Tag: Teachers Unions

Tear Down the Statue of Liberty: Understanding what immigration should be and knowing real history

As a very strong advocate of President Trump and his policies I am in a good position to defend the reasons that we want to build a wall. Only stupid people thinking in a negative below the line way would think that the reason is racism. The actual cause is to inspire more above the line thinking which stupid people are terrified of, so their only defense is to accuse above the line thinkers of racism. But in all honesty the need for the wall at the American southern border is to defend the values of the nation from those who don’t share those values and it has nothing to do with racism. Even deeper than that however is the need to defend America from its domestic enemies, any below the line thinkers who seek to destroy the concept of America who are now gathered under the clear tent of Democrat politics. I’ve had the benefit of watching my son-in-law go through a naturalization ceremony where he had to swear as a new American citizen to defend our Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic, and it was quite serious when placed in that context. Well, the Democrats have positioned themselves as clear domestic enemies and they are on full assault, so its time that we make it clear what this fight is really about. Don’t negotiate with them, destroy them!

The Statue of Liberty is a part of recent American history, there is a lot more to the concept of freedom and liberty that were in place well before the French gave us that statue which resides in the harbor of New York. It was commissioned in 1886 by President Cleveland at the start of the progressive movement in New York City so any references to the Statue of Liberty and the role it plays in immigration are tainted at best. Elis Island where the Statue of Liberty resides then became the first immigration station in the United States from 1892 to 1954 where roughly 12 million immigrants passed through on their path to citizenship. This is why progressives are particularly fond of the Statue of Liberty and keep using it as a reference to illegal immigration at the southern border, because the whole concept of a processing station with the Statue of Liberty looming over the process is one born in the heart of progressive politics in America to begin with in the very recent past.

It was Emma Lazarus who wrote the famous words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty,

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

She was part of the movement that was trying to raising money for a permanent home for the Statue of Liberty as it had been touring around since the French gave it to us. She was close personal friends with the progressive economist Henry George who wrote the terrible book Progress and Poverty, which ultimately inspired Emma to write what she did. That is why progressives in our modern era are so quick to point at the Statue of Liberty and attempt to unite the entire country behind their cause. Personally, I think we should tear down the damn thing. If you want to put up a symbol of American values in the harbor in New York for the world to see, it should be someone like John Wayne who much more embodies the values of America rather than the statue of a French designer who was part of the progressive era as it was born in New York society to grow like a massive disease to attempt to destroy American civilization.

There is a reason under capitalism that people are poor, it’s because they are lazy. In a capitalist society, which is something Henry George was debating, effort is the key to earning a good living. If you have that basic approach, you can do well in America. If you don’t, then you won’t, or wouldn’t until the progressive era corrupted politics with all their social reforms that made it so that people were less inspired to work hard and more inspired to think below the line such as is common in the labor movement which is another progressive era invention. Henry George and Emma Lazarus were some of the first people in America to propose a land tax which came directly out of this quote from his 1879 book Progress and Poverty:

Take now… some hard-headed business man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: “Here is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city—in ten years the railroad will have taken the place of the stage-coach, the electric light of the candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will in ten years, interest be any higher?” He will tell you, “No!” “Will the wages of the common labor be any higher…?” He will tell you, “No the wages of common labor will not be any higher…” “What, then, will be higher?” “Rent, the value of land. Go, get yourself a piece of ground, and hold possession.” And if, under such circumstances, you take his advice, you need do nothing more. You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon or down a hole in the ground; and without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota of wealth to the community, in ten years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious mansion, but among its public buildings will be an almshouse.

–Translation, Henry George is proposing that the hard-headed businessman must be compelled to donate their riches to the “community.” That the wealth they create isn’t a value of its own which makes a town into a city or electricity to replace the candle. What the Statue of Liberty represents isn’t freedom, but compulsion as proposed by early progressives who are below the line thinkers trying to hide their negative vantage point behind do-gooding.

The below the line progressives and their modern Democrats are what early Americans fled from in Europe yet they followed with immigration the efforts of those frontiersman and adventurers who came before and built New York City with ambition and capitalist yearning. Below the line thinkers like Henry George saw this wealth and wanted to tax it, and his little girl friend Emma Lazarus adopted his ideas and stuck them on the side of a statue the French gave us as if they understood American capitalism and that is how the first immigration station started in America, which was a disaster from the beginning. Immigration is a fact of life when something has value and people are leaving areas of low value to seek a better life. But Emma missed the point, her entire quote was inspired by an economic below the line thinker who wanted to tax land owners as his great contribution to thought.

Resistance to illegal immigration isn’t to protect America from a “browning” of it from people south of the border, but in ensuring that the people who do come into America want to protect its Constitution and not to overthrow it. Hidden behind their proposals are the below the line efforts of the Statue of Liberty founders who were not rugged American capitalists. The debate isn’t about preventing all people into America through immigration but in letting in the best and brightest, not the perpetual poor, lazy, and drug addicted. Some people you don’t want in your country. People lacking value are some of them, and its time to have that debate instead of retreating back to some stupid words that Emma said on the Statue of Liberty. In fact, its time that we just take that damn thing down and use some other symbol of American value that is more properly representative of our present circumstances, like a gun that is there to protect the land owner from bleeding heart progressives like Henry George from using public resources to steal money from those making it, because he thinks he’s morally inclined to do so and to distribute that wealth to below the line thinkers who didn’t earn it to begin with. The debate is really about values and who has them and who doesn’t.

Rich Hoffman

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It’s Good to be Hated: Consider it an honor

It is actually quite a compliment to be hated. Being hated is a very healthy thing. Its one thing to point to a big national figure like Donald Trump and say that people hate him, and for good reason. It’s quite another to look at a new executive in any business who brings in their wake great change and to say that they are hated. But in essence, the hatred is a needed element and is something that should be sought out, not avoided. If everyone loves you, you are doing something wrong, and not pushing the world around you as much as you should be to above the line thinking.

It never made any sense to me why we have taught people in our culture that the most important thing in the world was to seek being liked by our peers. I suppose for me it has taken roughly ten years of writing articles over 1000 words each coupled with many interesting life experiences to hone the issue down to simply Above the Line Thinking and Below the Line Thinking. I had to re-read The Oz Principle for a business need, which is a brilliant book. But after all the personal work that I have done, it really made a lot more sense to me now than it had previously. Its one thing to read a book like that and agree with it. It’s quite another to understand it at a deep philosophical level and be able to use it. Many of our problems in the world do simply come down to below the line thinking and above the line thinking as proposed in The Oz Principle.

