Tag: Woke

The Failures of Institutionalism: Disney’s New Star Wars Hotel Rejected by the Fans

Corporate Failure

To understand why and how liberalism is failing currently and will continue to fail, a great example of what’s to come was displayed when Disney released a preview video for their new Star Wars Hotel experience.  Fans had been waiting for over eight years for the opening of this more than a billion-dollar investment, and what Disney showed the public instantly went from ambitious hope to fandom scorn for the immense wokeness contained in the project.  I certainly wanted to give the project a chance. I would have liked to take my grandchildren and children to this hotel if it looked any good.   After all, I raised my family on Star Wars and the various stories of good and evil in such a modern storybook fashion.  But what Disney did with Star Wars and the hotel experience was full of contemporary liberalism in every way that we can see it failing, from the Biden administration to the global greenie weenies at the United Nations.  These people at Disney, who had infinite resources to spend on this hotel experience and Star Wars itself, didn’t understand what they had bought from George Lucas. They presented the ultimate failure of liberalism, which I found very interesting and relevant to our modern observations.  After a very long wait, the hotel is supposed to open in a few months, March of 2022.  The video itself looks like a child made it, and for what Star Wars means to people, everyone expected from Disney a lot more. 

Part of that billion-dollar investment went into making the Galaxy’s Edge experience at the two Disney parks in Florida and California.  My wife and I went to the one in Florida once it opened, and I thought it was magnificent for the price of a $100 admission ticket.  To see some full-scale props from the movies was worth the money.  I enjoyed myself and thought it was a great experience.  But this hotel experience was poised to be something like a “West World” experience, or Fantasy Island from the old television show where you came to Disney to realize a fantasy of living in Star Wars for a two-day affair.  And for that experience, it would cost around $6,000 to $10,000.  So naturally, what they were selling was very ambitious, and people were excited about it.  The point of releasing a preview video, which they did in mid-December 2021, was to book reservations for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.  But the video turned out to be so bad that the opposite happened.  People started canceling their reservations as soon as they saw the video because it looked and felt nothing like Star Wars.  I covered this problem years ago on a radio show with a guy who is now a Disney employee.  Way back in 2013, when this Disney Hotel was just announced, we contemplated the problem Disney would have with its anti-gun politics when Star Wars was all about guns.  How do you have fun with Star Wars without promoting “war?” When fans attended the hotel experience but couldn’t wear around their blasters, it wouldn’t feel like Star Wars, and that is precisely what the first problem was with the video promo. 

It looked like the people who developed the concept for the hotel were more in love with the movie, The Fifth Element rather than Star Wars.  The cantina singer as the feature in the video was a clear sign that the Disney creators thought Star Wars was all about funny colored aliens, space, and orchestral music.  They didn’t understand the heart and soul of what made the films so beloved in the first place. It’s the kind of corporate failure I see all the time and talk about extensively in my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  I wasn’t upset by the video, but it certainly solidified my plans for 2022.  There was no way I would spend $20-30,000 in 2022 to take my family to this Star Wars experience.  To understand their target audience at this hotel, the Disney planners would have done well to study the current video games, Battlefront, Call of Duty, and Fortnite.  With the amount of money Disney wants for the hotel, they should know that, at a minimum, they should be offering some kind of competitive laser tag experience, something that simulates pulse-pounding action with real consequences to the story.  People were not going to spend that kind of money to watch people sing and eat food.  But to be fair, the Disney philosophy had no chance out of the gate; as a woke company going after what they think is the emerging middle class of China, they are not prepared to tell Star Wars stories.  They believe that as a media company, they set society’s values instead of offering the products that society wants. It’s a fine line that they have lost, but it’s more a condition of modern liberalism in general and institutional failure on a massive scale.  Institutions are not powerful if they don’t embody what the public wants as a consumer class.  And Disney has lost its way the more corporate they have become and moved away from the foundations of Uncle Walt Disney himself.  That is the same thing that has happened to Star Wars the more they have moved away from George Lucas, who created the franchise. 

The mistake was that the modern corporate Star Wars approach had all the tools for success right in their breadbasket, but they approached it all with the wrong philosophy, which carries over to the more significant message here.  If all the values of institutionalism were as they assumed, the Star Wars Hotel would have been a slam dunk for Disney.  They had the money.  They had the best and brightest of modern college graduates.  They had a proven brand that spanned decades as a money maker.  What could go wrong?  Well, wokeism, for one.  But deeper than that, it’s the corporate approach that fails in all companies to some degree or another, whether it’s McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, or Nike.  Once a product becomes affiliated with a political movement, such as globalism, it loses its use as art. It becomes simply a tool of a detached class of people stuck in their own versions of quicksand in life.  Star Wars was always about rebellion against tyranny.

