Tag: Hollywood insight

Corporations are Great: Star Wars, Disney and all the great things that come from making money

I personally love corporations, even though most of them function as socialist organizations. And it is difficult for a company like Disney to be creative as a result, as opposed to the early days when Walt Disney guided a much more capitalist enterprise. All large corporations have the same trouble when they become more socialist than capitalist for a lot of reasons which I am covering in my upcoming book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. But I couldn’t help but notice that the Star Wars problem and overall fan reaction to the new Black Spire Outpost in Disney World has an anti-corporation bias which goes completely against the nature of what many Star Wars fans stand for. Reading recently the Black Spire Outpost novel about the new Star Wars land the situation was obvious for which we see muddled in most of our understandings of corporate culture and everyone gets it wrong.

In the new version of Star Wars, the post Disney purchase, which I think they have gotten wrong, but more because of their own cultural limits than out of maliciousness the various factions of population are the Resistance, which many liberals directly attribute to our contemporary president of Donald Trump. The First Order, which is an authoritarian regime of micro controlling government which Tea Party types would associate with the Progressive Movement. Then there are the scum and villainy—the smugglers and bounty hunters who live outside the law always running from the law as space bound pirates roaming about freely, but often without a sense of family or home. I personally relate to this last faction, but in all three I see a kind of infantile understanding of human existence, however compared to other art forms, its much more sophisticated than any other entertainment option. For instance, I think the prequal films, especially Revenge of the Sith is a very sophisticated examination into how government can be a good entity one day, then the enemy of the people on the very next.

The problem Disney has is that they try to appeal to all the leftist types, the transgenders, the feminists, the socialist Democrats which all corporations can relate to, so to disguise their need to make money—which is the goal of all corporations. The problem is the dysfunctional relationship that corporations have with appeasement politics so that they can earn the right to do what they do, and that is to be a profit driven enterprise. The Disney problem with Star Wars is the same one that George Lucas could never deal with, that was to use the great money generated off of Star Wars and its merchandise to continue expanding the ability to create great mythology, because it takes money to tell these stories. So there is nothing shameful about turning a profit even though Disney and now Star Wars seems ashamed of it.

Out of those three factions the stories never deal with people’s need to make a living. The members of the Resistance don’t have jobs, they are given shelter and camaraderie for their efforts in fighting for the cause, but they aren’t out building families, buying starships or buying property. And that is the same for the First Order and the Empire that came before them. The members of the order are corporate in their design, but the individuals aren’t interested in buying houses and using their finances to gain prestige in the greater society. It is among the bounty hunters and smugglers that we can most relate because they are concerned about personal gain, which says a lot about a science fiction story because at least there is room for such contemplations.

In that way the Black Spire Outpost built by Disney is unique because the Resistance and First Order are present, but the town belongs to the pirates, criminals and smugglers who really make that galaxy an interesting place to visit. That’s interesting because even as a massive corporation who is out to make a lot of profit, and deserve to, Disney understands that at the heart of Star Wars is the every day people just trying to make a few bucks so they can live in the universe and if that is the baseline of understanding, then we can all build off it toward a mythic masterpiece that can mean a great deal to the customers.

In the book The Black Spire Outpost I enjoyed the corporate namedropping of all the things that can be done in the actual Disney Park, the names of the drinks you could buy in the cantina, the clothes and other souvenirs. There is nothing wrong with Disney selling merchandise and wanting to make money. The problem is, Disney has allowed for their own shaming by trying to appeal to leftist anti-capitalist groups to prove that they aren’t bad people, like many corporations are pushed into liberal causes to show that they aren’t big mean capitalists. However at the heart of what consumers want is those very traits and if the bottom line is so important, then Disney and all corporations should embrace capitalism publicly, and not hide their real desires behind masks of socialism. Its OK to want to make a profit and people don’t mind paying. But where the fears of corporate Disney ruining Star Wars reside is the real fear is in losing what the stories really meant to people. Nobody is interested in a bunch of altruistic self sacrificers. They want characters who are driven by the same needs they are in real life.

Only Disney and the incredible amount of money they can make could have built something like a real Black Spire Outpost and if it wasn’t profitable, they couldn’t do it. So for the benefit of everyone, we all need to drop the socialist perspective, which the Resistance certain is and the First Order and just admit that Star Wars as a property is all about making money then reinvesting that money into something good, like expanding the myth. Disney shouldn’t be shy about that and neither should their fans. I was talking to a person the other day who spent $800 in the Oga’s Cantina, which I understand completely. I mean where else could you sit down and have some exotic drinks to play Sabacc with the Millennium Falcon parked right outside? It takes money to build all that stuff and to maintain that reality to enjoy leisurely. If not for all the money that the Disney corporation has made, nothing at the Black Spire would be possible.

Corporations are not evil, making money is not wrong. But trying to adopt socialist ideas in the products that the corporation produces is bad because its not honest. And that’s when Disney gets scrutinized by its own fan base who have been told that the Resistance is all about being altruistic yet the company itself wants to make all the money it can. Well, yes, of course they are. We have allowed our society to criticize the very thing we enjoy most, we like to make money and we like to see companies become wealthy so they can create things we ultimately enjoy. The ideas of the Resistance and the First Order are not completely fleshed out ideas, but in the aspects of Star Wars that has received some of the best attention are the parts that involve the them of the Black Spire Outpost and that is a good sign for the future not just of Star Wars and Disney, but for corporations in general.

Rich Hoffman
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Monroe Schools Plays it Safe: One of the many reasons that Julie Shaffer has to go

I was very happy to learn that James Hahn, who is running for the Lakota school board is aligned with the Trump plan to allow concealed carry in the Lakota school district to stop potential threats to children at the point of danger. Lynda O’Connor is as well. If people who normally don’t vote in Lakota oriented elections within Butler County actually showed up to vote this November, there is the potential that this important program could be enacted at Lakota. However, as long as Julie Shaffer sits on the board, inaction and liberal policy making will continue, dangerously well into the future. Lakota like most districts without such a concealed carry policy will remain victims, and as the Monroe school system reminded us this past week, the danger is ever present.

Of course, the alternative to under preparation for moment to moment dangers is over reaction, and to their credit, Monroe schools in southwest Ohio has been very aggressive in monitoring social media accounts and cracking down on every little threat, which the Wednesday alarm turned out to be this past week. The alarm was real, but the threat wasn’t credible. Better to be safe than sorry. Yet a few years ago Monroe schools was accused of going to far digging into the text messages between students which led to the police isolating a young man and making an example out of him for a very minor commentary on his cell phone. For that the kid was suspended and had his cell phone confiscated by the police and was isolated within the student population for “security.” Better to ruin the reputation of one kid than to have a bunch of dead kids due to a rash of violence would be the reasoning. But that is what state controlled security looks like, they are watching everything we do even outside of the classroom, because that is where the roots of threats start and must be detected.

As all trained shooters know however is that the best way to deal with violence isn’t in suspending the liberty of all your students or voters, but in dealing with the problem when it occurs. Just doing the little things right, such as diligence on security check ins, following up on rumors with logic, and carrying guns for when and if a threat emerges so that it can be dealt with right then and there, not five to ten minutes later once the police arrive. That is after all the reason that our Constitution promotes private people carrying guns, so that the other aspects of the Constitution can be protected, such as unlawful searches and seizures.