But that wasn’t the first time that humans figured out the problem, The Oz Principle is a business take on The Wizard of Oz which was a very empowering story about not being a victim in life, and getting what you need at the end of a hero’s journey. Dorothy and her little dog didn’t do anything to be hated by the Wicked Witch but exist, much like the rest of us. All Dorothy did was get caught in a whirlwind and land on the sister of the Witch with her house. It was an accident, yet Dorothy was made to feel she owed something to the evil spinster. All Dorothy wanted to do was return to Kansas and help people along the way. Nobody in the world should have hated her for it, yet they did. It was unavoidable. It always is for people who are good to be hated by those who are bad.

So what is good and bad, well, simply bad people are below the line thinkers who scheme and plot to get others to join them there. Below the line thinking is victimhood mentality, thinking negatively about things, trying to keep the world suppressed to your weaknesses so that you as a below the line thinker are not outmatched by others. Below the line thinkers love the idea of equality for all because it gets them off the hook to perform. This is why politics is such a below the line activity, and why we instinctively think of it as an evil enterprise. Above the line however is where the good are, they are positive people always looking to improve the world around them. They take personal responsibility for actions and are always advancing intellectually because of it. Judging the good from the bad is simply that easy.

In the corporate world it happens all the time, a consultant is hired or a charismatic new CEO who comes in as an above the line thinker and changes the world of the below the liners, and it is safe to say that those employees hate that new element. They hate above the line thinkers because it demands on them performance, they are too lazy, or too corrupt to compete with. So the dominate emotion is sheer hatred. I grew up with a pretty good understanding of these things before I ever read The Oz Principle, but as I got older I understood the futility of making other people happy really early in my life. Instinctively I understood that if people disliked you, that you were doing something very right. Now in my life I understand that the more people do dislike me or hate me, the better I am doing in the world. If everybody loves you, then you are socializing with too many below the line thinkers and are becoming one of them yourself. Above the line thinkers, good people, are much fewer in number among populations because of the difficulty in being an above the line person. It is much easier to be scarecrows in life using The Wizard of Oz metaphor a bit, just doing our jobs and staying put where people tell us to be, then in going down the yellow brick road to a moment of self-discovery to find out all along we had everything we needed within ourselves. Its much easier to blame others for our problems than to take responsibility for them and to solve them. Most people spend their entire lives like the tin man or the scare crow blaming others for their withering condition when all they really need to do is to follow Dorothy to their own personal freedom. But guess what, they want to keep it that way, because it’s easy to just stand in a field and rot away. It takes a great effort to walk around and change your circumstances and when some above the line leaders crosses your path and evokes you to move along, great resentment and hatred do become the dominating emotions. But so what.

Once you understand that everything essentially comes down to above the line and below the line thinking, everything in the world makes much more sense, especially in politics. If the world believes that Donald Trump is a good president because lots of people love him then merit would be given to his faults due to so many below the line thinkers hating him. But as my way of thinking persists, since lots of people hate him, he is doing a great job as president because he is encouraging them to think above the line and they clearly don’t want to. That isn’t his problem, its theirs.

Everyone should aspire to be an above the line thinker, there is nothing good that comes out of below the line thinking. Forget about political affiliations, gender roles, skin color, nothing matters more than people who are above the line thinkers. Everyone should aspire to be one. Everyone, without exception. But so long as there are below the line people functioning in the world, there will be conflict and hatred. And that conflict is good, it’s needed, and its very healthy. Without above the line thinkers there would never be advancements in human society. And without them there would never be a challenge to evil. The true definition of the battles of good and evil come down to above and below the line thinking. The two are not compatible, they cannot negotiate together, and one must destroy the other. So the hatred that is directed at good, above the line thinkers is one of the greatest compliments that can be given. It means that you are doing it right, and good things do come about as a result—so long as you can teach yourself not to care about their opinions.

Rich Hoffman

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We Should Terminate all 800,000 Government Workers from the Shutdown: All federal labor unions should be illegal

One of the things I’m not going to do anymore is provide an equal argument to the inefficiencies of government, to ponder why they are so slow, inefficient and corrupt when we all know why. So why waste the time? The important elements are in identifying the problem, teaching people why its unacceptable, and correcting the situation for real in the future. And the government shutdown is one of those things that happen from time to time when reality meets the fantasy of government, and no legitimate business person in the world could look at the proposals of government and even suggest sanity. The assumptions made that people care about a government shutdown are preposterous. The rate of pay is also preposterous, many of the 800,000 jobs who are not receiving a pay check over the government shutdown would be eliminated in the private sector due to business needs anyway. Much of the demand is artificial. When I hear Democrats trying to pull on our heart-strings that those 800,000 workers are not able to pay their mortgage or their car payments and that we should be willing to toss away billions of dollars and re-open the government just so they can do so, I hear the efforts at lunacy only. It’s an insane proposal that they are making. The government shouldn’t be opening to accommodate those 800,000 jobs, those jobs should be eliminated. They should seek new jobs in the growing economy and in the private sector. That is the real issue, yet nobody has come close to addressing it.

For so many years on this site I have provided instances where government workers make a lot more than private sector workers, on average. Where CEOs do make millions on occasion, average government workers functioning under a socialist labor union are artificially inflated by their wage rate. True market conditions do not have a say in the matter because the money is stolen from the tax payers and distributed insanely to their work force, who often are extremely inefficient. In private business there is a kind of subculture of what we call “fix it men and women” who go into an organization and straighten them out in all matters of production, and the companies thrive as a result. The current replacement for General Mattis as Defense Secretary is Patrick Shanahan who was a “fix it man” at Boeing. The assumption was that General Mattis, or “Mad Dog” as they were calling him was a far superior candidate because of his military service while Shanahan wouldn’t know what he was doing. In reality the situation is quite the opposite. Private industry experiences where lean manufacturing techniques are applied to increase the efficiency of an enterprise are far better than a military general who learns authority driven process controls and constant yielding to authority, for which politics often is the typical holder of power.

The problem with Mattis turned out that he was a “mad dog” as in he turned out to be a Democrat. You don’t always know this about people until you get to know them but that left leaning political philosophy comes with it inefficiency and apathy by the nature of their existence. It’s easy to talk a good game about how to remove troops from the Middle East or the perpetual war in Afghanistan, but after a few years of no results and asking why, that is when the Democrat side of people come out, such as with terms like “compassion,” “troop strength,” and “we’ll solve the problem next year.” Only government can get away with such below the line thinking, in fact government was entirely constructed to give below the line people a means to make livings and compete in the world. In all my years of doing lots of things with government I seldom find above the line people working among their below the line ranks. OF course, by using such terms I’m referring to The Oz Principle, which is a fairly famous book on business management and the types of people who contribute to productive enterprise, and those who must be overcome.

