speak without a rock band to accompany him. People show up at these rallies to repeatedly listen to the same speech, and they wait many hours beforehand just to see him. No other political figures can do that anywhere in the world. And here we have this magnificent person at the height of his powers who wants to apply them to the Republican Party. I’m all for that and happy to have Trump on the team. But then, what Trump has now mastered late in life is the art of public speaking, the ability to stand in front of a crowd for two hours and talk, talk, talk in such entertaining ways that people never want it to end. The people who are after Trump are terrified of these relationships that Trump has with the public. They know the truth about the 2020 election. They know what they did to conceal the steal sponsored by the American intelligence agencies to remove an elected president from power. Their actions tell us everything we need to know about who was guilty of the biggest crime in human history. Instead of physically killing Trump, as they might have done with Kennedy or some other obstinate political figure, they are attempting to create a police state like they have in different places and sell it to the public by destroying Trump with it. They hope that it will stick with our culture in the aftermath. 

What Trump has done that is the most valuable attribute is that he has truly unified the country in ways nobody realized beforehand that it could be. Trump was a former Democrat, as were Dr. Oz, Keri Lake, and several other characters who the MAGA movement has now inspired. Suppose you look at all the kinds of people who are getting elected into MAGA roles. In that case, whether it be for a senate seat, a congressional seat, or a governor, there are more women, more people of color, and more people from other nationalities who are becoming part of the MAGA movement that no longer are the stuffy white guy executive who doesn’t hire women attributable to the Republican Party. Trump has created the most diverse party to ever represent people politically in world history. That is precisely why the established order hates him so much and dedicates so much of its time trying to destroy him. Their only defense is to make so much noise about Trump that perhaps people might abandon him just for the possibility of peace. That is the nature of war, to wear out your opponent and to secure a victory. And for many Republicans, the constant barrage from the media and the intelligence community has made them want to surrender to those forces. 

But Trump isn’t done politically yet. There is a lot more that needs to be done, but we clearly are not the same world as we were in 2015 when Trump and his wife came down the escalator in Trump Tower for their big announcement speech. All these elements were there, but we didn’t talk about them. We thought everything politically was on the up and up; we didn’t know how radical the FBI was in favor of Democrats, and we didn’t realize just how complicit the media was with the Liberal World Order. And we might have suspected election fraud at times. Still, we had no clue that so many forces had their hands in our cookie jar and were openly conspiring to put one political party in power in America for their own benefit and how much they wanted to destroy the other. They were the creators of the “uniparty,” a mixture of Republicans and Democrats who get very rich while in office as a kind of payoff to create legislation that harms America and redistributes our wealth to other countries in the name of globalism. Politicians like Mitch McConnell, for example. But Trump even made “China Mitch” a good guy by holding firm to get a good Supreme Court. When it comes to Trump, there are many great things to consider. But most of all is, the reason they attack him so viciously, and that is because they have nothing else. Through their hatred, we have learned much about our election system’s political forces. And it might be ugly, but it always was.   Yet now we can identify it; we have seen it attempt to defend itself. And the failures of the Liberal World Order are currently on the ballot in ways they never intended, and it’s because of Trump and the pressure he brings that has revealed it so spectacularly, perhaps for the first time ever.

Rich Hoffman

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What ‘Bob’s Burgers’ says about American Society: What people will do to have a good family

At face value, it would be one of those strange mysteries. But when you dig into the issue a bit, it makes a lot of sense and says a lot about what kind of society we really are as Americans. I’ll admit, I was perplexed as to why any studio would produce a Bob’s Burgers theatrical release. With so many streaming services that are out there these days, why would anybody make a movie of the somewhat popular cartoon on Fox called Bob’s Burgers, which is a version of the typical animated formula that they have made so popular over the years with other offerings like The Simpsons, and Family Guy? I’m not too fond of Bob on Bob’s Burgers; I think of him as a loser. He’s not very ambitious; as a dad, he’s perpetually broke. He runs a little New England burger place in a resort town, and he can barely rub two pennies together.

Most of the episodes are about the problems they have as a family because they never have enough money to do things. And of course, my famous saying to people complaining about not having enough money is just to work and make more. Especially in America, if you want money, you can have it. You may not make all the money you want in 8 hours of work. Forty hours a week may not be enough; you might have to work 80. When I was raising a family, I have told the stories of only having one car, and I rode a bicycle 25 miles a day, so my wife could have the car for the kids and worked two full-time jobs to make the money we needed as a family. So, I can’t relate to Bob in Bob’s Burgers, and I find it odd that young people like the show so much. But, apparently, they do. Enough so that they made a theatrical movie release this year as something they thought was justifiable. 