Given the Monroe approach, which is keeping threats off the radar, but it’s always running all over privacy rights all in the name of safety, and that is the problem. Is that really what we want to teach our children, that their rights can be always superseded by the state need to protect them, when in fact they have a right and obligation to protect themselves? Of course, I would say not but this is a question for the general population. For most people safety is the limit of their concern, all they care about is whether or not their kids come home from school, and shallow thinking politicians will be happy to give them the minimum of their concern requirements. But at a cost, philosophically, and legally. Should the state take responsibility for safety or is it the task of each and every individual. Leave the math, the reading, and the history to the schools, but for the parents and school administrators, its their job to make sure things remain safe.

I’ve debated Julie Shaffer on WLW radio before, and in other forums and let me just say as politely as possible, that type of deep dive conversation is not within her intellect. She’s a pretty shallow stream, not very deep. For her, so long as Lakota, or any school system prevents mass shootings by intruding on the rights of the students and their parents, she’s fine with that, even if it does push kids into accepting that everything they do in life can fall under the purview of the state all in the name of safety and security. So long as something can be deemed “safe,” people like Shaffer can justify personal intrusion of the students. That is why she led the school board at Lakota to a stall out on the Trump initiative to arm teachers in the schools with concealed carry hoping to run out the clock on the inevitable act of violence that any district with 16,000 kids might embark on. Its safer to turn the responsibility over to the state and throw the rights of the students out the window. And when they grow up, they will then vote for the same policies because its all they know.

Lucky at Monroe this past week the threat wasn’t credible. But one of these days it will be, whether its there, or at Lakota, or some other big-name school in the famous southern Ohio districts outside of the I-275 loop. Its easier for shallow school board members to kick the can down the road and let someone else solve that problem for them even if it does step all over individual rights—because on the political left, that is the agenda anyway. At Lakota presently three of the five school board members are what we’d consider liberal, while the other two trends toward conservative. If James Hahn could find the votes from a sleepy public, that ratio could be turned around and this whole concept of safety and philosophy would have a chance to be heard. But not until a major change occurs.

Monroe, which is right next to Lakota as far as districts go has shown the trend of the future, monitor everything and at the slightest provocation, over-react. Play the better safe than sorry angle and hope you get to the bad guys before the bad guys get to you. But in the process, lots of innocent people are being scrutinized in ways that would have sent shudders up our spines just a few decades ago where nobody would ever think that such a day of personal intrusion would ever be acceptable. Just think of two more decades into the future where these kids will be running things, and what they will be willing to justify all in the name of safety.

Of course, the cause of the tendency toward violence is very much a current debate. I would say that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Fatherless homes, failures of state care, a lack of personal responsibility where everyone gets a trophy, the legalization of marijuana, the over medication of depression medicine, the failure of religion, all just to name a few are contributing to the concept of violence against classmates that certainly wasn’t a consideration when I was in school. I would place the blame squarely at the feet of liberalism, which most of these school boards are functioning from, so we are mathematically inclined to get more of the bad behavior not less. That means we need to get our approach to this crisis faster than we are now. Kicking the can down the road doesn’t work when you run out of road, and I would say that’s where we find ourselves presently. And the demanded action will require more than a letter sent home to parents.

Rich Hoffman
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Why Government Health Care is Bad: Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay $572 Million to fight opioids in Oklahoma

There are many more lawsuits ahead for Johnson & Johnson, one particular in Ohio coming in October that will likely end the same way as the one in Oklahoma did which granted $572 million in damages to help the state pay for its opioid crises. Of course, Johnson & Johnson will appeal and will try to settle out of court as many cases as they can. But what cannot be appealed or staved off in any way is the cause of the opioid crises itself, which is essentially the entire medical industry from the local doctor and pharmacy to the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies that thrive of death and pain. Now that there is a roadmap to prosecute a company like Johnson & Johnson for their role and marketing dangerous pain killers to the public, then neglecting to mention the terrible side effects just so they could sell mass quantities of the drugs, many more states will start to get similar judgements and if the high courts grant payment and reject the appeals, then many of these big companies are done for. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

This is the big problem when government and corporations get together against the public good and don’t allow capitalist competition to rule the day. People must understand that the argument over health care isn’t to make people better, it’s to fight over who will get paid off of people’s pain. When there is profit in pain, this is the kind of effect everyone can expect. The solution of course to medical insurance is to have less people sick, for our medical system to repair people, not to prolong their death just so that they can be prescribed medicine to ease their pain. At the heart of the opioid crises is a problem that is the foundation of our entire civilization, are we going to go forward and evolve or will we just decline into dust and be one silly little page in history. The crux of the debate is upon us and it is the result of this latest drug company lawsuit.

Unfortunately, while many of us crave personal freedom about what television shows we want to watch, what cars we drive, who we marry, what schools we go to, what we like to eat on a Friday night, we surrender our lives to doctors almost entirely. We assume they know best because we were taught in school that they did, and we take their advice on everything, how to live our lives, whether or not we can work or be on disability, or what drugs we will put into our bodies which could change everything about us. As a matter of fact, every mass shooter recently had one thing in common besides broken homes, they all were on anti-depressant medicine—which of course taken with marijuana and alcohol can have devastating effects on sanity. But doctors enjoy the free vacations to Hawaii and other exotic places because their name appears as drug dealers from the local Walgreens and they get rewarded for writing the prescriptions. And so long as the trust in doctors is there and they desire to profit off the sick, we will always have this problem.

Personally, I avoid any kind of drug, even when I’m sick. The desire to alleviate pain is to attempt to shut out part of living. If something is painful it needs to be fixed and if you just numb the pain, you will never fix the problem. The purpose of pain is to solve it, not to suppress it. Instead of an insurance industry that pays for all these drugs to suppress pain, our focus should be to get people healthy to the point where they don’t have pain because they aren’t sick. But the massive imprint of the big pharms that drive up the cost of insurance and medical care in general is far too great and the only way to get out from under them is to essentially put them out of business in the way that Oklahoma and Ohio are striving to do. The amount of money at stake in the medical industry is staggering, to the point where $572 million is really just a small fee to pay. Johnson & Johnson would rather not pay it, but that alone isn’t enough to alter their operations. And there are far too many politicians who, like the doctors that prescribe the medicine, profit off of people’s pain.

For all the same reasons that there are political factions who are against President Trump’s attempts to make friends with North Korea or Iran, and to fight China with trade wars, that is because those factions represent those who profit off the suffering caused by the conflict. You don’t have to look very hard to see that dear reader. It’s as obvious as a sunrise in a cloudless, desert sky. The opioid crises was caused for all the same reasons, because there is profit in pain and death, and short term, small minded people would gladly trade in their immortality for a beach house in Florida for twenty years of their gradually diseased life. There is no Republican health care plan that could be unleashed so long as this is the state of the medical industry, to profit off of pain and to drag out the effects of death to give pharmaceuticals a market longer into the lifespan of the average person. It’s not the quality of life that health insurance is seeking to cover, it’s to maintain dependency so the drug companies can flourish, which is why they support politicians who argue for universal health care.

