Tag: philosophy

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Socialists of Seattle: Jeff Bezos tried to feed red meat to the wolves, and they bit him

Way back in 2013 I told you dear reader about Kshama Sawant, the socialist who was recently elected to city council in Seattle. Remember that? Well, she and the rest of her socialist brethren have proven me more than 100% correct with their anti-American brand of socialism that is going after the rich at every turn these days. The budget of Seattle is a disaster and these idiots are seeking measures to pay homeless shelters and taxing their big businesses to cover the costs—which has already pushed Boeing to remove a lot of jobs from the city to avoid the high taxes. Now the Seattle City Council has voted a new “head tax on their large businesses with an 8 to 1 vote on any company that earns $20 million or more in annual sales, 14 cents per employee hour, in an effort to raise $50 million per year toward outreach efforts for the homeless, including affordable housing and emergency shelters. This is what happens when people who have no idea what the value of businesses are truly for their communities or lack the understanding of what makes people homeless in the first place. Throwing money at the problem by stealing it from valuable companies is not the way to solve the problem. But when people follow the failed philosophy of Karl Marx, this is what you get in human intellect—deficient people too stupid to help themselves.

It’s a little funny that the big time liberal Jeff Bezos tried to appease these socialists in Seattle with his war on Trump by using The Washington Post as his personal blog to create an impeachment of his billionaire rival. Bezos is now the richest man in the world and he gambled wrong in thinking that the socialists of Seattle would stay away from him because of their mutual hatred of Trump. Obviously, Bezos is a smart guy who runs a great business in Amazon. But like many in his position he got caught trying to feed the wolves red meat hoping they would go away. Instead they only became hungrier.

The thing with socialists is that they always are looking for people of value that they can steal money from in an effort to call it “social justice,” “equality for all” and one for all and all for one, and all that garbage. Socialists mask their parasitic tendencies behind altruistic intentions, but what they really are reveals itself in decisions like their Seattle Head Tax—theft granted by government for the sake of those who work and produce and those who simply are too lazy to exist on their own. Socialists are those who want to live off the efforts of others, its that simple. There isn’t anything morally just about their actions, they are thieves—pure and simple.

If Jeff Bezos didn’t build Amazon up bit by bit over the last several decades what would it be? Would Kshama Sawant create Amazon, would the city council? Would the homeless people they want to help make Amazon the great company that it is today? If Jeff Bezos didn’t have all those sleepless nights in the 1990s when he was building his empire of e-commerce with distribution warehouses all over the nation for a business that was on the cutting edge at best—where were the socialists of Seattle back then—playing video games, reading books about Karl Marx, protesting the breeding patters of fruit flies cut off from a thousand-year old hole in the ground where someone wanted to build a housing development? They certainly weren’t trying to create jobs like Jeff Bezos was.

In a capitalist society—in ANY society a job creator is one of the most important aspects of civilization. Without job creators there is no economic expansion. Government doesn’t create jobs unless you count useless bureaucratic positions equivalent to slow ass workers at the BMV or a Clerk of Courts. People like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump have far more value than a socialist looter trying to use the power of government to steal the hard work of those who take the big chances in business to create jobs from nothing. Yet where Bezos went wrong is that he tried to appease those progressive minded by tossing money at them hoping they’d go away—only they didn’t. Once they realized where the money was—after all Bezos is now known as the world’s richest man—and he lives in the neighborhood so to speak of people like Kshama Sawant—their target went to him. For a socialist it’s like a nice pile of shit for a fly to swoop on to take away all they could get while the gettin’ was good. Such lessons have come hard and now Amazon doesn’t have much choice in the matter, they’ll have to move their operations out of the Seattle area. Starbucks is in the same situation—Seattle is now notoriously unfriendly to business, and the word is out. Businesses will have to leave Seattle.

I was in Paris, France recently and the effects of their open socialism is grotesquely obvious. There are no big chain restaurants, no big factories—not like there should be for such a large city with so much history. The socialism of France has pushed away so much business investment because it’s a pain in the ass to do anything. It’s hard to even use the restroom in Paris, even near the tourist attractions the restrooms were dirty, and they charge you money to use them. I was stunned to see a toll turn style at the bathroom at Notre Dame with some Pakistani guy smoking a cigarette and collecting $2 a piss. I told him I’d just piss on the sidewalk outside which is what I dd. And so were about five other guys. No wonder Paris these days smells like piss everywhere you go. The city to deal with the exodus of their most productive turned to immigration to refill their empty apartments which has created their current crises—of mixing Muslims from the Middle East with the Christian Crusaders of old to extract revenge for the long conflict between religions that are left over from the Dark Ages. Instead of thinking of building new vehicles for space and colonizing Mars, the people of Paris are trying to keep piss off the sidewalks and nobody in their right mind is opening up a McDonald’s with free bathrooms across from the Eiffel Tower. Socialism has destroyed the opportunities for private investment to make a deal.

I’ve seen plenty of homeless people, I got to know them quite well in Canterbury, England where I’ve spent some time living in the city. Because of the social justice policies of that town ran by first the church, then by a much more socialist government in England after World War II homeless people have been incentivized into sleeping on the sidewalks. They are actually well fed and people befriend them letting them know that there is a safety net in case they fall from life. Knowing that, the weakest among us tend to throw in the towel too soon and retreat to a sleeping bag on the sidewalk rather than to shake a drug addiction, a family problem or whatever crises has come at them and destroyed their ambitions. When you give people free shelter, food and companionship—what reason do they have to keep fighting in life? Nothing, which is why when you start giving such people resources you get more of them, not less.