Here were the Disney people all too happy to be a compliance culture trying to make a Star Wars experience for people, complete with masks indoors in a state-run by Ron DeSantis, who has been the best against such idiocy.  Because of their political intentions toward liberalism, Disney masks their employees and guests on purpose.  They didn’t have to, but they wanted to be part of that “woke” culture they think the world will be driven by.  In the video, they put out there were no signs of masculinity, which is essential because Star Wars was always designed for boys 8-12 years of age.  Trying to create an “expanded market” with outreach to girls and people of color has only destroyed the original base of the franchise.  So now Disney has made something that nobody wants.  Their target audience for this hotel experience would have been the Comic-Con types who would spend thousands of dollars on a Star Wars experience.  But now, they have all those types of people against them as they are insulted by Disney’s approach.  And after watching all this, it looked like our nightly news and the perplexity that many global institutionalists are having when they wonder why people don’t want Build Back Better, the CDC, or to be controlled by the United Nations.  When institutionalism and the necessities of individuals are not aligned, we can see these kinds of failures everywhere.  But what’s essential about the Disney case is that it proves that no amount of money can solve the problem and make people think something they don’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jim Renacci, The DeSantis of Ohio: Even the Disney Company has benefited from federalism

Jim Renacci for Governor of Ohio

Well, thank goodness for federalism.  If you have read the new book from Geoff Shepard, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, you can see clearly that what happened to Trump and Kennedy is not new tactics.  In the climb to global power, foreign and domestic enemies have thought that they could control the world by controlling the presidency.  They make a mistake in viewing the presidency as a kind of American king, which was always wrong.  But the plot to remove Trump is just the same old power that has been around for a while, and in knowing what we know now and comparing it to the Nixon Conspiracy, there are a lot of ah-ha moments in that book which is very telling.  What has protected America from a complete takeover by these crazy powers, which we might call the “deep state” or the “globalists,” is our very good government balance of federalism where local and state powers are a priority.   The federal government has very little power within the borders of the country.  We could spend hours and hours talking about the vast Covid conspiracies or the quandaries of the “deep state” and their intentions of menace.  In essence, what we have learned after the Trump presidency and the global Covid protocols is that federalism is the way to go all over the world.  A competitive check on powers among the states has shown many economic lessons they had previously taken for granted.  And in America, Governor DeSantis of Florida has proven to be one of the very best governors of a state, where Ohio’s Mike DeWine has shown himself to be the worst.  Both call themselves Republicans, but only DeSantis has truly embraced federalism and the magic of capitalism to solve problems that came from so many directions.  And to this day, Florida is thriving where Ohio is not.  If only Ohio could have a governor like DeSantis.

But wait, Ohio does have such an opportunity.  Jim Renacci is running for governor and looks poised to primary DeWine in May of 2022.  Jim is offering to be the DeSantis of Ohio, using the model of federalism that has evolved out of Covid, where governors of states have shown just how much power they had.  During the Covid lockdowns, which Mike DeWine started even among the blue state governors, the fundamental philosophy of the governors of all states had a measurable distinction in the success and economic recovery of the states.  In red states where governors were strong, the economic impact of Covid had a much less impact.  Cases being cases, all the states dealt with their issues, but in blue states where lockdowns and tyrannical power went to the heads of the governors, such as in New York and Michigan, death by Covid and the rapid spread of the virus had no improvement.  Statistically, they look to have performed worse than in states that were more free and open with much less government intrusion.  And these were valuable lessons.  No longer was federalism debated in a college classroom advocating Marxism and more centralized authority as a capitalist utopia boomed outside the windows preparing for a big college football game on the weekend.  Now all the rules of economic theory were put to the test by the two primary ways of approaching government, and the red states clearly won.  Blue state governors, which Mike DeWine operated as one even though he called himself a Republican, showed the severe cost in misery, economic downturns, and the dangers of letting health departments run the general policy of a state. 