Human beings are just biological machines, there is nothing about them that cannot be fixed or maintained at a certain healthy level. If they were healthy once, they could be healthy again. But our medical industry is not interested in healthy people who do not need them. They need the sick, and ever dying. It is a short-sighted profit path for the partnership between government and corporations and has nothing to do with capitalism. The entire system plays to the worst of human nature, to remain short sighted, and to avoid pain suppressing problems instead of solving them.

If Trump had not been elected president these fights wouldn’t be happening. It is in the lack of a government health care solution that there are any signs in any courts to even consider taking on big pharma, because the lobby money is lucrative. But Trump has changed politics and politicians are seeing the benefits of the long view as opposed to the short and science is finally starting to put courage in the minds of the sick. More and more people are realizing that they don’t have to listen to their doctor, that maybe if they stay healthy, that they can avoid the doctor all together. And when that happens a real freedom can be realized that most people never thought possible. But to have it they can’t be on drugs and under the influence of a medical system that wants to ride them, not to set them free. When we talk about government health care what we are talking about is prolonging this problem and when we talk about suing big pharma, we are actually seeking to free ourselves from their influence. And that is a great thing that couldn’t come fast enough. Then once it does, we can really get started as a species because if there is anything that is truly holding us all back it’s the nonsense about life and death and sickness and health. We can do better and if big pharma goes down, we can have something much, much better.

Rich Hoffman

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D23 and Star Wars: Liberal ideas are rejected everywhere, especially in a galaxy far, far away

It’s important because it involves so many parts of our culture, but as I occasionally do write about Star Wars it is interesting to watch as how its meaning has changed for people over time. Personally, when people ask me how I’m able to do so much on such a range of things, it’s because I use mythology to grasp concepts so that there is room for ideas to be conceived and to grow. I would compare it to a bowl to hold something like popcorn in, the bigger the bowl, the more ideas you can hold. Mythology is how the human race holds ideas that it can then grasp and work with, and the bigger the ideas, the better functioning the society. In a lot of ways young people have more than ever lots of vehicles to invest ideas into, not just the movies that we all grew up on, but video games, a lot of literature, and all the streaming services that are available such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. And to make those streaming services flourish there has to be a lot of content and Hollywood, as I have been saying for years, is struggling to produce. We live in one of the most creative times in human history, but we have more than ever also witnessed how liberalism in general in a culture of mass competition for ideas shows the trends of society and nothing more vividly displays that trend like Star Wars, because it is at least a cultural measure that everyone can pretty much agree is a standard mythology of our culture. Not everyone likes it, but it manages to touch most people in some way or another making a great platform for analysis.

So to catch everyone up on where Star Wars is, there is a movie coming out this December, it’s the last film of the nine part series that has been going on for 40 years. It’s an important key to whether or not Star Wars survives into the future because as of now, it only has nostalgic value. Young people don’t necessarily like it on its own, its more something that they can share with their parents and grandparents, so the brand is struggling. Watching all the D23 news from Disney over this past weekend there is a lot to look forward to from arguably the largest media company in the world. But the evidence that as a very progressive company that has lost their way into making new and fresh ideas is obvious. Disney as a company is living off their legacy properties and what they’ve done many years ago, not what they have been able to do lately. With the exception of the Marvel movies, there hasn’t been anything fresh from Disney for years as they have taken for granted that people will buy into their products even though they are spewing with progressive political causes, such as race diversity, sex issues such as feminism, and elements of gay rights that most people just aren’t comfortable with. Disney as a company has tried to hide their massive appetite for capitalism behind progressive causes and it has hurt them tremendously—because they weren’t honest about it. They would have been better off to proclaim that they are happy to make money and not ashamed of it one bit instead of trying to sell themselves off as progressive activists laboring for every liberal cause known to mankind. Not so much at the stock exchange rate yet, but that is coming just as I stated years ago after the first new age Star Wars film came out, that Disney has really screwed up the multi billion dollar franchise leaving them desperate to fix it, which is what they are promising to do on several fronts starting with the new film coming out this December in addition to several live action television shows coming to their new streaming service, such as The Mandalorian, and a new show just about Obi-Wan Kenobi played by Ewen McGregor which fans have wanted for over 20 years.

Star Wars, especially the best parts of it such as the cantina scenes where Obi-Wan cuts off the arm of an assailant in A New Hope, then shortly thereafter Han Solo kills the bounty hunter Greedo in a blaze of gun fire, these modern progressive filmmakers thought that what they had made with Star Wars could be that bowl I was talking about that could hold lots of ideas including copious amounts of progressive sentiment. Even with the billions of dollars that Disney has put into Star Wars the fans have responded flat which was most notable with the most recent Star Wars movie, which I loved, Solo: A Star Wars Story. After The Last Jedi, which I enjoyed, fans had shown they had enough of Disney tampering with something they loved and they were rejecting the Disneyification of Star Wars outright, and not buying the toys, and merchandise at the levels that Disney needed them to in order to justify their investment. This has been obvious now that the big Star Wars lands that have opened in California and now in Disney World in Orlando and people aren’t that interested. I warned everyone way back in 2015 on radio and several articles, that the key to the franchise wasn’t Luke Skywalker, it was Han Solo, the space cowboy that reflected the American values of Ayn Rand and John Wayne, which has always been at the heart of Star Wars. Star Wars for people is best when it has those elements, not actors that were cast because they were Latino, or because they were women—but because the characters were good and the actors fit the part. When Disney essentially killed off the angry white guy characters and failed to replace them with new ones, they lost their audience. The Last Jedi was essentially a movie where all the white men were killed and the crazy progressive women were all in charge and people, real people who are out there voting for Donald Trump don’t want to see movies and stories about that kind of topic, and it has really hurt the Star Wars brand.

But I am encouraged, this year at D23 Disney is showing that they can take their money and do great things with it. I am rooting for them to get it right, I want their Star Wars Land of Galaxy’s Edge to be successful, I want to see Star Wars make a strong comeback for that next generation because it is still one of the best things out there to take our culture from where it was to where it needs to go in science and thought. There is room for big ideas in Star Wars, which is what I use it for as a mythology. It’s a big story with lots of bold concepts, but at its heart it was and continues to be a space western. So long as that formula is stuck to, Star Wars will be successful. If progressive concepts are placed above that formula, then its over for Disney and they seem to understand that now, after a decade of hard lessons.

I was enjoying all the news coming out of D23 and I sort of celebrated by picking up the Lenovo Star Wars Jedi Challenges video game which converts your smart phone into an augmented reality simulator and I have to say it is extremely impressive. But you can see clearly the hit Star Wars has taken to their brand. The unit just a year ago was being sold at Target for $200 and I picked it up this week for less than $50. I figured that for that much money I could take a risk and buy the Disney product and I’m glad I did. But considering what they had done to the legacy fans with the books and previous comics and other merchandise then gave those same fans a mess of a movie in The Force Awakens, which essentially killed all the old white guys and put progressive diversity in charge only to lose over and over again to a very inept First Order, not even I would pay that much money for a new Star Wars game. That’s unfortunate, because the game itself is just amazing, a real technical marvel and exhibition of mythology pushed to its absolute limits. Big ideas, big fun, and a major advancement of the story telling experience.