So Seattle has quite a problem now and there is no end in sight. I think it’s a good thing that the people of America can watch Kshama Sawant and her city council destroy their city, because it’s a good warning shot to the rest of the nation—socialism is dangerous, and it doesn’t work. And this is also a good lesson for people like Jeff Bezos. He should have never have tried to appease the socialists in the way that head hunters tried to appease their gods with human sacrifice, because it just makes the blood thirsty even thirstier. The only way out of all these messes is more capitalism and a defining stance against socialism before everyone can advance. Anybody who wants to help the homeless truly will learn these lessons quickly, the best way to keep people off the streets is to give them a job and let them earn their way through life. Giving things away for free while stealing from those who work hard and truly are people of value destroys opportunity for everyone. And that is something I think we can all agree is not what we want to see happening.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Donald Glover’s Brilliant Childish Gambino “This is America”: But it’s not the America the rest of us know

I couldn’t be happier for Donald Glover’s wonderful song and music video by his musical personality of Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” It is one of the most successful videos of all time pulling in nearly 120,000,000 million views on YouTube in just a week and I have to say that I think its one of the most interesting that I’ve ever seen. The music and the video are the work of a truly talented young person in Donald Glover who is playing Lando Calrissian in the new Star Wars movie Solo: A Star Wars Story. I am personally very impressed with young Donald Glover, he’s a smart person, genuinely very talented, and obviously has some things to say about the world around him and can express them both artistically and commercially, which is extremely rare. For his part, I hope the new Solo movie is a huge hit because it will continue to expose him to a larger audience and culturally, I think that’s great for our civilization. However, I disagree with the assumptions he has made in his music video. His America isn’t my America and that void is truly at the center of all our modern politics.

The video done with such fantastic choreography and pacing is obviously an anti-gun message that assumes that from the point of view of African descendants living in America that the deck is stacked against them by whites who are easily distracted and put gun rights over the rights of life. From the point of view of young people, especially people making a living in Los Angeles, this is a swallow well of thought that is common in liberal regions around the country. Even though the video is well done, and the music itself is excellent, the message is flawed because it doesn’t see the bigger picture of human existence as a context, but rather progressive politics as it exists in the mind of young people not yet in their 30s. They haven’t begun to live lives yet, in many cases they haven’t started raising families and living life, yet they think like all young people do that they know it all and can lecture the rest of us how things “ought” to be based on what they feel.

Value for life goes much deeper than just saying you want to let people live—the true value of human existence that sets us apart from all other living things is our ability to think. Obviously, the kind of culture that is displayed in Childish Gambino’s “America” is a black culture with beliefs and yearnings straight from their African continent—the manner of dance and values are clearly different from what might be considered from the aggressive white Wall Street crowd in the United States. It is one thing to believe that money is the root of all evil but it is quite another to complain that everyone in the black community is poor because they have either sacrificed themselves to a new plantation of Democratic politics, or they have chosen to bring the kind of Marxism that is common in the African continent to their voting patterns in America. In either case, it should not be surprising to anybody that people who do not embrace the capitalism of western civilization will be at a loss to live within those cultures without being left behind economically. It’s not that white America has left behind black America and suppressed them into the slums of inner cities—its that blacks generally as a race of people have been slow to accept capitalism in their lives and have philosophically at the most epistemological level adopted the wrong outlook toward life and have made themselves victims.

In the video Donald Glover appears to be smoking a joint, (a marijuana cigarette) as he dances on a bunch of older American cars. These are interesting images taken together—and marijuana is a particularly popular drug in black neighborhoods which I would argue are poison for their minds. Likely more dangerous for the black community than guns is the numbing of their minds by drugs, alcohol and poor educations. Even worse has been their acceptance of big daddy government to allow fathers to leave the home and government to raise the many children born to broken families. Gun violence is a symptom of the broken homes of many black families who are struggling to accept the rules of conduct that were always supposed to be part of the American experience and instead the young people have joined gangs for social acceptance and taken to mental destruction as a way to push away the reality of their many mistakes.

I thought the handling of the guns in the video was particularly powerful. Its true, America does handle the guns with great care because firearms represent an intellectual aptitude that they are meant to protect. Just because elements of our society fall short of the values that were always supposed to be part of the American experience, the guns are not the villains. To be lectured by a bunch of liberals who abort babies at a rate that would embarrass even the most ruthless mass murders in world history that guns are killing their young people is hypocrisy at its most telling. I don’t blame Donald Glover for his lack of seeing the big picture. I have had dinner with many people in the LA night scene over the years and I can report that they have a very limited understanding of life in the big picture. They are pinned into that little valley between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains and think that everyone around the country thinks the way they do about things, and they couldn’t be more wrong. The pace of our modern world driven by capitalism is fast-moving, it is driven by money, because money represents a form of value and is a good thing, not a bad thing. And guns are the centerpiece of American freedom, without guns politicians like John McCain would have turned America into Europe a long time ago—so the guns are an intellectual protection of the founding principles of our nation—and they are to be treated with great care—unfortunately only by the conservative parts of America at this moment.

The real dangers facing the black communities are in their ignorance—their desire to march in a mob together with Marxist philosophies which have imprisoned them to Democratic politics. Donald Glover’s caricatures of Jim Crow I thought were very interesting, but the suggestions of racism are misplaced in the context of history. America was founded by religious white people from Europe who had been thinking about freedom and self-governing ideas for many centuries—largely due to the failures of the church in places like England and France. A big part of that philosophical contemplation is what freed the slaves in America and gave opportunity to blacks that they certainly didn’t have in Africa, and for some they embraced these opportunities—Fredrick Douglas comes to my mind who was a very prominent Republican at the middle 19th century period. However, many whites were skeptical of people from black culture—their dancing and music were unusual, and they had ideas from a totally different region of the world that were unfamiliar—and it took some time to bring those two races together—and nothing else should have been expected. There are few places elsewhere in the world where people of totally different background have tried to unite in peace like they have in the United States. Rather than complaining about everything, black Americans should be happy that they can find an audience of acceptance in the United States. I can’t think of anybody I know who will refuse to see Solo: A Star Wars Story because Donald Glover is a black man—and I certainly don’t know anybody who loves sports who refuses to attend a professional team because the players are mostly black. The only people who really notice blacks and whites are those who profit off the divisions, like Democratic politicians who need to victimize black cultures to keep their vote counts high. That is the real victimization that is going on—and that kind of thing certainly wasn’t in Donald Glover’s video.