On the other hand, DeSantis decentralized the problem, took away the federal government’s power to stick its nose in people’s business, and promoted an environment where people at the local level could solve Covid problems and economic challenges through their own innovations.  By protecting the diverse state of Florida from centralized mistakes made by the federal government and protecting people with executive orders from further centralized authority mishaps, DeSantis led Florida to a very successful economic recovery coming out of the government-made pandemic.  And the correct measure has been in the reaction by the very liberal woke company Disney in what they have been forced to admit, even if reluctantly.  Due to the severe and lingering lockdowns in California, the Walt Disney Company has moved several thousand employees from the Anaheim offices to Orlando because Florida has been open and is a much more stable business climate where the government can’t interrupt their business operations so frequently.  With DeSantis, companies can at least trust the governor will keep the government out of the company’s management. With Disney going woke for such a long period of time, much of that wokeness came out of mitigation of knowing that for decades, a centralized government coming out of the White House intended complete authoritarian control, similar to what they have in communist China.  So they did what most companies did, appease the tyrants with wokeness so that they could survive.  But in Florida, where the Disney presence is a massive part of the state’s economy, actively and passively, the reality of the situation benefits the entertainment company tremendously.

From the beginning of Covid, Disney led the way just like Mike DeWine by adopting all the government rules and regulations, imposing mask mandates, and all kinds of ridiculous and unscientific protocols, which has hurt their business tremendously.  For them, if everyone had to impose the same restrictions upon themselves, then it made sense.    But because of DeSantis not following all the rules, but in protecting people from those rules, all businesses in Florida did not have to wear dumb masks or socially ridiculously distance themselves.  That left the Disney Company hanging out there alone, and losing money because of it, by their own choice.  When it came time for the unconstitutional vaccine mandates, which the Disney Company wanted to impose, DeSantis had created a business climate where that Biden Executive Order would be challenged in court protecting businesses from an overreaching government that was just spitballing in the wind regarding ways to manage a virus they had in fact through Dr. Fauci released upon the world.  So because of DeSantis, the people of Florida were protected from that level of stupidity, and even the Disney Company had to recognize the benefit.  They announced last week that while they reviewed the legal circumstances, they would not be imposing the vaccine mandate on their employees for the time being.  Essentially, they were putting their finger to the wind and seeing how these court cases play out, which is great for everyone involved.  But if not for DeSantis, there would be no check on federal power, no matter how well-intentioned.  Ultimately, when mistakes are centralized, everyone suffers.  When errors are separated by federalism, then not everyone has to suffer.  That is the benefit of a great governor like DeSantis.

That DeSantis model is now out there, and there is history that can be studied for centuries on the positive impact of federalism during a mass international crisis.  Nobody can put this genie back in the bottle; it’s out, and it’s out forever.  All those who have been pushing governments toward more centralized government, as they were even in the Nixon White House, have seen through Covid the root cause of their massive failures.  They had hoped, like Disney, to hide those failures by forcing 100% submission to their cause. Still, because power was decentralized through federalism within the states of America, to compete, even the mighty Disney Company had to see reality for what it was.  They benefited greatly from DeSantis as governor; even if they didn’t vote for him, his policies made Disney a better company.  And that approach is what is needed in Ohio.  With Mike DeWine, we will never have such a governor.  But with Jim Renacci, we have a chance to have perhaps someone better than Ron DeSantis.  Trump helped pave the way for DeSantis.  And DeSantis has helped pave the way for people like Jim Renacci, whom I think can actually do better in Ohio than DeSantis has been for Florida.  And the time is coming quickly for us to be able to vote for him in the primary.  Which is something we can all look forward to with great zeal!

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I Still Support Jon Gruden: Don’t play the “woke” game by the rainbow Marxists

I Still Support Jon Gruden

I have a lot of great memories of Jon Gruden from when he was the coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and those memories will not be erased just because a bunch of globalist wokesters decided that some emails they dug upon him from 11 years ago broke some invisible modern rules.  If you haven’t figured it out yet, wokeness is an attack strategy, not the utilization of fairness, and there was nothing I heard of from Jon Gruden in his emails or any other source over the years that gave me pause to support him.  The rules of fairness and equality that have been pressed upon us run counter to the way humans think and are meant to control us as a species, and they should be rejected.  Climbing into private lives and thoughts is likely to bring up things many don’t want to hear.  Turning personal thoughts and actions even in an email into a public debate would reveal uncomfortable opinions.  But from those who want to attack our culture, such as progressives, that’s how they want it.  They are playing for blood and targeting what we enjoy as a culture and should treat them that way.  For me, I’ll disregard their stupid modern rules of behavior.  They have no impact on me or my life, and if they do carry over in such a way, then I’ll deal with them as the enemies that they are.  But they are playing along on the bandwagon of woke religion, as many have.   Jon Gruden is too good of a person; he doesn’t deserve that.