The lesson here is that progressive, or even liberal ideas cannot fill up that bowl of thought, and people won’t just accept those concepts because they like Star Wars. They like Star Wars because it represents values that most people share, small government, independence, and you gotta have guns. The anti-gun policies and hippie like love your neighbor stuff doesn’t go well with a franchise that is all about war and why wars happen. When you can’t even where a gun on your hip in cosplay to the new Star Wars land in Florida because everyone is crazy over weapons and terrorism, Disney has to understand that you can’t tell a story about peace, love, and trusting the government without weapons, and expect people to spend millions of dollars of their hard earned money on it, just so they can eat colored popcorn and drink blue milk. Star Wars is about fighting for independence, especially personal independence. In all Star Wars stories that are good are examples of institutional failure, even among the Jedi Council, and that is the heart of the entire franchise. Unfortunately, Disney was a part of that institutional thinking and it took them a long time to come close to figuring out the problem. I just hope its not too late. It would be a shame if it is.

Rich Hoffman

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How the Deep State Works: Whispers from beyond the veil

It’s not that Patrick Byrne is a hero or anything for coming out on live television and taking Fox News hosts off guard by revealing that he had done clandestine “deep state” work directly for the FBI’s Peter Strzok. The old hippie, Grateful Dead fan who was the CEO of Overstock.com had to resign because the William Barr investigation that is about to unveil the greatest scandal in world history is about to turn election year politics into a meat grinder for the Democrat Party, and he’s in the middle of it all. He has a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders so he did the right thing and stepped down while he could without the company tanking during the upcoming trials. None of that was surprising to me, but what was a little bit was the public reaction to it, particularly in the mainstream media. If you ever wanted to know about the nature and power of the “deep state” then what wasn’t said was far more powerful than what was.

The “deep state” essentially is nothing more than the static patterns of established society and their acceptance of the handful of options given to them socially out of their grade school days. As I have said for many years, and even the hero of the left Bill Ayers has said, the purpose of public education is not to teach people things, it’s to place them into categories of peer groups for which they will spend the rest of their lives. The deep state is the undemocratic official control mechanism that holds those groups together. So while we officially have a republic as a country, and many liberal media outlooks like to talk about our “democracy” and socialists like AOC “Cortez” are seeking to change the election system from an electoral college to a popular vote so they can count all their illegal aliens and other criminals for Democrat votes, the real power rests outside of that understanding and obviously members of the FBI were functioning from that understanding, especially Peter Strzok who was uncharacteristically caught.

This is nothing new, its just that the nature of President Trump, who is functioning outside of the normal controls of peer groups that are built in our public education system is wrecking the whole order of things because he is binding people together who normally wouldn’t associate with one another, and that makes him very dangerous to this “deep state,” and they apparently understood it from the very beginning. The Deep State themselves, whom Patrick Byrne calls the Men in Black don’t often do things directly, they get other people to do them—compromised people. And to avoid prosecution they get them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do. Then if things go wrong, the perpetrator takes the fall and the deep state continues in the shadows operating behind the legal curtain.

It’s not a conspiracy theory to assume that deep state actors inspire young influential people like these recent mass shooters to do some act of violence that might push legislators to embrace gun control measures. The deep state was caught trying to overturn a presidential election, so nothing is off the table for them. Patrick Byrne didn’t come across as particularly sane in his Fox interviews, but then again, who really is? The guy was nervous, obviously, he has probably done a fair share of drugs in his life if he’s the Dead Head he claims to be, which as a CEO of a company for twenty years leaves a lot of opportunity to have the deep state extort you for bad conduct. So, I can see how his story played out and it was hard to come out and talk about it on television when obviously the hosts were not ready for the information. It wasn’t part of the script, that was for sure. The story should have been the biggest thing to hit television in years, but less than 12 hours later, it was barely talked about except for the usual “conspiracy” channels like talk radio and a few YouTube accounts.

Yet that is precisely how the deep state operates and how it continues to remain behind the scenes. It’s not that they are some powerful organization that uses mind control to remain anonymous, but that they rely on the education system that we have to keep anybody from really seeing them, even when the evidence is right in front of everyone’s face. I’ve seen this method of concealment work several times, and I’ve told the stories here before, but will repeat them again for the sake of demonstration. At one of my high school reunions I was there with my kids and we were doing those contests where the people who were married the longest got a reward, and who had the most kids, who had visited the most places in the world, that kind of thing. I was the winner of something like six out of the ten categories out of my entire class yet there wasn’t much fanfare when I stepped up to get the awards. It was like I was invisible, and it wasn’t because people didn’t know me. In school I was one of those kids who didn’t fit into any class category and I rejected any attempt to put me in one. That led to, let’s just say, a very turbulent time in grade school. Counselors didn’t know what to do with me. Teachers couldn’t reach me because I thought of all of them as too stupid to give me any advice. I wasn’t afraid of the authority structure and was constantly in trouble and in the principal’s office, like every week. Getting my parents involved didn’t help. There was no peer group that I responded to. Nothing worked, and I liked it that way. The treasure in all that was that I grew up independent of any peer group and that is still the case to this very day. But the cost is that people only typically respond to stimulants that support their chosen peer groups for which they have accepted their roles during their grade school years. That means anything outside of their peer groups is invisible to them. So even though in our class reunion I had done more, seen more and lived a lot of life that would normally be talked about, because I wasn’t’ in one of the accepted peer groups the effects were pretty much overlooked.

A few years later I was involved in a big presentation in front of Cincinnati City Council that would determine the future for the Banks Project. My group that was doing the presentation were all of the same type of people I was, outsiders and proud of it. Not affiliated with any of the peer groups developed in our education system but free thinkers and charismatic individualists untethered to conformity. We gave a very dramatic presentation that would eventually become The Banks, only twenty years before it was designed and built. We knew we had done a good job but after not a single politician or developer came up to us to inquire more on our ideas. Now we could say that we were young people, and nobody was going to listen to us, only that most of the ideas presented that day ended up in the final design. So, it was obvious that they were listening. That presentation was a competition from the public and by no close measure, ours was the best and most dramatic. Yet we were painted out of the coverage and never even made the cut on television. That is how the deep state works. People only respond to what they understand and if they are presented with something outside of their realm of understanding, they’ll rationalize it into something they can understand. Such as the cargo cults of primitive tribes when they see an airplane, they might call it a bird and refer to it not as a miracle of science, but as an act of nature confusing the nature of flight entirely. And for such people if they encounter people outside of their peer experience, they may only see aspects of them that they can relate to within their peer group, but not the entire essence and until they can, they will view such people as entirely invisible.