But take as a work of art from a young man who still has a lot to learn about life, I thought “This is America” was a brilliant piece of work. I may look at it and clap the way I would encourage a kid in the third grade to keep trying because someday they may get it—due to their raw talent. At my age these days a third grader and a 30-year-old are not that far apart in intellectual development, so I kind of see them the same way. Unquestionably, Donald Glover is a rare modern talent and I am excited to see more from him. It’s not wrong to have opinions, or to express them. But he’s not presenting the next monumental breakthrough in thought. He’s still a young kid trying to impress his LA cultural peers with his understanding of their politics—no matter how false that politics may be compared to the sentiment of the rest of the country. And that is the real trick, not just in making interesting art that a particular sector of political order enjoys as a reality, but that speaks to everyone. In that regard, “This is America” misses the mark as it only speaks truly to the self-oppressed, the ignorant, and the inexperienced.

The big misunderstanding that persists to this day is that merit and respect are given out in American society the way a village chief might have enjoyed in some other region of the world, and under capitalism, that isn’t the case. Respect is earned by those who work hard and pull themselves up. While it was true that white Americans were weary of black Americans because they feared that the newly freed slaves would not work to incorporate themselves into the Christian based society that was so newly created from European statism. But Donald Glover certainly has made good use of American opportunity, and many other black Americans have too, and that is where skin color truly does disappear. Americans like successful people, or people trying to be successful. They tend to look down their nose at lazy people no matter what their skin color is, or people who lack intellectual aptitude. Racism isn’t the biggest problem facing America—its stupidity—from all races and sexes, and that is what needs to be addressed if we are ever to truly solve the problems of our age. America is not the problem and never has been, the burden has always been and continues to be that not all people understand what it takes to live and be successful in America. As a person, Donald Glover gets it, but as the culture he is representing in his new music video, they don’t. All they can do is discuss the symptoms of the problems instead of the causes—and for that they must look at themselves.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

 

John McCain is a Bitter, Dying Man: Getting captured, and tortured can’t erase the fact that he was and still is an idiot

So what did White House communications aide Kelly Sadler say that wasn’t true? John McCain is dying, How else to explain McCain’s attitude toward Donald Trump as the former presidential candidate dies of a brain abnormality. There’s obviously something wrong with the guy, because even after turning around the economy, bringing peace to North Korea and solving a long list of problems that have plagued White Houses for many years, McCain’s hatred for Trump goes even deeper than sanity would dictate. It was just a week ago that John McCain let it be known that he didn’t want President Trump to attend his funeral. What is the Trump administration supposed to apologize for, Kelly Sadler was telling the truth, and trying in the nicest way possible to explain away the actions of an obviously bitter man in McCain?

Yet of course there is always more going on isn’t there? The calls for the Trump administration to apologize isn’t out of respect, but control. The intentions of the Trump-hating politicians like John McCain was never to solve regional problems, they always intended to use them for more military deployment, larger military budgets and more reasons to conduct legislative monstrosities on Capital Hill. The North Korean problems were always solvable—the kid Kim Jong Un just wanted NBA basketball tickets. He’s been in love with the West for years, he just didn’t know how to get there—after all he had a role to play which he inherited from his own family. Everyone knew that the kid was willing to turn—but nobody acted on it until Trump was elected and now that the little secret is out of the bag, people like John McCain are spiteful that Trump is actually solving problems instead of using those same problems to further the power of the legislative branch by using chaos to gain public opinions. The Never Trumper types out there are angry at Trump for taking away their excuses—they aren’t outraged by porn stars, or Trump’s weekend golf games, they hate him because he does the job he was elected to do and people like McCain never wanted to solve the problems to begin with. People like McCain use problems to stay in power but believe that if they ever solve anything that the public will turn on them and expect results in the future—which incompetent people always fear—results.

This method of control which is being attempted to keep Americans always in a state of guilt to hide the solutions to problems goes back a long time. Even to the point in world history where holes were being dug in the earth to mine gold or coal, lunatics trying to maintain the old order of politics would try to scare away prospectors by proclaiming that nobody should do such things because they might dig their way into the devil’s bedroom and awaken the wrath of Hell for disturbing God’s fallen protégé. Of course, we all know that now to be nonsense, but such arguments have been made in the past to keep mankind clinging to the old so that those who held power could keep it based on the fears of the population. Even men on their dying beds hold such power to be their primary sustenance and they cling to those fears like a hungry person clutches a marinated chicken wing fresh off the grill.

What makes a person a hero is not that they were a prisoner of war, or that they suffered at the hands of an enemy. When Trump made his original comment during the 2016 campaign when he said he liked people who weren’t captured, he was simply stating that in the private sector results matter. Yet in politics there are all these emotional rules we are supposed to follow no matter how bad politicians have been. John McCain the way that the political order of things has established for us, is supposed to be a hero just because he was a POW during the Vietnam War. With that criteria the three guys who were just released from North Korea will be heroes for the rest of their lives, no matter what they do in the world. McCain lost the 2008 election because he had the wrong strategy and he cost Republicans a lot of trouble during the years of Obama. Most recently he voted against the repeal of Obamacare and he has even participated in the leaked dossier which found its way into the FBI hands against Trump. McCain went after the jugular of the Trump presidency many more times than once and we are supposed to overlook them all just because John McCain was captured at one point in his life?

Politicians like John McCain use military service to highlight a larger, more corrosive element of human existence which actually imprisons us all to the aristocracy of ancient times, when modern life has made it quite clear that those old politicians are worthless to our advancements. By highlighting military service as the highest honor an individual can obtain they define self-sacrifice to the “greater good” as being the focus of human existence, which is as wrong as wrong can be. But that’s how they have sold the kind of trouble that politicians have gotten America into over the years, for which ultimately Donald Trump was elected to fix. I have known that this game was a farce for a long time, and I dreamed of having someone like Trump in the White House to fix the philosophical problems presented by statist societies. Because he was a Republican I voted for John McCain in 2008 but he was so embarrassing—always apologizing for things, always insisting that we play nice with all our opponents—and he wonders why he lost. An apology is an admission that something is wrong or that someone committed an improper act. Would John McCain apologize to the United States for holding a personal grudge against President Trump by voting down the Obamacare reform, or in trying to keep the Russian conspiracy alive with fake documents just because he is spiteful that an American businessman was elected president while a POW from the Vietnam War didn’t get elected just because people didn’t feel guilty enough about his service in the military so long ago?