Within hours of this story going public early this past week, the Tampa Bay Buccanneers, where Gruden coached and won a Super Bowl, removed the old coach from their Ring of Honor, which I thought was despicable.  I love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and have going way back to the Vinny Testaverde days for many years. I’ve seen a lot of bad seasons and some good ones.  It’s fun to finally have a Tom Brady team to root for because they win a lot more.  I love the family of the Glazers, especially the deceased father of the group.  The kids are a lot more progressive, apparently even Biden supporters.  I used to think they were all really smart, but if they supported Biden, maybe not.  So I found it disturbing that they so quickly distanced themselves from Jon Gruden over this woke controversy.  After a press conference with Bruce Arians, the new coach, I thought what a wimp he was for wearing a rainbow-colored Buc hat, which was an obvious tip to the gay community.  Bruce thought it was appropriate to promote anal sex to young people with that stupid hat?  But Gruden couldn’t send an email with topless cheerleaders to his old partner at the Washington Redskins for some guy fun?  No, I’m not playing that game.

Gay rights are sodomy, and it’s dirty. I’ll take the girls any day and not feel guilty about it one bit.  When Bruce wears a hat like that, he attempts to appeal to these dark forces of progressivism who want to ruin our culture and destroy our families.  Ultimately, the NFL product is a family sport that many people can share over several generations.  That is the ultimate attack progressives have against the NFL.  Wearing a gay hat won’t stop them from attacking.  It might just appease them for a while, which is the game that Tampa Bay is playing. “Hey, we’re woke, don’t hurt us.  Look, we got rid of any reference to Jon Gruden.  We don’t have a spine.”

The NFL has been attacked for years, and you can see the game Roger Goodell is playing with these attacks.  I said last year that he’s doing a good job keeping the product going.  He managed during the previous year to get an entire season in even while Covid was shutting everything down. That’s because of how woke the NFL has become.  The progressives thought that the messaging by the players union and the protests against the American flag might be worth letting them play.  So, Roger has been caught accepting a few evils here and there to play the NFL games on the field.  People can say what they want about compliance and what they would and wouldn’t do but look at all our companies caving to the vaccine mandates from an illegally inserted President Biden.  Lawyers and human resource departments have been rushing to get in line to be the next Judas to the Constitution, acting like desperate dogs looking for a table scrap from some obese human patting the dog on the head for doing silly tricks for a morsel of food.  Most everyone has caved under the Biden executive order, including most of our tough talking politicians.  Nobody has stood up for Constitutional rights, so they are no better than Roger Goodell.  And going back to Bruce Arians and the Glazer family behind the Buccaneers, they know the game.  If you have things of value, like a sports franchise, or a big paying job, you are a target for these progressive insurgents, so you appease them by giving them what they want and hope they go away.  But all that does is feed them for the next time. 

It’s nice to know there are people like Jon Gruden out there. I’m still a fan of him, and if he loses all connection to the NFL, which we will assume he will, then whatever he does in the future, I’ll be a fan of.  Hopefully, he’ll start a podcast.  He doesn’t need the NFL or ESPN.  He could probably do better as a podcaster the way things are these days.  Traditional media is in a transition.  The woke attackers have penetrated our institutions, but that’s not where the action is, as usual.  It will always be people like Jon Gruden who make the world go around, no matter what language they use to convey it. I’ve been at this point for a while, it is not just because of this Jon Gruden story, but I’m not playing this game.

The woke rules, as far as I’m concerned, mean nothing. I’m not building my life around them or appeasing them in any way. I’m not worried about anybody digging up any emails on me or secretly recording what I say. I’m not a football guy.  I hear things like what Jon Gruden said every day and in a lot more explosive detail.  People are still people. We’re not going to change people to the snowflakes of existence.  In my life, I use a lot of three-syllable words, even in my most private settings.  I doubt these woke losers taught in government schools even know what I’m saying half the time, so good luck.  But molding our life to these woke rules, no, I’m not going to be doing that.  Progressives are a threat to American life, and it’s time we start to treat them that way.  We need to be less inclusive and a lot more judgmental.  What they did to Jon Gruden was simply a warning shot to the rest of us.  He was a big target because he had a big contract in a game most of us love a lot.  Progressives don’t like that we are back to somewhat normal with Covid, and they took a shot at Gruden to remind us that they are still there.  And to me, that’s not acceptable.  I love Jon Gruden and always will.  I will still proudly show his Super Bowl pictures on my walls, even if the Buccaneers wimped out and caved to the rainbow Marxists and gutter rats of anti-American sentiment. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Screw Our Freedoms: ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ would have been different if written in Deadwood