And that is what’s going on with Patrick Byrne and actually the entire Trump presidency. None of this activity fits within the framework of our education system and the peer groups we have adopted as a society. It’s not that the events aren’t happening, they just aren’t happening within the context of experience that most people can understand and that is where the deep state does their work. They have been letting us believe we have a republic but in fact they intend to have a dictatorship of a sorts and they use our own ignorance as their greatest weapon, our need to be in a peer group and to function within its rules and regulations. In that regard, the deep state can rule forever, or so they believe. Until they must deal with elements that don’t adhere to the peer group system. Then they have trouble which is how this whole story is even coming into fruition to begin with. If not for the Trump presidency, we wouldn’t know anything about Patrick Byrne or any other deep state operatives. And the members of the media, even on Fox, anybody getting a paycheck to be part of the media culture, they are part of the peer groups that keep this kind of information from getting out. They are paid to ostracize the Patrick Byrnes of the world once they have stepped down as a CEO of a popular company and to consume them until they are no longer a danger. So this is all very interesting, and it’s going to get a lot better. Stay tuned! Many people, to use Patrick Byrne’s metaphor, are going to learn that Soylent Green is people, and that has always been the way that the deep state has viewed us all, until people start to learn the rules and threaten the entire structure.

Rich Hoffman

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The Good Gardener: Understanding the importance of the Amazonian wildfires and nature in general

It is really interesting to gauge how liberals view events like the current Amazonian wildfires as a catastrophe when in all reality they are quite a common occurrence on planet earth. Fires start all the time, especially by lightening, however these in the Amazon that are raging currently were largely set by farmers trying to clear their land and have gotten out of control. It has even gotten to the point where the new Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is claiming that is political enemies are setting the fires on purpose to make him look bad as he is more to the conservative side of political thinking that Brazil typically has avoided, to their own detriment. So far in 2019 there have been 74,000 wildfires along the Amazon valley which is up from previous years and the blame is going to farming, and logging companies. So called “experts” which is the same as saying that people who have read the progressive National Geographic since they were kids and grew up to be college institute liberal activists, are warning that these actions “could” cause a stop to the world’s oxygen supply and begin to emit carbon and speed up climate change further. “OH NO!”

Well, all of that is garbage, there is an actual psychology to this pathological nonsense that needs to be understood before we have any real intelligent discussions on the matter. Of course by now we all can at least agree that liberals by their nature have attached climate science to their long established goals for communism and socialism using something everyone can agree on, such as climate conditions as a vehicle to launch their political ideology with urgency for action, to vote for them in office. And most of the time they believe their own arguments turning their plight into something that might make the plotline for a new Avatar movie where they are the heroes and all things capitalist are the villains.

That is after all what liberals are protesting in all wildfires is that imprint of human thought and action, farmers trying to grow crops, or industrialists wanting to turn trees into lumber to build homes and more businesses, are bad. Liberals want a world where nature rules, but the quandary to their effort is a scandal all its own, because what they are arguing for is to allow the world to remain sick when it is taken over by disease. Imagine a human body that accepted every little disease or cancer attempt where the immune system just accepted the intrusion and allowed the bodily parasites to take over and kill the whole body. That is what liberals are advocating, because in a lot of ways they see themselves as the parasites which want to thrive off all healthy activity and consume it into chaos, like the underbrush of a rainforest.

Trees are a renewable resource; they grow quite fast. Like all plant life they consume what we dispelled and what they give off, we consume. We have a wonderful symbiotic relationship with plant life as humans. And the more humans and human activity, the better it is for plant life. And following Adam Smith’s economic philosophies, forests are wonderful examples of the invisible hand and survival of the fittest. The best and most healthy plants grow and flourish where the weak and sickly perish into underbrush. It is that underbrush that occasionally needs to be burnt away from the good living life forms through forest fires. Naturally, liberals have an affinity for the underbrush because in the world of human life and functions that is what they are, and the thought of tragedy coming along to burn them all away is a constant fear for them. Every time there is a mass shooting, or an earthquake the first thing that is consumed is liberal ideas. Bravery, self-reliance, and proper philosophies for survival become the most urgent thoughts. Just as in mass forest fires, where the best rooted and strongest trees survive in some form while everything else is consumed.

Take the liberal gardener who lets plants grow everywhere and doesn’t tend to them properly. They always look like a mess. Compare that to the astute and meticulous gardener who plants certain kinds of plants here and there and trims back the dead limbs and shapes the growth of their garden with care and precision. The effort of the human influence to shape the garden makes it either esthetically pleasing or not, based on the interpretive mind of the human being. The gardener makes a choice to rid the world of undesirables like weeds and dead limbs and carves out beauty as a form of art, which is to say a way of thinking. A philosophy of thought, a value system that says some plants are beneficial to the garden, while others are detriments is critical to a good garden, or a good society. What makes a weed a weed? The value system that places it at a lower value than say a well-trimmed Japanese maple tree. A good gardener hopes that all plants do well, but once the garden grows, we must make decisions on what works and what doesn’t and change the behavior into something more conducive to a good garden.

Rainforests are messy, and hot. Life is growing everywhere, and it is unmanaged. Nature’s management is that occasional catastrophes like fires come along and clean up the mess. But ideally, mankind was born to think and make decisions to carve out nature for the best benefit, whether the need is for farming, or industry, the human mind is just another force of nature, and its disciplines are meant to create esthetic harmony by bringing nature under control for the use of higher needs, instead of some random nonsense of a bunch of animals living and dying in trees and underbrush that only are born, eat, reproduce and die. The human mind brings a higher meaning to all life and it is a force of nature in and of itself.

The typical liberal cannot see themselves in that higher plan because they know that in the great gardens of the world that they are the weeds, the underbrush, the diseases infecting a healthy body and that they must be eradicated in order for healthy conduct at life to occur. They may want to have a roll in the scheme of things but since they are parasitic in nature, their philosophies mandate that they must be destroyed in order for better things to live. That is why they cry so much when there are forest fires and try to threaten us all with a terminal life on planet earth, so to protect them from termination within the philosophy of politics and world conduct. They are the weeds and cancers fighting for their right to survive, but we know good health cannot support everything. As humans we must choose, just as our immune systems must choose healthy cells over diseased ones. To live and be healthy we must choose life sometimes over other life. A nice tree over a weed. A healthy body over a diseased one. And not to discriminate, but to discourage people from becoming weeds, from becoming liberals and help them in life find their way toward good thought and conduct. That is the most humane way to deal with political gardening. And the way to do it in the world such as along the Amazon is to burn away the garbage so the people of Brazil can use the land for something more than just decay and nonsense. Clear the land for farmland. Log for more lumber and develop the resources of that country so that people who are barely living in huts and on city streets can live better and longer for the purpose of existence which is not up for debate. Give them a better life in our world garden. The trees will grow back. But the weeds and underbrush need to go.

Rich Hoffman
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Hate Crime Legislation to Ban Guns: The Government attempting to disarm the Second Amendment to cover for their own crimes committed

One of the gun control measures that congress intends to pursue when everyone gets back in session and is being floated around more and more recently is to take guns away from people convicted for a hate crime. In fact, it was Columbia, South Carolina of all places who just enacted a first pass hate crime ordinance which is going in the same direction as what is being floated on the federal level, and it is just ridiculous. The trouble with the proposal is that it is purely reactive to the current circumstances of mass shootings, which I have said many times are the result of Democrat policies as an origin, and that it just opens the door for banning guns based on hate speech, which is entirely defined by whatever political party is in power at the time. Such a ban opens all kinds of doors toward future encouragement and abuse of the law no matter how good the intentions are of the people proposing these measures.