For days now regarding the government shutdown and the replacement of Mattis as the Secretary of Defense and putting the private industry guru Shanahan in charge, Democrats have continued to insist that we all had an obligation to the inefficiencies of the past, that we shouldn’t even ask if the 800,000 workers missing out on a paycheck during the shutdown were even needed. Of course, they aren’t, we could discharge them tomorrow and nobody would even notice. So why do we have them, just to pay them a pay check? And why are there any government unions attached to these workers saying anything about anything? All government labor unions should be made illegal, immediately. They only drive up the costs to tax payers without any added benefit. A lot of times “fix it” people in private practice have to go into a union shop and break up the command that “the people” have over management and to reinvigorate management to engage with employees in ways that offset the benefits they get from a labor union. It can be tricky business, but the job gets done and organizations most often live happily ever after. But in government no such thing ever occurs. The unions run everything and there is no real management of anything. If there was one thing that people in Washington D.C. really hated about Trump it’s that he is a manager functioning from the White House. Government workers don’t want management or any expectation of success, they just want their overly high paycheck and to use it to live a life of unrewarded excess, meaning they live large, but they didn’t earn that right. Which is how they end up corrupt.

In a book store you can find countless books on how to make business work better, but not a single book on how to make a government job more efficient. That’s because we have allowed the government worker to become insulated from reality. And since they have no competition, they actually think they can stand in front of us and declare how important they are when 800,000 workers are suddenly out of a paycheck and demanding to reopen the government. I would say to them, consider those jobs gone. Those 800,000 should be getting private sector jobs and moving on in life instead of waiting around for the government to reopen. If we really wanted to solve the problem of government inefficiency, we would start behaving in such a way and get rid of these ridiculous labor unions which only exist because the tax payers are forced to fund them due to no other options available. Its like being forced to buy a car from General Motors while the quality is terrible because the employees are smoking pot on every break and don’t care about the product. We have government workers who are just as bad and they are in that 800,000 number, and technically they shouldn’t have a job. Their labor unions have made management of their positions impossible and made them too expensive for what we get in services. And this government shutdown finally reveals the truth of how little we really need them. Which is why Trump needs to hold out for his border wall money. People need to know that all these government positions weren’t really needed to begin with. And instead of reopening the government just so they can get a paycheck, we should eliminate their positions all together. And this is one way to do it.

Rich Hoffman

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Comey is Shit out of Luck: The FBI allowed for the destruction of 19,000 text messages laying out the biggest case of corruption in American history

Did you see that dear reader, James Comey after his testimony in front of congress is revealing the really radical bias that was always there under his command of the FBI. The pressure is getting to the former Director as all his tentacles of influence have yet failed to remove President Trump from office and now that we know that over 19,000 text messages were deleted under the careful watch of Bob Mueller, Comey’s friend and special counsel investigator, that real trouble is on the horizon. The Republicans that Comey is pleading to for help are the ones who are dying off and retiring, because they can’t hack the game. The new Republicans are the ones that were always there, but did not have a voice. Market circumstances in the world of politics have changed that ratio however, and now they are showing up to pass judgment, and Comey clearly doesn’t like it. His blame of these new ways of looking at things is misplaced on Trump and his supporters. Comey forgets that one didn’t make the other, its only that the protective blankets for which he had operated have been pulled away leaving him exposed, and like a child having those covers stripped away in the middle of the night in a dark, cold room, it’s a terrifying proposal.

You have to consider what Comey was really expressing when he spoke to reporters after the hearings on December 17th 2018, he wanted a step back into the good ol’ days where Republicans were lap dogs to radically disguised Democrats operating as conservatives and setting the agenda of thought. And those Republicans didn’t ever do anything to upset the apple cart even though there were many good reasons for doing so. Such an approach allowed Jim Comey and his friends in the intelligence community to believe that they were philosopher kings of political discourse and operated immune from performance or scrutiny so that they could define what was good in the world and protect that good even if it meant breaking the law on occasion—or perhaps often. Of course, when you are the law enforcement’s top cops, they were functioning under the assumption that anything they did was lawful, because they knew better than anybody else.

When I did a CNN segment on the truthfulness of James Comey a few years ago I knew then there was something very fishy about the guy. I wanted to believe him, like most of America did. He looked the part of a top cop and he seemed polite and considerate, the way you’d expect someone given great powers to behave. But it seemed like a ruse based on little things that he said that didn’t quite make sense and what evolved over the subsequent months was a guy who had been a public servant, and a kind of beta man to his wife and daughters within his family to a sudden celebrity allowed to come out from under a rock and get a taste of the lime light, and he liked it. So the Hillary Case gave him a place on the front pages of history with presidential candidates and the highest echelons of politics and he let the appeal of it all suck him in.

He tampered with the evidence probably to make his wife happy, who was a Hillary Clinton supporter, and it probably made him a big man within his family for a while. He likely also enjoyed the ass kissing people from both sides awarded him with in the days leading up to the election. He had allowed his agents reporting directly to him to become radicalized into overturning the results of the election and they had to cover it up. But now they’ve been caught and he would desperately like to erase his part in it all. His first mistake was when he allowed the Attorney General Loretta Lynch to take a secret meeting with Bill Clinton and turn it into a deal to erase the Hillary Clinton email investigation as if it never happened. So under pressure he came out and spelled the case out so that he could maintain his reputation as the honest Boy Scout within the ranks of the FBI, but also tell the world there was nothing to see. As he said, no reasonable prosecutor would seek a case against Hillary because she was covered by the Obama White House and nobody would want their record tarnished with an impossible case. So with that Comey hoped everything would just ride off into the sunset and the FBI and himself would live happily ever after.

But Trump won the election………………….

Now the FBI had to play clean up because their fingerprints were all over the email corruption as they had allowed for the destruction of evidence and a behavioral practice of picking winners and losers in the election. If Trump really meant what he said to Hillary during the debates about locking her up, and by the way the Trump supporters had behaved at political rallies, there was a real danger to the FBI in getting caught. So Comey directed his agents to use the FISA courts to spy on the Trump transition team so that they could gather some kind of dirt to bust the incoming administration on anything they could discover so that Trump himself would never be able to conduct a proper investigation into what the FBI had done. Using the Russian dossier paid for by the DNC Comey sought to use it to extort Trump into a compliant relationship with the FBI. And just in case the plan went south Comey leaked his confrontations with President Trump to the media so that a special investigation against the Trump administration could occur in case Comey was fired for his activism, which he was in May of 2017.

By now Trump was supposed to be crushed and his administration in shambles, but it hasn’t turned out that way. The midterms did not go strongly for Democrats. Sure they filled some seats being vacated by Rino Republicans who were largely Never Trumpers, but they didn’t make any real ground as hoped, and things look very strong for Trump in 2020. There aren’t any Democrats to run against him and his approval ratings are great in spite of the constant negative press. People just aren’t listening, so the old tricks haven’t work leaving Comey wondering what’s next. He has literally tried to do everything to keep investigations into his investigators on their heels and wrapped in chaos. And now we know the Mueller team actually destroyed more evidence, so Comey’s plans have come unraveled rather spectacularly. His activism is now unleashed, and raw and real trouble is on the horizon for him, even though the Washington D.C. culture is more than willing to run cover for him as long as they can. Because after all, if Comey goes down, most of Washington D.C. will as well as they are all guilty of government activism on some level or another. And that leaves James Comey, shit out of luck.