In the logic of the political order we are supposed to ignore everything John McCain says because he is dying, even to the point that we aren’t supposed to talk about it. We are supposed to ignore everything he says because he was a war hero, even though John McCain’s intentions have been quite malicious and personal. What he has done hasn’t been for the good of the country, it has been to satisfy his own yearnings for power by using guilt of service and hardship to cruise his way through frozen opinion that put his actions beyond social judgment—and that is just ridiculous. It is exactly that which caused people to vote for Trump in the first place, and if McCain really loved America, he’d see that. But John McCain doesn’t love America or its role in the world as a beacon of freedom. He loves to use guilt to drive opinion because he’s been doing it most of his life now—using his personal failures such as being captured as a POW to elevate himself beyond opinion so that the political order that he does love could continue to rule mankind through guilt instead of logic—and that is a crime all of itself.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Vote For Jim Renacci Tomorrow: Maintaining a republic means more than just flying flags, you have to make educated votes–even in primaries

It’s not enough to fly American flags in your front yard and to make sure your NRA membership cards are in your wallets. Voting in the primary, especially these days, is a big part of the battle for our modern Republic and it requires your participation. With that said, Donald Trump has been a very active president in moving around the chess pieces for his administration, which I think is a good thing strategically for the Republican Party. Just today one day ahead of the Tuesday vote Trump has come out against Don Blankenship in West Virginia because he’s thinking ahead to the fall elections in unseating an entrenched Democrat. Yet over the weekend Trump came to a roundtable discussion essentially to throw his full weight behind Jim Renacci for the U.S. Senate seat that is designed to unseat another entrenched Democrat in Sharrod Brown. I am a supporter of Jim Renacci, a very enthusiastic supporter in fact, so I was particularly impressed with all that is going on with Donald Trump in his very active presidency that he took the time to come to Cleveland to help Jim out.

I don’t think Renacci needs help, but in a primary election that typically has a low turnout, you never know. It’s best to take nothing for granted. Renacci is really the only person running for the Senate not only in Ohio, but all around the country who could beat someone like Sharrod Brown who is as progressive as they get. He’s equivalent to someone like Elizabeth Warren and the recently ousted Al Franken. Brown has his hooks deep into the Ohio labor unions and they will do as they typically do, show up to support politicians willing to toss huge amounts of money at them. Although I did notice in northern Ohio a drastic change in 2016, those labor unions were supporting Donald Trump for a change, and with Renacci in the race, there is a chance to divide that labor vote getting some to support a Republican for a change. That by itself would be a phenomenal undertaking.

I had a chance to listen to Mike Gibbens on 55 KRC who is challenging Jim Renacci and seems like a nice guy, but he obviously doesn’t have the horsepower to do much in the Republican Party and the Trump administration overall. I admire that he touts himself as an outsider and a business guy, but he’s a bit too naive to fight in the hard battles that are coming to a head for that particular Senate seat. He certainly doesn’t have the Republican Party behind him which if that were a few years ago, I would say would be to his benefit. But a lot has changed, and that Republican Party is Trump’s to lead now, and he’s a guy who knows how to lead, and he’s building his team and Mike Gibbens isn’t on it.

That is the same kind of deal with Don Blankenship in West Virginia. I personally like Don, but Trump knows what he needs, and Blankenship is a little too crazy to win in a standard election. If he were as charismatic as Donald Trump, then some of that craziness would work to his advantage, but like Roy Moore who had made a splash when he touted his gun on stage at one particular event, he was never able to come out from under the pressure of the sex scandal that the Democrats unleashed to destroy him as a person—true or not. Trump has been aggressive in supporting certain kinds of candidates because he’s building a team within the Republican Party and his track record so far has been very consistent.

Also in Ohio is the big decision between Mike DeWine and Mary Taylor for governor. I’m a Mary Taylor kind of guy, it could be argued that DeWine knows how the government works, but that he is also a creature of the swamp. I think if the ballots were cast right now that DeWine would win with the conventional vote, so if you are looking for a change, then Mary will need your vote. If the turnout is low, Mike will likely win. If Mary’s people get out, then she has a chance to win and to challenge the Democrat for the Governor of Ohio this fall. In that election, I think Mary will have the advantage, but to get there she must win tomorrow. As I said, if you stay home and don’t participate, you won’t have a say in how this election turns out—so it’s really important to vote so that a properly elected representative of our Republic is put in place to do what is needed, instead of just an active sector of the Republican Party either defending the swamp or in looking for a pump to dump it.

Yet don’t kid yourself when it comes to Trump. When he gets behind someone as he has with Jim Renacci, he means business. Strategy is the operative word here and after these fall primaries you can bet that Trump is trying to get the seats in congress up over what he needs for votes on his agenda—and Renacci is part of that plan. As usual, Ohio is playing a tremendous role in national politics so voters there play a bigger part in the grand scheme of things and that is something to take very seriously. Don’t assume that the next person will do the job for you, you must assume that your vote may be the deciding factor in many ways, so don’t take it for granted in the least. When the smoke clears, the person you vote for, or the policy you throw your support behind may not win, but you can at least say you did what you had to do by voting. While elections are very emotional things, the essence of the participation is what is required to maintaining a proper representative Republic.