Screw Our Freedoms, no, I don’t think so

It was pretty amazing to see the massive panic coming out of the Biden administration over the vaccine push and mask mandates.  Stunning really, from celebrities to Dr. Fauci himself, last week leading into this one has been a test of sorts for this global push for a central government to take over all day-to-day activity.  But for that to happen, they had to scare us into imprisoning ourselves into the cage they intended for us.  Instead, what happened was that they found most of us refused to enter and are running about doing our own thing regardless of their taunts.  That left Arnold Schwarzenegger to tell us on CNN to “screw your freedoms.” Dr. Fauci said pretty much the same, something in direct reference to Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, as over a million people descended on the Sturgis Bike Rally, an annual event I talk about a lot.   Despite the Covid warnings of the new “Delta variant,” people went anyway and didn’t wear masks.  People were getting tired of the government crying wolf every day, and they were finally starting to ignore them.  I would argue that people should have stopped listening to the government months ago, but ultimately, people were getting it, and the government has been in a bit of a panic.  So much so that Biden avoided talking about the evacuation of Afghanistan but instead deflected comment to the booster shot to the vaccine that would be available soon.  Covid is their cover story to hide all the crimes that have been committed, even when the world was on fire and all they wanted to talk about was a glass of water. 

This is Where We Are

God bless Kristi Noem, who went to Sturgis herself after a week of the press following Dr. Fauci and trying to put tremendous peer pressure on her to cave to the gods of Covid.  She rode her horse onto the stage at Outlaw Square in Deadwood carrying an American flag in front of a large crowd and gave an excellent speech on freedom.  The optics were tremendous, and you could tell by what the media didn’t show.  Hardly anybody covered a prominent American governor riding her horse carrying an American flag while wearing a cowboy hat down the streets of Deadwood, South Dakota, at all.  But for Kristi Noem, it was her answer to the criticism.   It was a kind of Braveheart moment in this new American story, and it infuriated the government.  Wait, Kristi Noem is the government.  So was Donald Trump. Let’s say instead, these insurgents connected to international Marxism have infected Washington D.C. and other academic circles with the intent to overthrow our American Constitution.  How about that?  We don’t want to overthrow the government.  We want our government to resume administrative power and take away the leverage that the spooks, kooks, and losers of international Marxism have over us presently.  We let them have that leverage after all out of niceness, and they misread that niceness as weakness.  But that niceness has expired.   

This is what Leadership looks like

While all this was going on, I read Vivek Ramasamy’s new book Woke, Inc. a few times, which I liked a lot.  But, there was a lot I didn’t like at all, which I attribute to him being on the inside of corporate America for a long time—even being tempted by the fruits of globalism.  I loved his book because I loved his perspective.  But as I closed the book for the third time in a 70 some hour period, I concluded that Vivek is still learning. He’s a brilliant guy who has made a lot of money, but he’s still the kid in India who grew up with a caste system spoiled by American capitalism.  He thinks the modern Woke problem can be solved like the story he recites in the book The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor committed Christ to death because the Church no longer had a use for Jesus.  Jesus Christ had served his purpose, and now it was time to die and let the Church handle things.  Well, we can’t help where we are born, and I’m perfectly open to people fleeing from where they came from to come to America for a chance. I’m even more for America spreading its influence to many of those places so that they can get western civilization in their back yards, which makes what’s happening in Afghanistan that much more of a tragedy.  But in America, when we get tired of being poked in the eye by some bad guys, we won’t be kissing them on the cheek and leaving quietly as Jesus did in that story.  The Brothers Karamazov is a very European story. That’s not how things are done in America, or at least they haven’t been.  And that planned assumption that Americans would passively sit around and be bossed around was a bad one from the start.  Yes, there are plenty of bootlickers in America who will.  There are more who won’t, and that is what’s going on with the masks and the vaccines. 

Liberty or Death……..but where are the deaths?