You can see it on his face too. He knows it, he’s not stupid. He’s just corrupt, corrupted in many ways. He is and was the well-intentioned radical who thought government ran the people and that the FBI ran the government. He lost his place in history and his grip on reality. Because now he knows the hard way that his assumptions about things were completely wrong, and that old Boy Scout innocence that he has used all these years just doesn’t work anymore, because we know the truth about him. And he has nowhere left to hide.

Rich Hoffman

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The Amazing VSS Unity: History was made this week and the implications are enormous

In case you didn’t hear it, big news occurred this past week, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic company became the first to send commercial astronauts into space. It looks like within six months Branson himself will be going up as well making 2019 the year space travel became commercialized and a whole new economy was unleashed. Even though Richard Branson is a liberal a big thing happened that will redefine the parameters of political thinking and it’s quite exciting to watch. Even with all the negative news that is out there is a silver lining to it all. An old static order is giving way to exciting new adventures and Virgin Galactic has taken the unlikely step of being the facilitator of great change. The Virgin Galactic efforts weren’t as big of news as the moon landing, but it was close. Its one thing for a government to use all its resources in a space race against another government. It’s quite another to have a small, nimble company taking off from the ground of a desert runway and launching a vessel into space without the violent escape velocity of an earth-bound rocket.

The VSS Unity spacecraft is actually a brilliant design that leaves a lot of modifications open to future growth. The variations of that type of space travel is quite extensive which essentially makes it so that travelers can literally leave a ground-based space station and ride comfortably off the runway into a deep space destination without the violent thrust of a rocket launch. While the rockets that Blue Origin and SpaceX are designing are very much-needed for payload off planet, the Virgin design is a game changer that makes becoming an astronaut something everyday people can experience. And I couldn’t help but think of how much of the current chaos in the news is necessary so that this new race into space can happen. As twisted as things can sometimes look it is an amazing trait of human intelligence to know how to give itself a self-fulfilled prophesy.

I was at a Game Stop the other day buying Christmas presents when I overheard several conversations going on around me as I browsed video game titles on the shelf. The sheer variety of inventory items in that story that were related to new mythological sequences of thought were astounding. If you considered where things were in the Middle Ages where the printing press had just come along and gave people the ability to print copies of Bibles to read, the Enlightenment period wasn’t far off due to the sudden ability of people to actually be able to own a book and to read it. Now in a simple store like Game Stop there was so much intellectual material available for just pleasant consumption that the bridge from way back there to here was quite long and dangerous. While the Midlevel Bible reader couldn’t even contemplate space travel, Game Stop shoppers literally had infinite possibilities to consider just such thoughts, and that is a very new phenomena. When you add that to the Weekly Standard magazine going out of business, as well a much of the current media culture soon to follow, and the absolute erosion of the Washington D.C. lobby culture happening under President Trump. Much of the conflict between the president of the United States and the world is very much-needed for this exciting new stage that is occurring presently.

In the business world there are lots of consultants, some good, most bad, who sell themselves as change agents for the production culture. This dynamic force is needed to clear out the stagnate elements of a company that keep it from growing. So even bad consultants can have a positive impact on a culture due to their dynamic effect against static resistance. What makes some bad and good is relative to how well those changes stick, or how the moment the consultants leave, the previous culture reverts back to its old ways of doing things. Change isn’t just good, it’s necessary to always keep innovation moving in a positive direction. Currently in our political system Donald Trump is a radical force that is clearing out all the siloed thinking that has ruined most of America’s institutions and allowed a very static world to hold innovation down to a level they could still control for their own benefit. But that doesn’t help any of us advance. So relative to the timing of this new commercial space race the Trump presidency couldn’t have come sooner. The current policies of deregulation, economic expansion and general positive outlook and support for NASA has literally unleashed a pent-up potential that is quite explosive, and the effects will be extensive. Richard Branson couldn’t have hoped for a better fortune in the current circumstances because the media is so focused on Trump that the primitive naysayers to everything innovative don’t have time to pick these new space companies apart, much the way they did in the days after the moon landing.

Just like in a typical business culture there are always two forces at work, one that has a reverence for how things have been, the primitive—the static forces. Then there are the dynamic forces, the people who want change, who love to invent and be creative. When America launched man to the moon for the first time in 1969 the primitive revelers were getting ready to have the music festival Woodstock which represented the old static order. On the surface they appeared to be the crazy anarchists wanting to change America’s traditional culture into something much more socialist. But this was a ruse, the real intent was to keep America and the world from becoming a more technological place that wanted to grow up and leave the comfort of mother earth. So thus, the need for change agents and when one never came along the world was plunged back into the Dark Ages. For a short time, Ronald Regan brought forth the kind of optimism we are starting to see again now, but it quickly was crushed by the fifth year of his presidency. The Space Shuttle program that had already been started during the great space race withered away and died, and we never went back to the moon.

It’s not enough to just invent space travel for commercial enterprises, the culture itself has to be made ready to accept it and from what I can see it is happening. From Donald Trump to the changes in entertainment culture, specifically video games, the VSS Unity has had the barriers to thought removed so that the technical aspects could be worked out and now we have commercial space travel, just like that. And regardless of what happens politically, and within the entertainment culture, what Virgin Galactic is doing and is about to do will change everything we know about our relationship with earth. While many of the entertainment leftists that have the money to ride Virgin Galactic and see space for the first time as private citizens, they think they will love the earth more. But they will discover that space has so many more opportunities that once humans can touch it, entirely new vantage points of thought and economics will spring forth, and that is so exciting as well as very much-needed.

Rich Hoffman

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People Who Work in Government are Generally Stupid: Watch the movies ‘American Made’ and ‘Chappaquiddick’ to understand why they hate Trump

I recommend you do two things right now dear reader, go on Netflix and watch Chappaquiddick and watch wherever you can find it, American Made with Tom Cruise. I watched it on HBO. They were both remarkable films. Chappaquiddick of course is about how Ted Kennedy left a young girl riding in a car with him to die when he accidentally drove off the road in an inebriated condition in a bay where she drowned, and he escaped, mysteriously. What was astonishing about this movie even if it did attempt to paint Ted Kennedy in the best possible light was that he was so enormously stupid and incompetent. For a guy who was being groomed to be president of the United States the way his “handlers” treated him was astonishing. It was a really interesting look at life behind the scenes of a crises regarding people at the highest level of politics. It then becomes very clear why all those people who have come to handle presidents of the United States over the years have come to resent President Trump, a man who is street smart, instinctive and does not want their advice. Then you will really have your doors blown off when you watch American Made, about Barry Seal, the ex-TWA pilot who was coaxed by the CIA to become a drug smuggler for Pablo Escobar.