Personally, I am very, very proud of Jim Renacci to have been handpicked by President Trump to go after the Brown seat and that it is important enough for the president to take time out of his weekend to throw his full support behind Renacci. I’ve watched Jim’s campaign from the very start and he has a quiet way of dominating whatever he does, whether it’s in business or in politics and he plays a good compliment to the character of Donald Trump. So I’m very excited for Jim to win the primary and move on to the bigger challenge of beating Sharrod Brown. As I said, I think Mike Gibbens is a pretty good guy, but he just doesn’t have it in the tank to beat someone like Brown. In the primary against Renacci, Jim never really went negative on his opposition whereas Gibbens did. Usually a loser in a race is the one who has to go negative unless they are counter punching, and that wasn’t the case with Gibbens. He was an outsider who needed to make a splash and it never really worked out. I’d like to see Mike Gibbens somewhere in politics in the future, but not for this senate seat in Ohio.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Republicans of Star Wars: Expanding the base with new voters inspired to action by fantasy meeting reality

It was good to see that two Republican politicians that are notable in Ohio politics took a moment on May 4th 2018 to honor the now official Star Wars holiday which takes place every year on that date. Jim Renacci who is running for the Senate seat in Ohio to challenge Sharrod Brown put out the press release displayed below, and Sheriff Jones put out a Tweet that was well received by Star Wars fans. It would be easy for either politician to ignore the Star Wars holiday as both men are over 60 and could plead ignorance to the cultural changes that are taking place artistically by the Disney franchise but they wisely embraced the holiday which was very smart–politically.

Good afternoon,

Today is Friday, May 4th a normal day for many, but die-hard fans of the Rebel Alliance will tell you: it’s Star Wars Day.

The first Star Wars movie to hit theaters (eventually subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope) was released in 1977, 41 years ago. Though this blockbuster franchise has existed for over four decades, career politician Sherrod Brown has worked in politics even longer, first being sworn into office in 1975.

“While Brown has lived in a political bubble for the last 44 years—never bothering to develop real-world experience—Jim Renacci has worked as an entrepreneur for the last three decades, creating more than 1,500 jobs and employing over 3,000 Ohioans.”

— Brittany Martinez, Renacci for Senate Communications Director

I’ve been writing a lot about Star Wars lately for a lot of reasons. Not only am I excited for the new Han Solo movie that is about to come out, but I can’t help but notice a number of things that are happening where politics and entertainment are coalescing together in new and unusual ways. I personally think that the new film Solo: A Star Wars Story will be one of those special movies similar to what happened when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981 and was one of those movies that everyone went to see and was a kind of unifying factor in our society culturally. Most movies that come out don’t have the potential to touch just about everyone who watches them the way that I think this Solo Star Wars film will. When Raiders came out it was a year and a half into the Reagan White House and looking back at how politics and entertainment came together to create a positive decade for America, I can’t help but notice the similarities happening now in 2018. Only I think the potential now is much greater than it was back then. So that prospect has given me great excitement. We are facing a new decade that will not only see mankind visit Mars, but there will be economic expansion that will touch literally every country in the world and their point of entry into those new opportunities will come ironically from Star Wars. People in China and India don’t watch Fox News but they will see Star Wars and be touched by it likely in some way and that will shape their politics in ways that aren’t explored under normal circumstances. But these are not normal days of political development.

I recently wrote of the nature of the Star Wars stories as being best when they are anti-authoritarian, because that was the original vision George Lucas brought to the film series. When Star Wars works best, they are anti-authoritarian art. When Star Wars fails, they are saturated with progressive politics reflective of the creative people who work in the film business. The new people running Lucasfilm and Disney these days are starting to understand that relationship through trial and error, and I think we will see those results in the new Solo: A Star Wars Story movie. Star Wars is not a form of liberal art, it’s a conservative endeavor by its very nature. Even though George Lucas meant it as a reflective form of art from the counter-culture, it was his love of old westerns and 1950s science fiction that set Star Wars apart from everything else that was being produced by Hollywood.

It is hard for liberals to look at themselves and admit that it is the Democratic Party that is all about tyranny and attempting to control people’s lives. They sold the Democratic Party to themselves as the part of civil rights and empowerment, but it was always the Republicans who truly stood for all the things that gave power to individuals and philosophically relied on smaller government to advance a country’s needs. That is why Republicans tend to love Star Wars. Even though the creative people behind Star Wars self-identify as Democrats they philosophically have been making Republican movies because the stories have always been rooted in the traditions of mid-20th Century America. The rejection by fans of elements of Star Wars since the Disney acquisition have been those Democratic elements that just don’t fit with the traditions of the old Saturday morning matinees that inspired George Lucas. Just as Disney would never have been such a massive company if it started out as a liberal enterprise, the origins of both film franchises was rooted in traditional America which Republicans represent.

This is important because if you look at the pod cast shown below where a big show was recorded in a Denny’s to celebrate the upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story which the restaurant chain is promoting, there is a represented fan base there which I would bet are all potential Republicans, yet they don’t currently vote. If you listen to them speak, they sound like Republicans, they are certainly not collectivists, but the political party structure as it currently is does not inspire them to participate. Getting to know elements about the Star Wars movies are much more interesting to them. And I can say that there are many millions of these people out there, they are politically disconnected from the real world, but the politics of Star Wars as a functional mythology philosophically grounded in the traditions of America and being shown all over the world culturally are aligned with them. It would not take much to convince these people to vote Republican, because in so many ways they are already there.

Until Donald Trump came along Republicans allowed themselves to have their messaging controlled by the Democrats who tend to be better at marketing themselves even if they steal all the good stuff from Republicans—like civil rights, women’s rights, and small government ideas. What I see happening is now with a year and a half of Donald Trump and Star Wars really dominating the entertainment landscape, those two things are coming together in a way that should expand party affiliations in favor of the Republicans. Smart Republicans like Jim Renacci and Sheriff Jones already understand that the way to expand their party base is to reach out to Star Wars fans and get them out voting for Republicans in elections.