I also had a unique experience while attending various comic cons with my daughter, an outstanding illustrator who does exhibitions of her work at those types of events. As I have said, it’s interesting to watch people cosplay at comic cons, the kind of outfits they want to dress up in, and invest so much of their time to bring characters they enjoy to life in some way. I can understand the various Star Wars characters and those from the Marvel movies. Those are action movies that make you feel good when leaving the movie theater in some way, so it makes sense that people would want to dress up as those characters during Halloween and at comic cons. Bringing fantasy to life is a specific function of the human imagination, a conceptual vehicle that expresses inner values that manifest in mythological impressions during social exchanges. Dressing up as a favorite character is a way to vote for the kind of values that you see in pop culture. Imitation is the ultimate compliment. But while I was at these events, I was just a little shocked to see young people dressing up as characters from Bob’s Burgers, which is hard because they are all cartoons. It’s not easy to bring a cartoon character to life, yet people did, and some were really good costumes. Why? I’ve watched many episodes of Bob’s Burgers, and I just don’t enjoy the show that much. For me, it’s often filler in the background while I’m doing five or six other things. I occasionally watch it because I like the colors of cartoons. But I can’t relate to the characters much at all. 

Oddly enough, my wife likes Bob’s Burgers a lot. I’d say it’s her favorite show, so this problem has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Yet, in working to understand the current political sentiment of our mass society, I felt something was going on with Bob’s Burgers that was worth noticing, significantly if film executives believed that a theatrical release of a subpar cartoon series on Fox justified its own movie. So the one thing that really jumps out about Bob’s Burgers that is likable is that all the family members like each other. Bob, his wife, and his three children all live in a little dump of an apartment, yet they don’t act like a bunch of losers who are waiting in line with a bottle of booze to buy lottery tickets. They work hard for the money they make and love each other as a family while running the family burger business. Bob is always a few cents short of whatever the family needs, but his wife never talks about leaving him for a better life with a more ambitious lover. The kids are just happy to have mom and dad together in the house. The brothers and sisters aren’t out to kill each other; they go on many neighborhood adventures and solve problems like rational people. They are a very “traditional” family. 

And that’s what it is with Bob’s Burgers; like many of the other Fox primetime cartoons, they all have in common a mom and a dad in the home who love each other. That is certainly the case with Family Guy, a very progressive show that features a family that stays together. There aren’t step-parents and step-children in these cartoons. They are all very traditional. Other animated shows have tried to make it with more progressive storylines, but they always fail. The ones that stick around over the years are the cartoons that feature traditional family settings. The Simpsons have been on for decades now, a very long time. And yet, with many hundreds of storylines, Homer and his wife Marge still love each other and work through marital problems together in a way that never ends in divorce or a family breakup.   And that was the key to this Bob’s Burgers mystery. Here was a family on an animated show with many problems, and they seemed limited in their ability to solve those problems. But, they enjoy each other as a family. You don’t see Bob running around on the town to cheat on his wife. Or running away from the attention that the kids obviously want from him. He’s a good dad, even if he’s unambitious socially. And his family loves him for it. Obviously, the audiences who can’t say the same about their own families have found a reliable father figure in Bob’s Burgers. In Bob’s Burgers, they see the family they always wanted and never had in the fictional settings. And it has such an impact on them that they even dress up as the characters in cosplay. It says a lot about the true state of our society when those types of fictional stories indicate what people really feel inside. Their vote for the type of entertainment they wish to enjoy says what all people really crave outside of political theater. Most people would give up a lot to have a family like Bob’s Burgers, where at least mom and dad loved each other, and their siblings worked together to help make the family a family. In a world full of disappointments, at least Bob and his animated television family were willing to fight through disappointments for the key ingredient to all happy societies, a good family that might not have a lot of money, but at least they had what all humans crave, a genuine love for each other. And that is worth noting and something that should give us all hope for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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Why The New ‘Top Gun’ is So Popular: Americans like rule-breakers, not conformists