I knew a lot of this information but I never really thought of Barry Seal the smuggler being at the center of the Iran Contra affair, the Clinton scandals in Arkansas and being the payoff man to Manuel Noriega. Looking at these distinctly 1980s events knowing what we do about how the FBI and the Department of Justice handled the Clinton email scandal and their attempts to remove Trump from presidential office before he even set foot in the White House it made the movie American Made that much more powerful. The two things that bothered me was the way that the CIA picked Barry Seal for the job, knowing he would become a drug smuggler, and actually allowing it to happen so that they could prop up a flood of cocaine into the United States and prop up insurgents in Central America with cash. Barry was a bit of a daredevil, so the CIA set him up with his own airport in Arkansas overlooked by Governor Clinton specifically and they gave him plenty of property to build a smuggling empire.

Much like Chappaquiddick when Ted Kennedy had just accidentally killed a young woman and was making calls the morning after from the desk of the sheriff’s office—because the Kennedy’s controlled all of politics in that region, there was a scene in American Made where Barry had just been arrested by the local law enforcement, the F.B.I. the ATF and other agencies and was hauled up before the state attorney general to spend many lifetimes in jail when President Clinton called her and commanded her to release the drug smuggler. I’m sure many of the scenes in the movie were exaggerated to compress time and events, but it was really strange to see it happening in a historical context. Then to have that same drug smuggler in the White House as an advisor to Oliver North and the Reagan initiative against drugs called “Just Say No.” They used Barry Seal to conduct a sting operation against Pablo Escobar which worked. But Escobar sent a hit squad into the United States to kill Barry Seal. Once assassinated the White House needed a new way to get guns to freedom fighters and drug runners in Central America so they used the Iranians, which spawned the Iran Contra Affair.

I have read books and books on all these topics individually but until the movie used Barry Seal to string them all together did it really click how things worked. It helps to look back in hindsight and knowing what we do today of course, but I thought it was amazing to put all these elements into one movie that had so much to do with how the world has been shaped today. It doesn’t take much of a fantastic mind to imagine that even today the people in politics who support open borders are doing so to help the drug trade funnel drugs into the United States. After all, the CIA was clearly involved at a high level into the whole operation and one can only imagine what the sinister desire was to allow it to happen. But on the most basic level it was to funnel cash into impoverished areas to act as change agents against communism and other anti-capitalist forces. Perhaps a good idea in intent, but a disaster into practice.

When I was a kid, even up to my mid 20s really, I thought of people in the F.B.I. and CIA as being elite law enforcement types who were the best of the best. The fully grown adult in me knows now that they are just people like anybody else and usually, they aren’t very smart. In fact, most people working in government are pretty stupid, which is why they are attracted to government and not the private sector. That is very disappointing, but a grim reality. Yet they struggle to maintain that illusion not just to themselves, that they are smart and important, that they go to GREAT effort to only allow puppet presidents of the people to be in the White House so not to shatter their reality with evidence. The real action is out there in the people like Barry Seal who do the work of these agencies, then are expendable when their work is done. We see the same kind of activity in our modern times around this whole attempt to destroy President Trump while real crimes were openly committed by these very same agencies. We don’t want to believe they could possibly do such a thing, but they obviously did.

Its one thing to know something, and I’ve heard stories from conspiracy theorists for years about the CIA drug smuggling and gun running operations—heck, that’s how ISIS was started by the Obama administration. Obama was in support of the Muslim Brotherhood caliphate all around the Mediterranean and Assad was standing in the way. In Syria the Assad family had previously fought the Muslim Brotherhood for control and weren’t about to allow some Islamic radicals to take control of the country from the family rule. So Assad gassed his own people and the Obama White House ran with the story to bring international pressure down on Assad. When that didn’t work the United States started funneling guns to rebels who then became ISIS. This is a very old story that happens over and over again. But what we all must ask ourselves is why it continues to happen.

The hatred of Trump is that he is truly a people’s president elected outside of the controls that were obviously in place in the two films I mentioned. In those movies, the presidents or potential presidents were just pawns of the greater politics involved, where the so-called Deep State operated. In the case of American Made, the Deep State was the CIA breaking the law for what they considered a greater good. Barry Seal was a criminal completely propped up by the CIA to make the drug runners in Columbia extremely wealthy so that they could destabilize the communism that was in fashion in Central America. And you can hear the same rationalizations from James Comey today about Trump, trying to justify why he broke the law to keep a people’s president out of the White House…. essentially because he felt he knew better than the rest of us how to deal with world affairs. And that is how these disasters happen.

I remember the events of my youth well, the Chappaquiddick situation and the antics of Barry Seal and I’m not going back to that. I voted for President Trump because I have lost faith in the F.B.I. and the CIA—in the Presidency itself. I am not going to sleep just so that losers in those intelligence agencies can give us the illusion of a Republic while they work behind the scenes under great illegal circumstances to overthrow our way of government. I do not find those options acceptable, and Trump is my solution to that long-standing problem. And if you want context dear reader, then watch those two movies and apply what you learn to our modern circumstances. And many answers will become quite clear for you.

Rich Hoffman

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The Next Big Thing: Cheering on Richard Branson and his wonderful company Virgin Galactic

Putting politics aside which is hard to do because ultimately everything is political, but considering our modern conditions, those definitions are changing by the moment. I am and have always been a very excited person for everything new little thing that comes along as I am very much in love with the things that humans imagine. Nature is nice too, but I really like what humans do with the tools provided by nature and to see how civilization can advance. While many look at cell phones and the hyper communications that come with them as dangerous to the old order of doing things I think it’s all part of our natural evolution as a species accelerating toward some yet to be known destination. While everyone who knows me understands how much I love tradition particularly the American western mythologies and concepts, I am very much an achievement driven person excited for tomorrow in so many ways. And that is why despite his politics, I have been very much a fan of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic endeavors. And according to him from the interview shown below, he still plans to get his space airline into space before Christmas of this year, which would be a great feat. I am very much hopeful that he will be successful.