Even through Bob Iger at Disney is a Democrat, and Ron Howard who directed Solo: A Star Wars Story is not a Donald Trump lover, they have both done a really good job for their responsibilities in the movie business. If they behaved like liberals in their jobs, they obviously would not have done such a good job so it doesn’t take much to win them over too. The new Republican Party under the Donald Trump White House is actually something that social liberals but business conservatives could sign up to be a part of and that would truly be a unifying factor nationally. I think that’s where everything is headed in 2018 so it would be wise to make strategic alignments that would allow for some really special things to happen at this year’s midterms. There are a lot of new voters out there, and in many cases people who have never even thought about voting who could be recruited once they had the doors opened to them by a party who understands them. Republicans are the party for Star Wars fans and any candidate who wants to expand their base should do so with that understanding. While Star Wars is for kids, it has an epistemology that is rooted in American tradition for which the Republican Party best articulates, and that means that special things can happen politically if everything were aligned properly. So it made me very proud to see that Sheriff Jones and Jim Renacci are some of the first party heads to understand that real potential that exists just beyond our fingertips. We are truly in a new age and those who survive best use all the tools in the tool box, not just the ones that used to be cool—but the ones that are cool now.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Elections are the Alternative to Violance: Two more FBI agents quit ahead of mounting legal problems at the agency

The big speech that Donald Trump performed at the NRA meeting in Dallas, Texas culminated one of the most incredible weeks we’ve ever had in the United States. Virtually as Trump spoke two of the FBI agents close to former Director Comey left the agency, the much-maligned Lisa Page and James Baker. Of course, we were told that them leaving was unrelated to the Trump case, but in Baker’s situation he is leaving the FBI as one of its top lawyers and is now going to the Brookings Institute to write a blog on National Security Law. Give me a break, I write a blog every day—it’s not a full-time job. I can promise that Baker won’t be writing more than I do, nor will his content be as thought-provoking, or detailed. So his position at Brookings is simply a place to hide as the FBI hopes that all this mess that James Comey has gotten them into will boil over and they might all return to a normal life. Lisa Page of course was the person having the affair with another FBI lead investigator who muddled up the Hillary Clinton email case quite on purpose for political purposes then wrote all those text messages which are now unraveling the law enforcement agency more day by day as more is learned. Then there was the condemnation from the federal Judge T.S. Elilis III in Virginia Friday May 4th who slapped away the intentions of the Mueller special investigation quite publicly as a political witch hunt of the Donald Trump presidency. Taken individually, all these stories were extraordinary, but put together into the reality for which they represent and we see clearly what was behind the curtain of law and order all along, and it is pretty scary.

We should all hope that we never need our guns to take back our government from people like James Comey, Robert Mueller and useless bureaucrats like Lisa Page and James Baker. I’m sure that Lisa Page is a nice lady to have lunch with, but in her institutional role, she was serving as a vile tyrant using the law to pick and choose political players—along with her lover and companions outlined in those damning text messages found on her phone. It is for this reason, where parts of our government might go ideologically off the radar to take over rule away from the electorate that we have the Second Amendment. It should always be our hopes that we can correct these types of problems through elections, as we have with President Trump. When he goes to the NRA meeting in Dallas and indicates that he is enjoying these big legal fights, it is refreshing, because that’s what it takes. It keeps the rest of us cleaning our guns instead of having to use them to take control of our government again from people like James Comey who were obviously abusing their authority under institutional context.

I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I don’t recognize anybody on planet earth as my “better.” I don’t have a “better,” someone who is intellectually, physically, and morally superior to me in any way. I am a free person born that way and I intend to keep it that way doing whatever needs to be done to see that basic assumption through. I’m willing to be a law-abiding person so long as the law is trustworthy. But if it isn’t I will not submit to the authority of our legal system. To my way of thinking what does it matter if someone is under oath if they don’t believe in God, and the evidence is quite clear that many of these villains revealed by the current FBI are not believers of God—so what do they care if they lie to the public. What is there for them to fear if they don’t fear eternal damnation, because after all isn’t that the basic premise of being under oath? How can someone swear to the truth and nothing but the truth so help them God if they don’t really believe in God, Heaven, Hell and the concept of damnation? Yet many of these characters in modern government don’t believe in such things, instead they believe that government has replaced God which is the basic assumption of progressive society and that is an epistemological failure that defies the nature of our country. Without that basic agreement, there is no law and order which leaves us with two options. Elections which can reset the epistemological premise philosophically so that the United States is functioning on an agreed legal assumption, or violence, to literally destroy the criminals who are trying to take over our government and replace them by force. The Trump presidency has allowed for us to delay the violence in the hopes that elections might still work. But obviously, the Mueller investigation is all about undoing that election, so the situation is tenuous.

I’ve known for a long time that the legal system was rotten in America and like many people have played along to get along because we were not willing to surrender everything to chaos and anarchy. We always had hope that an election here and there would take care of the issue. That is how Trump was born, as a last resort to solve the corrupt nature of our legal and political system starting in Washington D.C. then cascading down through the rest of society through the states and local municipalities. Nobody cares if he had sex with some porn star or even a thousand porn stars. Donald Trump was a playboy who lived in the fast lane most of his adult life. Everyone knew that when they elected him, and they did so because they wanted someone in the Executive Branch who had been there and done it all and wouldn’t be seduced by the power of the office or become hypnotized by the décor of aristocracy. More than all that, he was used to legal threats and he knew how to deal with them when needed. Trump has experience with mob bosses and lawyers, mayors and regulations used to control a process so he was the perfect guy at this point in time to retake the White House for the electorate, and because of that election, it has kept our guns on our shelves. And that has been a good thing.