I only bring up Vivek because he wrote a reasonably significant book that the mainstreamers have fully embraced.  He represents many people who hatched this Covid plan, and clearly, they don’t understand Americans.  I was enormously proud of Kristi Noem when she hoisted that flag on stage atop her horse in Deadwood.  I had just returned from that exact spot a few weeks ago.  Deadwood and South Dakota, in many ways, are vestiges of freedom that people growing up in India or Russia can’t even imagine until they see it for themselves.  And even then, the culture change is dramatic. It’s not an accident that Mike Lindell held his Symposium in South Dakota. That’s where the heart of America is, and you can certainly feel it when you visit. It’s a long way from Wall Street and the hacks of investment that Vivek knows.  People who ride horses, shoot guns, and love their American flag aren’t putting up with what they are seeing, and the current government is just now getting a feel for it.  These kinds of Americans aren’t going to be controlled by Facebook or Google. They’ll just come up with their alternative.  They aren’t wearing masks or have the government tell them to take the medicine they don’t want.  And if the government gets too pushy, they’ll get shoved back.  When people wonder why Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires,” as Biden calls it, they haven’t seen anything yet when they try to go door to door in Ohio or South Dakota to confiscate guns and force people to take a vaccine.  Instead, they will see something far different from what Vivek Ramaswamy proposed with his example of Christ versus The Grand Inquisitor.  If The Grand Inquisitor tried some of that stuff that he tried to pull on Jesus Christ in the city of Deadwood, or Sturgis………well, I would promise that he would have been shot dead before he ever had a chance to sentence Christ to death.  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great book would have been a short story instead of a great literary classic if written in Deadwood.  And the bad guy would have died quickly and spectacularly under a hail of gunfire.   The American way to fight these things ultimately isn’t with a kiss on the cheek, but a hand on our guns and the willingness to defend ourselves when pressed by an authoritarian government that does not have our best interests in mind.  And it’s good to see people finally sticking up for themselves because that is ultimately the way to peace where such a tragedy could be avoided.  Do like Nancy Reagan used to say, “Just Say No.”

 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Woke, Inc. and The Gunfighter’s Guide: Meeting Vivek Ramaswamy and entangled fate

Woke, Inc. and The Gunfighter’s Guide

I was introduced to Vivek Ramaswamy by the great Butler County, Ohio treasurer Nancy Nix.  You might ask what makes her great; well, she has the books balanced in Butler County, where we all live, Vivek, Nancy, and about 400,000 other residents, and we are operating financially at a surplus.  Not a small town, but she and others like her serve Butler County as a fine example of good government, proving that it is possible.  She knew some of the things I have been doing, and she certainly knew Vivek as he was a very wealthy ex-CEO of biotech firms who wrote a book called Woke, Inc.  He was the featured speaker that night at the Middletown GOP office, which I had attended to hear what he had to say.  Nancy thought Vivek and I might have an interesting conversation. That’s when I learned that Vivek had been in attendance at a big campaign rally that I had organized a year and a half earlier where he had an epiphany to change his life, quit his job, and write this book.  Because at that rally which was saturated with political correctness, he saw a very good friend of mine, a CEO who at significant risk, came out publically in favor of Trump, and Vivek thought that was pretty cool.  It inspired him, so he sat down and wrote Woke, Inc for the next year and a half.  I accepted a warm handshake from Vivek and got along well with him for the rest of that evening, enjoying the early preview of his book that wasn’t due to come out for a few more months.  I made no mention of my own book, but the more he spoke that night, the more I realized that something weird was going on in Butler County.  After all, J.D. Vance was from Middletown who wrote the Hillbilly Elegy who practically lived in my backyard.  Now Vivek was a multimillionaire investor and biotech wiz who had decided to turn against woke culture and spill the secrets of that inner sanctum, and of course, my various projects. That’s a lot of exciting debate for a relatively small part of the world in southern Ohio. 

Vivek’s book came out on August 17th, and I immediately read it a few times.  I love the book, there are many things I could debate, but in essence, it’s a great book with a mass-market appeal that I want to cheerlead on as much as possible.  The more people who read it, the more people will understand what kind of fight we are in to balance out the needs of government with the needs of capitalism and the corporate alliance that has drifted away from America and merged with the Davos crowd of international conspirators.  I will likely read Woke, Inc. several more times because it is written at a high level and is filled with great information.  But the more I read it, the more I felt that my book, ironically comes out on August 28th, just a few days after Vivek’s contains the answers to many of the questions posed in Woke, Inc.  I found it incredibly ironic that two people from roughly the same area with different backgrounds would independently identify essentially the same problem and attack it almost like a question then answer.  For instance, a couple of the chapters from Vivek’s book, most notably “The Rise of the Managerial Class,” were the very aspects I was targeting in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as a way to contend with.  Ultimately, what was driving woke culture was fear, and I intended to teach people not to be afraid.  Once fear was conquered, many of the mechanisms mentioned in Vivek’s book would be eliminated.  But here were two people who independently arrived at a driving need and only shared a few chance meetings in getting there.  How inspired Vivek was from the event I hosted, I don’t think, will ever be measured.  But the irony was not lost on me. 