It’s been coming along for a while now, but if it is considered the sheer amount of information that is coming at us so fast and furious these days as opposed to when man landed on the moon in 1969 the human race is scratching at a huge change in thought and processing. As I was catching up on what Virgin Galactic was up to and if they were going to meet their timeline one of the lead stories on the Microsoft News dashboard was the newly recorded sounds of Mars as captured by the recent rover that just landed there. Much of this past week due to the very good series on the National Geographic Channel about colonizing Mars radio broadcasts across the country were contemplating what the steps to such an act would look like and what we’d all do once we got there. Elon Musk has after all been turning up the heat for his own departure from earth to live on the ancient red planet. I see many of his antics such as the smoking pot incident on a recent podcast as his teenage moment of creating enough escape velocity for himself to make the journey. He is sabotaging his own relationship with the earth so that he can psychologically make that journey to be the first to live on Mars. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is about to unleash a series of space endeavors that are quite ambitious with his Blue Origin company. Between all these adventurous billionaires fueled by childhood loves of movies like Star Wars and Star Trek compounded by a strong deregulatory economy by the Trump administration—the primer is set for some very exciting technological breakthroughs on the frontier of space.

As I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 by Rockstar Games on my PlayStation 4 and started messing around with the online play with many thousands of other players all over the world simultaneously, I couldn’t help but think of how subconsciously as a human species this visit to the western genre was necessary for our current age to accept what was about to happen. It’s not the safety of the herd that the human race is after, it’s the rough existence away from the support of civilization for which adventure promises great rewards and many opportunities for death. This next generation needs to be someone reckless and masochistic in order to endure the rigors of a dynamic shift in human consciousness, leaving the comfort of our earth and scratching at the unlimited barriers of space travel. Presently we call space anything over 62 miles, or anybody who travels over 50 miles and astronaut. We think of the moon as a long way away, and Mars prohibitively distant. But all those definitions are about to change just as they did in the period of American westward expansion once electricity and phone communications shrunk the world with power. The main observation I had about that great video game was that human beings needed to revisit that last period of adventure and see what it looked like so that they could take this next big journey.

I don’t really like the term “collective consciousness” because it assumes that we are all functioning out of one great well of wisdom which is not what I think is going on. Rather, there are certain rational decisions that are common to reality so it is bound to be a mathematical probability that all humans will come to similar conclusions just by the mandate of deductive reasoning. And that is why texting is more interesting than talking to an actual person for most people, the human mind to seek out the rapid communication forms that come from something like a modern smart phone as opposed to a very static conversation with one single human being is needed for the world of tomorrow, where information must be process quickly as our knowledge base explodes from what was previously understood. Young people especially will have to think much faster than humans do today and be shocked by much fewer discovers than previous generations just to keep up with all the news stories that will began to demand our attention as the frontiers of space are unzipped.

Aerospace is one of my favorite industries due to its exploratory nature. I desire to be a part of it as much as possible and to be quite honest, I love every day of my life because I am. I love to help build the vehicles that take humans to the frontiers of our imagination and I have had a front row seat to many of these new developments. So out of a love of adventure which transcends politics, I am happily cheering on the events of these coming days. Richard Branson has worked hard with his team to get into space first and if he doesn’t make it soon, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will overtake Virgin Galactic. So he doesn’t have all the time in the world, competition and capitalism demand results and the pressure is certainly on. If Branson can get into space by Christmas of 2018 it would be a life changing moment for many people around the world. But if Christmas comes and goes and Virgin Galactic is still mired in testing, then Blue Origin or SpaceX will get there first. This new space race isn’t between nations and governments, it between billionaires and capitalist mandates and that is redefining everything rapidly.

Humans are such conceptual creatures and once we get an idea in our heads reality has a way of growing around it. And from what I see that growth will spawn entirely new industries and lifestyles. There is great reason to be optimistic. Once space tourism is unleashed, likely by Virgin Galactic first, our conceptual knowledge will expand at such a pace that the world has never witnessed. We have been preparing ourselves for this age for years with the rapid digestion of so much information. It’s not by accident or greed, it’s all by necessity. As I’ve said many times my goal in a very busy life is to read at least one book a week, but I am even feeling the pressure to read not just one, but five. So grudgingly I have turned to audio books for some of them because by necessity I need the information coming at me faster than I could possibly read everything and still do everything else needed in an 18-hour work day which is pretty typical. We are all going through a similar transition and that’s what it takes to live and grow in an expanding economy driven by human adventure and curiosity. And much of that next phase starts when Richard Branson gets his Virgin Galactic space tourism over that 50-mile line where humans become technically astronauts.

Rich Hoffman

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The Funeral of George H. W. Bush: It was a lot like the movie Soylent Green

The funeral of Bush 41 I thought was nice. I always liked George Bush the senior, and the younger, 43 as he is often termed—as people. But I do not think they were very good presidents, at least in the way I would expect out of a Republican in the White House. But I didn’t dislike them, although I remember very well how much the media did. So I shared with many the observations that the media was all too friendly toward George Bush in his death, very much contrary to what they had been during his life. That of course provoked the question as to why. As odd as it was to see the Trumps sitting with the Obamas and the Clintons and to even have Jimmy Carter there as well it was also institutionally satisfying, and it was good that President Trump attended and said nice things along the way. But the invisible strings of conformity that stirred about the entire event reminded me an awful lot of the old movie Soylent Green. Through life the people are harvested as commodities of the state, but upon their death they were ushered into the afterlife with warm music and revelry before being eaten by society itself.

The aspects of the Bush funeral which I fundamentally disagree with, and which the press and seemingly everyone celebrated was that the former president was a sacrificial person who gave his life to service for others, and now that he was no longer a threat to the order of things as a Republican, it was OK to honor him. All the attributes that were celebrated mostly are concepts that are anti-individual and pro collectivist which is the subtle undertone to the entire exercise. The message to all other Republicans by the press, the not so subtle part of their message was that if you want to be liked by the media, then the attributes of George Bush that involved self-sacrifice, service and humility are the way to get there. While those traits are largely Christian tenants of value, that doesn’t mean that the old foe of Marxism isn’t present. To understand that idea you have to understand European history and the role that the Catholic Church played on controlling so many people’s lives, in a very negative way. Then you’d have to know that Karl Marx desired to exploit that inbreed trait into the targets of his philosophy work so much inspired by Immanuel Kant. To focus thoughts on others is the way to eternal redemption. To focus on yourself is the way of the evil vices of capitalism!

George Bush was a rich man who inherited a lot of money from his father and sought to dispel the guilt that a Marxist leaning society injected upon him with service in the military, then in government for much of his life. He wanted very much to be a good man and he was, unfortunately the way that good was defined for him meant that he needed to be a collectivist. So his great wealth created a paradox for him and his extended family that was deliberately hard to negotiate. The minefield however was set up by the institutional culture for which the media represents. Their value system is subservience to the needs of the machine, sacrifice and honor as determined by the amount of sacrifice an individual makes toward the institutions they occupy.