Yet that is how far we have all come. We are literally on that precipice of civil war where real people will get hurt instead of just a bunch of words being cast at each other. Both ideologies cannot live in the same country, one that wants a big centralized state that progressively controls everything and everyone, and a country run by the Constitution that assumes everyone believes in some concept of God and that the rule of law is rooted in a lack of desire to spend eternity in Hellish damnation. Intellectuals may laugh at the naiveté of our Christian nation to place such trust in oaths of office and moral indignation toward evil, but it’s a pretty good starting point when you have to keep rogue FBI agents from attempting to start their own country behind the mask of a corrupt legal system. They should all consider themselves lucky that there is such a system, because it has prevented a lot of violence. If those basic rights are not respected, that of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then the only next step is to take those guns off the shelves and retake the government by force. Compliance as progressives would assume based on the behavior of their rank and file, is not an option. It is better to see everyone fired at the FBI than to accept the vile conduct that their agents have conducted against the American people by allowing themselves to become weaponized and serve a political party that is specifically strong in the Washington D.C. area, but not around the rest of the country where Republicanism is still quite strong.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Revealing Statement Made by James Comey: Beating the law at their own game

One of the greatest fears that people have is of the law. They think that because our legal system is written in such a way that it defies the type of education that we get in school, and that only specialized lawyers can interpret it for us, that the law is something they cannot defend against. We can protect our homes and families with guns, but when it comes to the law we are at the mercy of specialists and the court system which we all innately know can be leveled against us to serve the interests of our enemies. We know and understand that if our enemies want to come after us that we might have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to keep what we had before the legal incursion—so when the law comes after you, it means to destroy you and can be quite vicious. The law is never about individuals, it’s essentially about the institution of normality which has been established through collective case-law, to impose the order of the masses against individualized effort. That made James Comey’s comments recently particularly powerful when he spoke about his wishes that Hillary Clinton were president and what impact that might have had on his future. To me this one comment encapsulates the entire case against Donald Trump from the Mueller investigation, the Rod Rosenstein rebellion and the general behavior of the FBI over the last three years toward presidential politics:

“I think I would still be the FBI director…Secretary Clinton is someone deeply enmeshed in the rule of law, respect for institutions, a lawyer,” Comey said in response to a question about what he thought would have happened to him if Clinton had won the election.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/comey-id-still-have-a-job-if-hillary-clinton-won/ar-AAwAQcN?ffid=gz

Then consider what Rosenstein said about the mounting pressure to submit documents to House Republicans, that the Justice Department was not going to be extorted—obviously he forgets who he works for. Yet in the context of what James Comey has said, now with everyone under great pressure, pressure that the FBI, CIA, and all the career bureaucrats within the Department of Justice have never had to contend with in their entire lives—they are starting to say what they really think and we are learning a great deal about the values of our legal institutions which were always at the cores of our fears. Confirmations of our worst nightmares has surfaced, in a constructive way.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/justice-dept-won’t-be-extorted-rosenstein-warns-republicans/ar-AAwBVNM?OCID=ansmsnnews11

You should never have to fear the law unless you are up to bad things, but that’s not what we are talking about in this case. The people who are having their lives destroyed because they are somehow affiliated with Donald Trump’s acquisition of the Executive Branch wouldn’t find themselves in the trouble they are in now if they had not fallen on the wrong side of politics and that is the danger. We don’t elect people like Rob Rosenstein to office, we elect presidents who do fill those positions, so everyone in the Justice Department works for the President and should be more respectful. Comey should have been more respectful before he decided to leak information to his friend to inspire the special investigation that Robert Mueller is now conducting on his witch hunt, which is all it is at this point. The institutions of government as formed by ideological moderates in both the Republican and Democratic parties are using this investigation to keep an aggressive president from changing their good life as politicians being enriched by a corrupt process. They have been using for years the institution of law and order to preserve their racket, and its very disgusting. In the past when there have been challenges to the institutional system, those people were destroyed by James Comey and Rod Rosenstein—and people lost their net worth’s and even went to jail fighting the law which was protecting a corrupt band of Washington politicians.

People like James Comey have sold the purity of their institutional roles to themselves by not looking at the corruption which created the laws, but on the laws themselves as law enforcement officers. In a similar way that a cop collecting traffic citations to raise money for the local municipality will tell their victims, “I’m only enforcing the law” they rid themselves of the responsibility for the imposition by not paying attention to how that money is spent. They surrender their judgment to the greater aspect of the institutions they serve. Maybe city council members swipe money out of the coffers to pay for strippers in Las Vegas, or perhaps to fund a new government project that helps them get elected at the next election cycle, the money and how its used is of no mind to the law enforcement officer—they are only there to enforce the law. In the same way, Comey has surrendered his thoughts to the merits of law enforcement choosing not to deal with the corruption of the laws in the first place, and why they were created. In Comey’s world and that obviously of Rob Rosenstein, lying to the public isn’t hard because they are protecting the merits of the institutions that they serve, and in their world that is task they are bound to by duty. They don’t see anything wrong with doing such a thing because they are protecting the institution for which they are a part. When Comey said of Clinton that she had respect for institutions, what he meant is that like him, Hillary Clinton put individual value behind the need of institutions to function. He is blind to someone like her who functions beyond the scope of institutions because she has always been one of the law makers which formed the institutions in the first place. That’s why his statement is so interesting and revealing.

Many people in life associate their value by the role they serve in the greater world of their occupations. A lawyer will introduce themselves at a dinner party as such—an engineer will as well. A FBI Director likely will think of themselves completely by the role they play in society—not necessarily as a dad, a husband, or perhaps a collector of coins, Legos or baseball cards. What they do for a living is what they are to the world at large—they base their value on their status within the institutions they serve. However, thinking in such a way can make such people weapons against the innocent because those who control those institutions might be malicious and up to no good and if law and order can’t be counted on to protect the innocent, then who can? The answer is nobody. Comey, Rosenstein, Mueller and many others are functioning from this assumption that they were the top of the food chain of institutional value, and that their jobs were bigger than the Executive Branch. This occurred because previous presidents yielded to the awesome power we’ve given to our institutions of law and order, because of that basic fear we all have of the law, that we think we aren’t smart enough to translate laws for ourselves and need lawyers to protect us from that scary foreign language.

The case against Trump by the federal government is exposing this massive weakness in institutional judgment. The law is clearly on the wrong side of history and now they are finding themselves caught in the quandary of their own failed philosophies. It’s not enough to say to the world that they “serve” the institutions of law and order when we can see clearly that those institutions have been used against us for years, and now that we have a president in the Executive Branch we are seeing things we always suspected clearly for the first time, and we—the electorate—don’t like it.