Where my mind has gone, however, is based on my background, not so much as a business manager and poker player with investor house money, but from my own experience at managing fear by taking away the option of people being able to scare you.  So I took my experiences as a gunfighter, for sport, as a foundation for approaching woke culture, just the latest rendition of socialism and Marxism.  Where I planned to give a review of Woke, Inc., which I’m sure I will at some point, I couldn’t stop thinking about how his book almost ended with a segway into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.   Yet mine is targeted to influence leaders, not necessarily a mass public.  That would be the case for most of my stuff.  But in all these explorations into an epistemological philosophy, you have to start with identifying the problem, which Vivek did.  While I could tell that Vivek was working out some things in his approach, he comes from a background in India where ideas of capitalism were romanticized as a way to opportunity.  In Vivek’s world, arranged marriages were very much a real thing.  My approach was to strip away the façade of the progressive era and set my book in the Old West, a period of American history that most people can agree on and have some relationship from which to build.   We live, after all, in a time when wokeness is seeking to erase our history, so we forget who we are.  Where toxic masculinity is illustrated so that Western civilization’s fall can be ignited without challengers, the danger is very much real.  So I set my scope there and then used that platform to teach people how to be all those great things again to attack this new “Managerial Class” that Vivek spent much of his book talking about.

I did enjoy Vivek’s book a lot.  If I didn’t have the experiences, I mentioned I would still feel that way.  One thing I talk a lot about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the value in “ghosting it,” and if something I did a year and a half ago inspired such a brilliant mind like Vivek’s, that makes me happy to hear.  I would suspect that Vivek, a big-time insider, had been thinking about these topics for a long time before he took his plunge into independence.  Reading his book, it sounds like he is making a platform for a political campaign for the future, where he wants to fix these kinds of woke problems as a legislator. That’s all great; it takes all sorts of people independently to make things happen, which is evident in some of the writing coming out of Butler County, Ohio.  Nobody was talking to each other, yet here come all these exciting ideas to contribute to a social need that has been brewing for a long time.  I tend not to spend much time thinking about that kind of thing.  Whatever divine intervention is doing its magic, I welcome.  My goal is to do what I can every day to make the world a better place in whatever way possible.  And in that regard, I am proud of Vivek.  He could have chosen a cushy life and easily become a billionaire by just riding the coaster into the station, especially for a guy like him, charismatic and full of energy.  But if I had any part in inspiring him to write Woke, Inc. with a political rally, well, I can say that his book inspired me of just how vital the themes in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business are for a hungry public looking for answers.  In that way, the world may just be finding a way to step out of the smoke and into a prosperous new tomorrow. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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Virgin Galactic’s Surrender to Woke Culture: What should have been a great space flight was just a commercial for gay rights and Black Lives Matters

Traveling to Space turned out to be more about Gay Rights

For anyone who has read my work here going well back into the past, they will remember that I have been an advocate for Virgin Galactic’s desire to create space tourism as long as they have been trying.  It was a sad day in 2014 when the company had a crash, and a test pilot was killed, which set back the company for many years as regulatory burdens followed, and it looked for a while that the endeavor might never get off the ground.  Now I know people will say that I’m not sensitive to the test pilot’s family and that there are more important things in life than going to space.   Well, no, there isn’t.  I have in my new book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business a whole chapter dedicated to the “Tyranny of Safety,” which covers the extraordinary costs of regulatory burdens that are imposed on all capitalist endeavors.  Pilots like that nice fellow who was killed understand these things.  If they die in the process of doing something big and bold, they are usually pretty good with it.  Especially if it’s something important like commercializing space.  If our civilization is ever going to get out of its static mode for which it currently suffers, we have to stop crying over every little death that happens to someone, whether it’s Covid or a test pilot for a space program.  Some things are worth dying over, and adventure and innovation are a few of them.  We must always keep in mind the big picture. 