This institutional element has become much more pronounced now in the age of Trump because so many of them are coming unraveled, and it is the source of the hatred of the current President. The odd exchange of the Trumps sitting down next to law breakers and social reformers hell-bent on taking society toward infinite collectivism was a clash of ideas that were unavoidable, yet they were brought together out of respect for a presidency that is the lead seat of American institutionalism looked at in entirely different ways. The paradox was revealed in the life of George Bush as his son George W. Bush conducted the eulogy of his father’s life and what a great job he did. While summarizing the merits of such a sacrificial being he managed to paint a picture of quite an interesting character who still sky dived late in his life and loved to watch cop dramas on television. For me I found those aspects appealing. To the institutionalists it was the sacrifice. But everyone was generally brought together by some notion of a recently deceased American president.

The media in this case are the institutional representatives that look at the life of all conservatives as bacteria in the body of collective experience. But anybody familiar with biology knows that bacteria is a useful element, its villainy is purely relative. The media hated the Bush family because they were Republicans but as the country grew away from that kind of conservative thought, the public has grown tired of the media. It was an odd thing to hear Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple lecture the world that any form of hate had no place on their platforms. As much as I love Apple products—and I do, and I know Rush Limbaugh does as well, clearly Tim Cook would view my support of the Second Amendment and liberal activism as hate speech and is suggesting that I’m not welcome to the company. But it’s not lost on me that most people who call themselves liberals, especially the creative types, use Apple as their primary functionary to interact with cyberspace. And most of them participate in hate speech. I have no doubt that if a survey of ANTIFA members were taken as to what phone system they used most it would be Apple if they could actually afford the product. Is Apple as a company talking to them?

The harassment of the Bush family by the media over all the years created Donald Trump. George W. Bush and his dad and brother took a terrible beating needlessly by just the same kind of people who tend to buy Apple products, the Hollywood left, the media culture, the hipsters and saggy assed getto thugs, the drug mules who cross the border then claim that America owes them something as illegal immigrants. It was their collective ooze for which the media pronounced was civil conduct and once George Bush the senior was laid to rest, it was OK to pay respect to him in that sacrificed state, as an essence of life to be consumed by the masses, a throw back to the days before there was a Donald Trump in the White House, rather than the man who loved his wife dearly and was a damn good father to his kids. There is a lot very evil about the process, the way that all the good things about George H. W. Bush were punished and all the bad things about him adored. It was quite an interesting paradox which comes from a society that has a schizophrenic relationship with itself. It was very clear to me, that the institutions of our modern life values death and consumption far more than productivity and effort. And that is the hard lesson that was very much on full display at the funeral of the 41st President of the United States.

Rich Hoffman

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It’s All About Gas Prices: Who cares about Khashoggi, for $20 I was able to fill up my whole tank

You have to understand what’s going on when you hear that all these United States Senators and the like are suddenly upset about the CIA report saying the crowned Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the execution of a Washington Post reporter in Istanbul. The righteous indignation is not over the death of a political activist reformer using his position as a reporter to incite challenges to Saudi Arabian rule, it is to make the gasoline lobby in Washington happy because they are very unhappy that President Trump has made America independent again at the gas pump and that has driven fuel prices under $2 per gallon where I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. This happening just as the Holiday season is in full gear giving American consumers millions and millions of extra dollars to spend on a fourth quarter spike to the 2018 economy. Those who profit from a less than great American economy are pretty pissed off, which all who are reading here should be very happy about.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the gas prices. I stopped by my usual place to get gas early in the morning before most people were up and decided to put $20 into the tank. Usually that gives me about a half tank that I use most of the rest of the week. When the pre-pay was complete, I put the gas nozzle back into its holster and jumped into the driver’s seat to go about my business. Out of habit I looked at the gas gauge just to make sure that it was reading the fuel that had just been applied to my vehicle’s tank and was surprised to see it was nearly full. That prompted me to look at the sign out by the main road at what the gas prices were and sure enough it said the price per gallon was $1.99. I thought that was simply astonishing given the world conditions. After all, that was precisely why Parisians were rioting in the streets that weekend, was due to excessively high gas prices due to too many environmental constraints.

President Trump had a plan and that was to make the American economy the strongest it has ever been, so one of the first things he did once sworn in was to make more supply of gas so that Saudi Arabia couldn’t dictate the supply exclusively essentially charging anything they wanted for a barrel of oil. Politics had created an artificial constraint to leverage favor toward the oil and gas lobby and that meant very favorable margins for them at the expense of the consumer. Trump took that away from that lobby and put the money back in the pockets of the consumer with competitive supply making America the largest oil-producing nation in just a few short years of his first term in office. A miraculous feat in and of itself. Of course, you won’t read about this miracle in the press and within the media culture because most of them still rely heavily on oil and gas money in advertising, and they certainly don’t want the public to know how fragile their existence truly was or how they have been price gouging people at the pumps for well over 50 years.

Of course, part of that equation was to keep Saudi Arabia as a supplier, because that competition leverages even American producers to keep their prices per barrel of oil down. So in a free market system that needs as many competitors as possible to get prices to a real market value, “what customers are willing to pay for gas” Trump leveraged the American fuel market to bring down the costs in Saudi Arabia and that effect has been a downward trend in gas prices since 2016, when Trump took office officially. Then of course the Crowned Prince appears to have killed off a rival in the press for which the world, particularly those in the media, wanted punishment for. But Saudi Arabia is a sovereign country. If he wants to kill people, that’s his business, right?

The way liberals work is they use peer pressure to leverage sentiment. In this case they wanted to trick Trump into going against Saudi Arabia which would really make the gas lobby happy, and it would give liberals what they want as well, a damaged president with a weak economy going into the 2020 election which would make him easier for them to beat. By excreting peer pressure on Trump they “the media run by the oil and gas lobby through advertising” could force him into a corner for which he could never get out of. But, Trump fortunately is a business guy and he isn’t so prone to emotional sentiment because he knows how the game is played, so he did the unexpected, he used his friendship with Saudi Arabia to leverage them to further reduce oil prices which is why gas prices are trending downward dramatically right in the meat of the Holiday season in America. This has pumped a lot of expendable income that would otherwise just go to oil companies in artificially inflated margins and put those dollars to use in the American economy. How about that—who would have figured?

People die all the time. For instance, a lot of people have died near the Clintons all through the years over lots of different types of issues. Benghazi comes to mind. Seth Rich does too. What if The New York Times and other newspapers put as much effort into discovering the conditions of murder of that Democrat operative who supposedly was leaking documents from the DNC directly to Wikileaks had an investigation done to the extent that they perform one for the murdered Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi? Both were high-profile murders, but one directly involved Democrats and pointed to a smoking gun that was very embarrassing to them. The other took away the leverage President Trump had created with Saudi Arabia through friendship to keep gas prices down in the fourth and first quarter of a new year during the 2018 Holiday season. The media being against the Trump agenda almost violently is picking their stories to fit an agenda, one that makes their advertisers happy ultimately.