We should not have to fear our own system of law and order. The institutions of the FBI and other government agencies should never seek to impose themselves on the public with fancy terminology that can only be interpreted by an overpaid specialist or the judges they play golf with on the weekends. If the law doesn’t serve the people of our Republic, then it’s no good. And Donald Trump was elected by us to represent our needs, and if the institution is picking a war with him, they are essentially picking a fight with all of us. And I can say this as a guy who has fought the law many, many, many times—sometimes even representing myself as legal counsel—I’m not going to take it. That’s for sure. While its true, I do have a lot of guns to protect myself from thugs, better than that I have a mind that isn’t afraid of any lawyer or judge. And neither should you dear reader. If you want our Republic to work properly, you need to stop fearing our own legal system, and to take command of it. Voting for a good person in the Executive Branch isn’t enough, obviously.

It’s time to change the title to this song–because they “ain’t” going to win this time.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Vote for Jim Renacci: Trump endorses the Ohio candidate to take on Sharrod Brown’s Senate seat in 2018

The primary election is now under a week away and in Ohio I will be voting very enthusiastically for Jim Renacci for the U.S. Senate. For me there isn’t even a close second. Renacci is the guy who should be the Republican nominee to go after the Sherrod Brown seat this fall, and is best poised to represent the new Trump agenda. So its important that when May 8th comes around that you don’t just sit home and skip the primary vote. Go vote and cast a vote for Jim Renacci, because you can’t take anything for granted these days. We are living in a time of great change, for the better I might add, but to keep that momentum going, you must participate even if in small ways. A vote on May 8th is a small thing, but it all adds up to big things. Even with all that’s going on in the world for which President Trump is a part of he took time recently to officially endorse Jim Renacci:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 1, 2018

Wadsworth, Ohio—Today, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Renacci, received the endorsement of the the Trump Campaign which comes on the heels of President Trump’s personal endorsement last week.

“I am humbled to have received the Trump campaign’s endorsement for U.S. Senate, in addition to President Trump’s recent personal endorsement for my candidacy. I am proud of my record as a strong advocate for the President’s America First agenda and l look forward to continuing to advance that cause in the United States Senate,” said Jim Renacci.

I enjoyed watching the West Virginia Senate debate on Fox News where there is a similar battle going on there as in Ohio. A Republican is looking to knock off a long-held Democratic Senate seat to put the numbers more in Trump’s favor. It’s a strategy that the mainstream media is ignoring in hopes that people won’t notice, but the GOP is very active in this regard in 2018, led largely by the Trump White House. My pick by the way in West Virginia for which I have many readers is of course Don Blankenship. He’s a business guy and he was prosecuted and sent to jail for many of the same reasons Sheriff Joe Arpaio was prosecuted in Arizona. I think it takes a lot of guts to step right out of jail and run for a Senate seat at the federal level taking on an entrenched incumbent. A few years ago such a thing would be unheard of, but in 2018, why the hell not. We’re looking for people in these seats who want America to win and will fight to make it so—even when they have had to face down personal adversity to such extremes. The Blankenship case is one of those types of political stories where the Obama administration was at war with the coal industry and was seeking to weaken it. Blankenship was the CEO of a number of large coal mines all over West Virginia and when an accident happened that killed several people, the Obama Department of Justice used the power it controlled to put a CEO in jail. It was Obama’s way of showing the world that socialism was the new trend in America and that CEOs weren’t safe under the new socialist oriented president.

Jim Renacci in Ohio isn’t nearly as controversial as Blankenship but he could tell similar stories about how the federal government abused him as a private businessman. Jim as an entrepreneur has been very successful and one of his big enterprises was a General Motors Dealership that he ran around the time that GM went bankrupt. Due to a long story of government tampering and a congressman in his district who happened to be a Democrat, Jim reached out to try to save his dealership from the GM collapse. When the Democratic congressman lied to Renacci leading to a series of events where Jim lost his dealership anyway, Jim did the most noble thing he could do at the time, and that was run against that Democrat and beat him to take his senate seat away from him.

Jim Renacci is a fighter, but not in a crazy way, in the careful and precise way that top business executives are—which is the trend for where the Trump controlled Republican Party is moving—thankfully. And that is why President Trump sought Jim out of the crowd to run for the Sharrod Brown seat. Trump needs more senators on Capital Hill and he wants Jim to be one of them. But he also needs someone who can beat an entrenched Democrat to take that seat away, which is how we have arrived at this place in time under these specific circumstances.

The politics of yesterday where fizzled out lawyers and old lobbyists try to get elected to one of the two parties for a chance to become American aristocrats enhancing their social lives greatly in destructive ways without ever being expected to do anything meaningful while in office is over. Now that Trump has won the Executive Branch and is doing a very good job, former business executives like Jim Renacci are getting serious looks where they hadn’t before, and for the first time we are looking at staffing a government not with political hacks, but actual people of real world accomplishment. Who couldn’t like the reasons that Jim Renacci got into politics and his record thus far as a true conservative? Jim is just the kind of person I think every elected position should have in it, if only there were enough good people out there like Jim Renacci.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet Jim Renacci a few times now, one time was when he was traveling on Air Force One with President Trump to visit a local manufacturing plant in southern Ohio. He’s as solid of a person I’ve ever meet as a politician, he’s the real deal, and Trump knows it. Being handpicked by Donald Trump, when it comes to the upcoming fall, the President will come to Ohio several times to help push Jim over Sharrod Brown, and that would be good for everyone. But Trump won’t do the same for those he hasn’t handpicked, because he knows how to tell who the losers are and who the winners will be, and his time is too valuable for losers. Given that qualifier, Trump has already put a considerable amount of time into Jim Renacci, and very early in the process. So if you are a Trump supporter, it is very important to help that overall effort out by voting this upcoming Tuesday, May 8th in the primary.

I think the primary elections in May are every bit as important as the fall elections in November, but often only a fraction of the potential electorate shows up to participate. Don’t be one of those people who stay home that day. Jim Renacci needs your vote, and so does Donald Trump. To keep this conservative reform going that we are currently undergoing, we need fresh troops on the line and Jim Renacci is one of those new, fresh faces that are so badly needed in the Senate. So vote for him and help us turn the corner to the next great battle—the Sharrod Brown Senate Seat!

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.