My brand of conservatism was common all through the twentieth century. It was the world that changed, not me, and that hard turn to the left that started really in the mid-1950s and culminated into the 60s was a bad decision based on the current condition of the world. I often say to people that I was born in 1968 as a solution to that left turn. I grew up knowing both of my farmer grandparents. Both of my parents stayed married and didn’t embark on that social experiment of divorces that was becoming so popular in the late 70s and 80s. And even more unusual, my mom was a stay at home mom, and she took all kinds of hell for doing it. She was a volunteer at my school to help the teachers with all the kid’s social events and all the other moms simply hated her, because she could be home with her children and had time during the day to do mom stuff. As a result, my view of America and Republican politics in general was not at all different from John Wayne’s America, or any of the typical westerns that were popular on television and at the movies during that period. So nothing I say is all that outlandish, only if it is compared to the screw ball politics of our current time, just as a disclosure for reference.

Hate crimes are a modern invention by Democrats to seek minority votes and to capitalize off tensions that always arise when cultures of different values are mixed together. Most of the time those tensions can be worked out with a little understanding but occasionally things get out of hand and bad things happen. Democrats especially are guilty of stoking those fires of discontent until someone snaps and thus, you have a hate crime. If everyone would just leave everyone else alone, there would be a lot less hate crime in the world. But activist politics pushes the issue and before you know it some panicked teenager raised in a house full of illiteracy is running their car through a crowd of progressive protestors committing a hate crime.

The trouble with hate crime is that it is entirely politically motivated, so that if an enemy political party wants to push your buttons as a target and you respond, you could be said to have committed a hate crime. And under these new hate crime proposals, the authorities have a right to then come and confiscate your guns. If that’s not bad enough, the natural next step is to extend that effort to hate speech, which essentially could be just about anything that President Trump says on a daily basis, because he is from the winning political party and the losers are hen pecking at him because they know of no other way to win an election. Because of that we are seeing massive amounts of banning going on social media platforms, such as Alex Jones has experienced along with many, many others. I understand shadow banning, that is certainly the case with me on Twitter and YouTube. I don’t worry about it too much, but I can see that it’s happening for sure. These are already dangerous elements in any society so we can clearly see that all this hate crime legislation opens the door for gun confiscation by whatever political party is in power, and it just can’t be allowed.

It is not radical to say that the reason we have guns, guns of all sizes and power is so that we can manage our own government. There may come a time, and it is obvious today, that we may have to take back control of our government through the use of guns. Government cannot be trusted without a check on their power, ultimately by the people of an electorate and the electoral system. Even with guns we have come perilously close to complete tyranny as the evidence of the last presidential election is testimony in itself. The FBI sought to help the Democrat party elect their presidential candidate and keep Donald Trump out of the White House, which didn’t work. But when he did, they actively played a part in subverting that election, the evidence is everywhere as revealed most explosively with the Bruce Ohr situation at the Department of Justice. That case is still unraveling, but it is very embarrassing to our government. Going back a few years we saw a similar situation involving the IRS where they targeted Tea Party groups as a way to punish them for existing, using tax laws to encumber the leadership. It was a gross abuse of power and nobody was ultimately held accountable. I was wrapped up in the middle of all that, so I saw it firsthand. It was abuse by our government, pure and simple and honestly, if I was not a gun owner, they probably would have come after me even harder. By my experience, I would say that my ownership of guns has preserved more liberty and saved more lives than if I had not had them. Let’s just say that.

As to the other proposals such as red flag laws, well the tools have always been there. Since the most recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio police and the FBI are finally doing their jobs and picking people up for the messages they put online about announcing their mass shooting intentions. The red flags have always been there, but police and the FBI were just too lazy to act on them. There wasn’t a political will to enforce the laws that were on the books, otherwise the El Paso shooting and the one in Dayton would not have happened. The red flags were there, but the cops were out eating donuts and thinking about something else. That is another reason we can’t trust our government; they are not consistent and driven by performance. They are mostly inspired by politics and when something is hot, they act. When things cool off, they sleep, sit in their cars looking up pornography on their computers, and they have massive affairs with each other. (I know a lot of cops or have over the years. I know what I’m talking about.) They do a good job when pressed and people are looking. But left to their own devices, they aren’t the most motivated bunch.

We can’t trust government to define hate crimes or even hate speech and we certainly can’t surrender our guns to them. The guns are there to ultimately protect us not from thieves and despots, but from the tendencies of government itself, to cover their crimes when they commit them from the burdens of history. And if someone like you or I are witnesses to that burden, we will then become the targets, which is what all this hate crime legislation is opening up as a possibility, for which we all must say no. For myself, I live by the Cowboy Way, I treat everyone no matter what their sex, color or country of origin the same and with great respect. I don’t need a government that is always trending toward criminal behavior to define for me, “fairness.” I’ll keep my guns, and if someone wants to come and take them, then that will leave no other choice but to call for a change in the government itself and return to a time when John Wayne made a lot more sense instead of the race baiters and hustlers of our current times who seek to hide their own illegal activity behind more laws and regulation.

Rich Hoffman

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ANTIFA is a Terrorist Organization: Both White Nationalism and ANTIFA are elements of the left and stand against the American Constitution

Of course, ANTIFA should be labeled a terrorist group. That’s what they are and have been throughout history whenever an activist group like theirs comes about to promote socialist causes, whether it’s the Brownshirts of the NAZI or the Marxists of Lenin the purpose they serve is to attack the social order of their society and to replace it with anarchy and chaos so that change in their direction can take place. I would also say that regarding the recent Portland protests where members of ANTIFA and white supremacy groups clashed from the supposed “alt right” that both organizations are from the political left and are in themselves terrorist in nature. All the representation at the Portland protests were to the left of traditional conservatives in America and that is something worth discussing because we are all told to pick a side and that represents “us” as Americans, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not a First Amendment protection issue. Basically, in the case of the ANTIFA people, they are communists protesting the basic foundations of American life, so the First Amendment is something they are willingly giving up. And the White Supremacists that naturally spawn off these far-left groups are a natural reaction to being isolated by the progressive movement’s agenda but are in and of themselves a creation of it. Everyone knowns by now that it was Republicans who put down the white nationalists’ movements in America, who freed the slaves, and pushed for the equal treatment of all under the American flag. When they wave around the Confederate Flag at white nationalist events trying to go back to a time before the Civil War, they are too stating that they do not want to be a part of American law which considers everyone equal, no matter what skin color we have. If the issue wasn’t defined well enough when the original Constitution was signed, then it was made quite clear by the Civil War and the Amendments that followed that war. Essentially terrorism is the mode of operation of all these groups, and we need to look at them that way.