It is funny to hear industry analysts trying to figure out why the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is doing so well going into its third weekend. I’ve listened to and read several hundred reviews of the film at this point. Unlike other kinds of movies, I have not yet found anybody who understands why the American market is flocking to see it many times now. Is it patriotism and the lack of wokeness that is in the movie? Or is it Tom Cruise himself, which many in the trades would like to think is the case? Well, Tom Cruise was smart to make Top Gun the way it needed to be, especially coming out of the Covid years. The film was done well before there was ever a pandemic, and Paramount sat on it for several years because of the uncertainty of the future of Hollywood, Top Gun: Maverick has the feel of a movie made in a different time and a different country, all the way back to 2019. I remember being on an airplane flying out of Orlando and watching Comic-Con footage of the movie for a 2020 summer release, so it’s been out there for a long time. But the film was released during a market recovery in a post-Covid world, and all kinds of forces were at play that inspired Americans to return to the movie theaters to see a movie worth leaving the house to view. Yet, there is an element to Top Gun that is very much reminiscent of the 80s when Tom Cruise was making so many blockbuster films, along with other movie stars, that say more about Americans to the world than anybody has seen in a while. It is that element that was on raw display in the new movie and is why the film is doing well without the rest of the world driving a majority of the box office numbers, specifically the Chinese market. 

The character of Maverick is a rule-breaker, and that is a trait that Americans love. They don’t like someone who follows the rules to the letter. Americans want out-of-the-box characters who will bend or break the rules to accomplish something great in the world, even down to the name of the Tom Cruise character. Tom Cruise himself is not like Maverick. But he was wise to play a character like Maverick and let all the elements of a rebel within the military shine in many reckless ways. Just the name of the character, Maverick, indicates a loner, a rugged individualist, someone who goes their own way in life. And that is not how the rest of the world is. Only American cultures celebrate such traits. The stories other cultures put on the silver screen are conflicts with conformity as opposed to what we see in Top Gun, a character so reckless that he costs the military hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just this one movie. Maverick crashes two very expensive aircraft and puts at risk many more in his exploits of individualism that are often audacious, unapologetic, and way over the top. In most cultures, Maverick would be in jail. But in America, he is considered the top navy pilot that the military has, and audiences love it.

Literally, in the movie, all the people who have trouble are those who follow the rules. There is a scene where all the best pilots are in a bar talking about the upcoming mission, and they wonder who will be able to teach them anything. And of course, it is Maverick who has been picked to lead the mission because for it to be successful, it will require someone willing to break all the rules and discover what nobody yet knows. There is a scene where Tom Cruise playing Maverick, stands in front of a giant American flag and tells his students to throw out the rule book because it’s what your enemy knows. To succeed in this movie, the characters must learn to “not think” and act on “instinct.” It’s really the message of the first Star Wars movie from way back in 1977 and is a yearning that most people often experience in their lives. The desire to be their own authentic person and not some caricature of social order. The only way a mission like the one featured in Top Gun: Maverick can be accomplished is by breaking all the rules because the enemy is stuck in rules and is their ultimate weakness. It’s not the military jets, the companionship, or even the music that makes people love movies like this one. They help sell the story, but the essence is that Americans love rule breakers. So does the rest of the world, but they can only experience such things in American movies, and that is precisely why all these woke politics have infected the industry to the extent they have. For the producers of Top Gun to turn loose a character like Maverick again into the movie business was a very deliberate act, and the results are apparent. 

In much the same way that ESG scores are failing the financial industry because the world does not value those measures, they have been artificially created to inspire liberal political change to a climate change fanatical religion. Real value is what people are encouraged to see in the movies, not just in the act of buying popcorn actually to see a movie just because it’s there. It’s what the story tells that matters to people, and in Top Gun, it’s about recklessness over logic. It’s about breaking the rules in a rigid military environment to do what the military itself can’t do. It’s thinking out of the box to solve the problems society at large gets stuck on. And that’s why this movie Top Gun: Maverick is doing such good business while other movies come and go, and people forget about them five minutes later. So there is much more going on with this new Top Gun movie than just great music, interesting visual effects, and a vintage throwback to the kind of movies made in America during the 80s. Americans love rule breakers, before and after Covid. Covid was everything that Americans didn’t want to be. They gave authority a chance in case it saved lives, but knowing what we do now in hindsight, they would never do it again. Instead, millions of Maverick types sit in a darkened theater cheering on the new Top Gun because they see themselves in the character. And they want characters like that to succeed, to win at all costs. That’s the American way of doing things, and the rest of the world is fascinated by it. Even though they can’t relate, they will still buy a movie ticket to see it in the fictional character of Tom Cruise’s Maverick. For them, it’s the closest thing they will ever get to a society that thumbs its nose at procedures and conformity and embraces adventure and the treasures found in recklessness. And like all great movies, because Maverick was so reckless, so brash, and such a rule-breaker, he saves society in the process, which says more about us all than any other measure of human achievement.

Rich Hoffman

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