Of those paid participants in this grand conspiracy are senators like Bob Corker, the forever Never Trumper who wears a Republican title next to his name, but might as well be a Democrat operative in all reality. Corker and those like him in the senate who really hate everything about Trump because the president is independent of the usual Washington controls would love to see the American economy tank if it got rid of President Trump. They wouldn’t care if gas prices were $4 per gallon, which they were under previous administrations for which Bob Corker was still a senator because the gas lobby was happy and that money flowed back into the pockets of senators through indirect means, and the Washington establishment was very happy about it. I’m only picking on Bob Corker because he has put himself at the front of the Anti-Trump Saudi conspiracy. There are reasons for his Anti-Trumper behavior and you’d understand if you know anything about the guy. He is a compromised person, years ago he made a lot of his previous money in real estate, a lot of which went bad. As of 2008 he had a net worth of around $19 million and just ten years later its at $40 to $50 million on a job that only pays $174,000 per year. Math doesn’t lie even though senators often do, Republicans and Democrats.

Part Two: The Corruption of Bob Corker

I say all this because you have to know the game that is being played, not the one that the media is showing. The hatred of Trump isn’t because of the death of a Washington Post reporter, it’s because the economy is too good, and that Saudi Arabia has lost their leverage. By looking the other way on the Khashoggi death Saudi Arabia has to be very thankful to Trump, and gas prices are showing it, and will get even better as we get into the 2019 vacation months. After all, the Seth Rich death was overlooked, so why not Khashoggi? I mean if all deaths are equal, everyone should care about them no matter who they are. But the Khashoggi death is only out of a need to control the optics so that the gas lobby can attempt to regain control of the world market. But Trump didn’t fall for it and I’m happy because for $20, I was able to fill up my whole tank at the gas pump. And that is what really matters.

Rich Hoffman

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Red Dead Redemption 2: Defining the meaning of an American

There are so many things to talk about, but I consider the new video game Red Dead Redemption 2 on the big console home game systems to be one of the most paramount issues of our day. Not just because I love westerns and video games, but because the story itself is really at the core of our modern world and the confusing philosophies that we contend with every day—is big government better or small. I’ve always loved the “Red” games as the producer Rockstar has published them over vast amounts of time. The first Red Dead Redemption came out in 2010, and its sequel just this recent year of 2018, so a lot of time, money and effort goes into these things and they are truly epic for any scope of entertainment venue. But as I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I couldn’t help but think a thought I had been thinking for a long time, that the game was essentially Game of Thrones only set in a western instead of some unidentified middle ages of Europe. The essence of the game is to ask the question, “what does it mean to be an American.” The conflict of the game is when many different sectors of society unleash their understanding compared with the natural human tendency toward greed and violence. The result is a very compelling story that could easily fill up several seasons of a Netflix drama.

You can tell that the game is upsetting the progressive elements of our present society, they have lots of problems with some of the themes of the game. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in 1899 just as the progressive movement is getting underway. In the game there are random characters that you meet many whom are part of the suffragette movement. As a player you can choose to help those people or harass them and many players are picking up these screaming feminists and putting them on railroad tracks to be run over by an oncoming train. And the game is providing awards for those actions, so the real progressives in our entertainment culture have serious problems with that. Additionally, the character you play in the game, Author Morgan is in a gang as kind of the heavy. The leader of the game is a guy named Dutch who is essentially a socialist philosopher. I don’t like the guy but it is a very interesting experiment in the fallacies of socialism that his vision is being destroyed moment by moment in the game driving him to lunacy because he can’t get socialism to work without being a criminal element in the larger context of society.

I thought Rockstar Games went out of their way not to insult progressives as many of the storylines within the game treated them fairly. But as the player you decided how relevant they were or weren’t, and that is what has progressives so angry. By the end of Author Morgan’s story in Red Dead Redemption 2 I had my good meter tapping out as high as it could go. That is a meter you get for doing good deeds for people, and mine was as good as it could get. And it was rewarding to do good as opposed to doing bad things which many players might be tempted to do. The whole thing is a very interesting experiment in human behavior that I thought went well beyond any previous entertainment exploration, whether it be a novel, a movie or a television show. This form of story telling I thought was very revolutionary, and powerful. I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is the literary equivalent to a Dicken’s novel, but Rockstar Games put a lot of effort into the whole presentation that there really has never been anything quite like it anywhere yet. I think of it as I often do with these massive video games, like its taking a resort vacation to an exotic place. On my 70” 4K television with a Bose sound system, its easy for me to forget that I’m just in my living room. The world is vast and well rendered in Red Dead Redemption 2, almost to the point of ridiculousness. That makes investing yourself into the stories that much more compelling, and powerful.

And again, by the end of Author Morgan’s storyline anyway, with the good meter at the highest point, because the character and those he interacts with changes depending on that meter, Author came to the point of what being an American really was. The game sifted through all the various elements of turn of the century North America and found the real heart and soul of American life quite wonderfully. It was a shame that his realization came all too late, but the point of the game is the tapestry that everything is set in more than the lives of the characters. I found the whole thing extremely refreshing. Its one of those things that everyone who can find the time should endeavor to experience.

I have always been around guns, but the first time I played Red Dead Redemption back in 2010 I had not yet purchased or became involved in Cowboy Fast Draw. But at the end of that game I decided that when things called down for me in life that I would. A few years later when an open window came I took 2K and had a custom fast draw holster made for myself and I bought my Ruger Vaquero. Since then I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw almost every day and I have become proficient. That is important because I see the gun, especially the way it was presented in American westerns to be even more symbolic to the life of free people as the samurai sword is to Japanese society—which is saying a lot. I usually dig a lot deeper into things than most people do so the first Red Dead game was something that built on thoughts I had been having for a long time. By the time this new game came out, I had a very good understanding of what Cowboy Fast Draw was all about so it was even more meaningful to me to be able to go around that vast world and gun fight other characters. I think any player would find the experience meaningful but for me and the kind of things I do in real life, it was even more so. It’s a world you simply don’t ever want to end.

That is why I think there is real opportunity here. We keep hearing about all these socialists that have been trained in our public-school system and are now making moves into larger official government positions. And that is in a class with the Trump economy and there is a lot of consternation about what will happen as a result. But the social experiment has already been simulated in Red Dead Redemption 2. And the socialists, like Dutch in the game, have no choice really when confronted with reality. Now, not to give too much away because Red Dead 2 is actually a prequel to the first Red Dead, but Dutch eventually has to jump off a cliff to kill himself because his views of the world just don’t match the reality of a new American idea. People followed Dutch because he was intelligent and well read, but that couldn’t solve his basic problem with his corrupted philosophy. And in a very complex story about many, many people, somehow Rockstar Games hit the nail right on the head, and it is truly a remarkable achievement in art and entertainment. And one that carries directly over into the politics of our modern times, in haunting ways that were quite intentional. There were moments in the game that were like the climax of every movie I’ve ever seen, only in the context of this game, they were better.

Rich Hoffman

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