But for ANTIFA to call anybody a NAZI is to say that they are just a less severe version of Marxism. The Nazis were a socialist organization from Germany and their rise imposed themselves on the rest of the world with massive destruction and poor philosophy. The ANTIFA terrorists are even further to the political left and are pushing for harsh communism like what we’d find in modern China and North Korea—or even Iran. When they all start burning flags and spitting in the face of basic American ideas, its time to get rid of them as a terrorist organization by accepting that they are exactly that. The First Amendment can’t survive everything, and the line needs to be drawn at the American Flag. If everyone can’t at least agree to the Constitutional concepts that the flag represents, then whoever disagrees needs to be treated as a hostile foreign entity and a domestic enemy by the terms of modern citizenship.

To go further into this issue, the creation of a group like ANTIFA to begin with, we must blame the educations of these young people for arriving so far into their adult lives and thinking the things that they do which go against America. To consider that we have all paid massive amounts of money into the educations of these people only to have class curriculums teach anti-American sentiment which gives rise to this kind of radicalism is preposterous. And that even our modern media members are so stupid that they can’t even understand left from right thinking between ANTIFA, white nationalism, and normal Americans says a lot about their fundamental thought patterns created during their educations. And even so, some of them do understand, but by positioning the problem the way they have it forces normal Americans by default to endorse with their silence one side or the other even though neither side has anything to do with America as we have known it. I’m certainly nothing close to a white nationalist, and neither is the Trump administration, or anything connected to it. But once a stigma is created rather than solving the problem, we are forced to defend a narrative for which none of us ever played a part. To attach any conservative movement with the “alt right” of white nationalism is like calling a can of soda a glass of water. They may be both liquids, but they have nothing to do with each other. All white nationalists are advocating a form of socialism or fascism that were always born of liberalism, specifically the Democrat party as it evolved out of the early 20th century progressive movement in America.

Of course, a bunch of dumb kids raised poorly and educated to fail, because failure puts boots of radicalism on the streets to demand change, are going to want to fight someone. They must blame somebody for being losers in the world, and I place the blame on their educations which we all paid for and have proven to be destructive to the minds of young people. Which to me is just another form of inner bred terrorism. The white nationalists aren’t any smarter, they are looking to socialism and fascism for a reason, because they can’t think their way out of a paper bag soaked with water. So, they turn to collectivism to solve their social problems. The situation really is a mess and most people don’t have time to figure out all the players and how they became that way. Which if you look at how the media has positioned these stories to pick winners and losers both on the side of the left, the attempt against our American lives is obvious, which is yet another act of terrorism against our Constitution.

There is plenty of blame to go around, and there has been lots of unchecked terrorism that has been left to grow because law makers didn’t want to come across as harming the First Amendment. But all these characters in this play have forsaken the protections of the Constitution by spitting on the American flag in some fashion or another which is to say to the world that they don’t honor the Constitution for which it represents. In that regard declaring these groups and anybody for that matter who states that they despise the American Flag, we should then treat them as hostile to the American ideas and law for which our society demands we at least find common ground. If we don’t at least have that common ground, then what do we really have and what will be the outcome? We can’t just let ANTIFA act so badly in our city streets and bring harm to people all in the name of open communism. We do need to draw a line and I think the situation is quite clear. ANTIFA and all such organizations need to be labeled a terror group, no different from an organization like ISIS. And we need to run them off the face of the planet as domestic enemies to the American concept. And that’s the way it must be.

Rich Hoffman

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“Its Only A Flesh Wound”: The Dayton Mass Killer and his liberal, cocaine driven murders

OK, I’m happy to say I told you so dear reader. Within hours of the Dayton mass shooting rampage that has so many calling for gun control, we learned this week that the killer had cocaine in his body, he even had a bag of it on him at the time of his death after he was shot over 24 times by police, and he was on anti-anxiety medication combined with alcohol. Which is exactly what I had said happened knowing very little about the evidence at the time but understanding the condition of the murders. Yet we are supposed to believe that gun control would have averted the killings. And we are supposed to put our complete trust into a police force that put so many bullets into the dead body of the attacker that they actually shot some of the victims with their own bullets. The whole ordeal was actually and remains a mess. It was liberal philosophies that made the shooter who he was and it was state controlled law enforcement that obviously over reacted and put more people in danger due to their “training.”

The killer Betts had 52 gunshot wounds in his upper and lower torso. Many of them were exit wounds but think about it. More than twenty shots fired in any crowded area would be a potential for more people around the target to be injured, and at least 2 bullets struck other people. It is humorous that when explaining this to the public Police Chief Richard Beihl had to describe those wounds as “superficial wounds.” It kind of reminds me of the Monty Python movie The Holy Grail. “Its only a flesh wound.” Of course that police training entailed shooting at the subject so that so long as he was near his rifle that they had to keep pummeling him with rounds of fire and that each of those bullets would bounce off the pavement and be a potential projectile flying into innocent people running away from the crime. They had to make sure that Betts was dead. Ah, but they were under pressure, the police. After all, wouldn’t everyone panic under such a crises and hindsight is 20/20. Well, no, not everyone panics under those conditions.

Sure, there were lots of cops that were around late that night in Dayton patrolling the entertainment district and they engaged the shooter in 30 seconds. But with so many cops also comes the understanding that they all knew this guy was a mass killer who had just attacked people on their watch, and they wanted to make sure some of their bullets got into the body of him so they could claim credit for bringing an end to the carnage, by creating more carnage. 52 bullet holes, that is just out of control, and more about getting their name in the record books than actually stopping the crime. With so many police officers firing into the cocaine liberal Betts, nobody could have taken the next logical step and moved in to remove the weapon from the attacker while he was down, minimizing the risk to the area. I have argued and will continue to, that most CCW holders would have done a much better job and not let their adrenaline get the better of them, as the police obviously suffered from. A typical NRA member with a CCW would have been much calmer and created less carnage in stopping the bad guy.

But that’s not the story of the day, its all about how to detect mental health, and the gun control advocates desire to do background checks and have red flag laws. Would a red flag law prevented this liberal Elizabeth Warren supporter from smoking crack and mixing anti-depressant medicine with alcohol and who knows whatever else, then making a terrorist out of himself? I would argue that just calling oneself a Democrat is a kind of declaration of insanity. Should all Democrats be flagged as potential terrorists? I think historically speaking, we could make that case. Is that where all this is going? Because any time a mind is altered with intoxicants, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, anti-depressants even, they are all potential minds for becoming killers. Most of them won’t of course. But where do you draw the line?

Just like the cops that shot their guns over 24 times into a body within the confines of a crowded street, politicians show they have even less good judgment on the matter. Most of them want illegal drugs legalized so they can get the tax money for their giveaway projects, and they don’t want to consider what those intoxicants do to our society. Maybe everyone who drinks a beer or smokes marijuana should be “red flagged.” I could live without drinking or doing any drugs. I would much rather have a society of gun owners carrying them around in public than a bunch of drunken heathens intoxicated in their spare time and thinking about dumb things. The lessen here is that no politician, especially on the Republican side where they should be leading the way, is addressing the core problem—drugs cause mental depletion, so no mental health scan under normal conditions will root out a potential killer. And we certainly have seen from the FBI to the local law enforcement that they are only human, and they panic too under duress and they may shoot you just for being nearby. So is the proposal of more government patrolling the streets viable, no. Is more government doing background checks and administering red flag laws viable, no. Would an assault weapons ban work, so that government could be the only ones with high powered weapons there to serve politicians who have a lot to hide in the world. Absolutely not!

So what are we to do? Well, first of all, lets admit to ourselves that drugs are a problem and our government should not be endorsing the practice of intoxication—of any kind. People will still want to drink their beer and whatever, but we must stop promoting that activity as normal. And we certainly must understand that endorsing cocaine, depression medicine and marijuana will lead to a less safe society. We cannot give up the Bill of Rights so that people can just sit around and get wasted. I understand that the political class likes intoxicated people who can’t think, because it makes it easier to garner their vote. But the consequences are obvious, and this Betts killer was an obvious example of when such a situation goes wrong. I think a legitimate look into every mass killer would tell a similar story as Betts. He was obviously a clear-cut case, he was a liberal likely caught up in the modern antics of political theater, and being a drug user, had lost his ability to rationalize outcomes. So, he became a mass killer with the obvious hope that it would inspire gun control, which is why he used the high capacity magazine. He was after all supportive of gun control, and his natural aim of throwing his life away, and those of many others, was to force the issue. But all those thoughts are derived from insanity provoked by drug abuse. Given our current culture which accepts that condition, there is always the potential for countless killers to emerge. And until we deal with the drug use, no law created by anybody will stop them. Obviously, we can’t count on law enforcement to save us. Apparently to them, collateral damage is a perfectly acceptable criteria so long as they stop the mass shooters when they do appear.

Rich Hoffman

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What’s Wrong with the Fox News Poll on Gun Control: Trying to position cable news for life after 2024 with smoke and mirrors

You can clearly see the influence of Suzanne Scott, the new CEO of Fox News regarding their recent poll on gun control released recently in the wake of two mass shootings that occurred within 24 hours of each other. Fox News has moved noticeably in a more liberal direction under her leadership as opposed to Roger Ailes. Knowing that liberal gun banners have sought to push an assault weapons agenda while the NRA is on its heels in internal struggles at the top of the organization to redirect their losses in the Russian hoax story and pull Trump toward gun control to split his base and weaken his power going into the 2020 election. Fox News was happy to play along being a New York based media company in the heart of progressive society, they have moved radically to the left and their poll on guns reflects this trend.

Their headline was that most of the people they polled back gun restrictions after the most recent shootings. They also aimed to show a slipping support for Trump and the NRA. Obviously Suzanne Scott’s staff in the boardroom of Fox News is looking beyond Trump’s presidency if not for 2020, because they will want the ratings bump they get from his campaign events, ultimately the cable news outlet need to figure out who they are after 2024 and they think the country is changing in a more liberal direction, that many of the heavily college debt driven young people will not care about guns, or even family, and will be more Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump in their economic and social thinking. Suzanne Scott is clearly not Roger Ailes, and it shows.

The big number in the Fox Poll is that they say two thirds of their contacts state that they would support an “assault weapons” ban which I think is highly unlikely. I would say that is something of a suppression poll similar to the type of polls that showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump in the general election or the ones that think Joe Biden will beat Trump head to head. The numbers may be accurate if you are taking your sampling at a local liberal college, but not if you were doing so in a steel factory or a competitive shooting event. Its not so much what the numbers say, it’s the kind of people that were polled. For instance, 100% of people polled in New York City would likely reflect the Fox News sample. They are already used to a non-gun culture and lots of progressive ideas. But in Eastern Ohio or Kentucky, the results would be much different.

The sampling itself was taken between August 11th through the 13th so the material broadcast by Fox and other networks was fresh on everyone’s mind and consisted of 1,013 registered voters, 222 by a land line and 791 by cell phones randomly selected for inclusion in the survey using a probability proportionate to the size method meaning the phone numbers for each state were proportional to the number of voters in each state. That means that by dividing the number of polled recipients by the number of states and not taking into account the nature of those states, the results would tend to lead toward a favorability of gun control anyway, which of course Fox News is pushing so that they can take credit for moving the needle on gun control during President Trump’s first term in office and changing the market demographic for that five year plan which takes place after 2024.

The big flaws are in conducting recipients who still have a land line, which is to say, most people these days have cut that cord a long time ago. Land line phone owners are not a good statistical sampling of the modern electorate. Its like saying to people who ride bicycles if they prefer that mode of transportation over a car. A land line owner is probably over 60 or they are very poor, and their opinions are radically shaped by current events, like within a week old. With all the news recently from traditional networks being all about gun control, it is not surprising that these types of people would be sympathetic to such an idea. Then of course there is the cell phone sampling, where only certain types of people answer their cell phone when a number they don’t recognize comes across their screen. Again, 791 people who answered their cell phone during an unusual call across 50 states is not a good sampling of gun control sentiment among real voters. The poll method is an old model that does not represent modern trends, and that is where the rubber hits the road in detecting the motive of this Fox News Poll.

Mostly, I would say that people who read here for instance are getting their news sourcing from Fox News over to Alex Jones, OAN or even Louder with Crowder on YouTube. There is a reason that many of these modern commentators who lean to the political right have been deplatformed from social media—it’s because that was never the plan from the left. They thought Facebook, Google and Twitter would push people to the left, instead it has given people on the right more of a voice and they are cutting their cords with Fox News and the cable companies that support them and turning to streaming online. The freedom of choice has gone in the wrong direction and this has particularly upset the Google radicals who thought they understood the game.

Fox News viewers really aren’t that impressive, and they dominate the other networks by having 2.3 million viewers between the hours of 8-11 PM each night. The YouTube channel of Steven Crowder is on par with those numbers and that is just one lone personality. Given the impact of talk radio, blog sites like this one, and alternative media such as Alex Jones on his own website that is still pulling in impressive numbers despite all the effort there has been to stop him. There isn’t any real polling coming out of those audiences and it is there that the real sentiment on gun control rests. Fox News tried to have a poll by doing what they understand in an industry that is dying and they are trying to sell that off as a fact. But its just a poll taken from backwards derelicts who are out of touch with reality and are by their very nature the products of the modern news cycle for which they provide the content. But that content does not represent reality.

The shocker is that even with the Fox News poll trying to pain the picture that a majority of Americans support gun control, which they don’t, the real trick is in trying to get Republicans to play ball with Democrats to give a legislative victory that they can run on in 2020. By puffing up their feathers at Fox News with what they hope the President will be suckered into supporting, they are trying to shape policy from a New York perspective that goes against the rest of the nation, that secretly support Trump through new media. If Fox News could do that they fantasize, they may survive in the marketplace beyond 2024 because it will take the wind out of the sales of all the new media out there that is beating the crap out of traditional media. And that is where the real fight is. There is no appetite for gun control from real voters, because they see the game. But the establishment is trying to shape opinion at a critical time while they still can. Hopefully, the President won’t fall for it.

But if he does, he does. It won’t change reality.

Rich Hoffman

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