However, Virgin Galactic, like a lot of modern companies with tremendous assets, has turned to Woke culture to appease the mobs of progressivism.  It’s an old story that many are just waking up to.  Corporations controlled by radical mobs and the CEO’s position to appease those mobs through risk mitigation because they desire to keep the squeaky wheels quiet are a real problem.  That type of mentality made viewing the Virgin Galactic space flight a miserable experience because of all the Woke sponsors.  Woke politics were on full display to keep the mud chucking liberals from losing their minds as civilization took bold steps toward space travel.  I say mud chuckers because I always think of the Woodstock music festival that took place a month after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon for reference.  It displays all too accurately the political divides we see today.   You essentially have half the nation who wants to cleave to mother earth and the safety of the home planet retreating to tribal primitivism.  Then, the other half want to explore and leave the nest to see what adventures are out there.  Those sentiments are reflected in our current political parties of Democrats and Republicans and represent the gulf between them unworkable.  There is no compromise when the general philosophies are that far apart. 

As a CEO and a generally liberal guy from England, Richard Branson is trying to bring all those soft types along for the ride, which ruins it for the rest of us.  Watching that space flight that day with the ridiculous NBC coverage with Stephen Colbert, one of the biggest Trump haters on planet earth as the host, was sickening.  And the stupid music.  The constant talk about gay rainbows and Black Lives Matters.  It was insulting, and they knew it.  They figure people like us on the conservative side of things, the people who still are willing to challenge death to develop space, who aren’t hiding under the covers due to Covid, will put up with such insults.  We aren’t the ones who will boycott Virgin if we don’t get our way.  But the gays, the BLM Marxists, and the other lunatics from the left will, so the programming was steered entirely to them.  What could have been a fun day of enjoying a major technical breakthrough ended up being a progressive gay rights parade and a reminder of everything that divides us.  Instead of space being a great unifier, it was used to illustrate the differences, which is a shame. 

The worst part was the Virgin Galactic sales pitch for why we should be going to space.  Their reasoning was to go up and look back at the earth and appreciate the need to protect it, turning the whole experience into a Green New Deal justification.  But reality says that humans are meant to escape earth and to migrate into space to survive as a species since there is a shelf life on earth that could blow at any moment.  We don’t go to space to save the earth.  We go to space to get away from earth before it’s not there anymore.  That is a devastating message for those who have built a religion out of earth worship and have replaced God with the goddess Mother Earth.  They picked a deity with a terminal shelf life, and if humans attach themselves to that shelf life, they will be destroyed with the planet whether it happens next month or several million years down the road.  People who have not come to grips with this issue have problems they need to fix psychologically.  They don’t have the right to doom the rest of us with their silly insecurities.  But rather than try to sell the advantages of space to them, Virgin Galactic and the media coverage pandered to them at the expense of the rest of us, and it was disgusting. 

Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson did a remarkable job of getting civilian space flight started commercially.  But what is sad is that, like many things these days, Woke culture is ruining everything with political opinions that are not only not mainstream but have the effect of a screaming child afraid of the dark.  Space travel is adventurous.  It’s dangerous.  It’s not for timid babies, and that’s all we saw from the coverage of Virgin Galactic’s great space triumph.  Some of that is to make space seem worthy to those types of people.  But it won’t work.  The only thing that will work is peer pressure when adventurous daredevils go to space first, then show all those timid types that space can be relatively safe.  Then they will go and won’t try to stand in the way of progress.  But you won’t win them over by talking about anal sex and waving rainbow flags.  They will go to space when it’s cool, and not before then.  Watering down an otherwise great corporation with Wokeness only weakened the message and took what could have been a big boom and turned it into Pee Wee’s Playhouse.  It ruined my decade of anticipation that was sold as a big firework that turned out to be a silly sparkler that went out as fast as ignited.  And it was a reminder of all the things I hate about progressivism and those people who cling to earth like some spoiled brat kid afraid of being away from their mommies longer than 2 minutes.  After all, liberalism is fear and adhering to safety and security so that the world doesn’t judge them too harshly for their timidity.  They use safety as the excuse to hide behind their fears as justification for their lack of effort and bravery.  And instead of showing them the way to adventure, Virgin Galactic appealed to their insecurities and allowed them to hide under the covers for a bit longer.

Rich Hoffman

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Colleges Paved the Way for Communism in our Corporate Culture: The quest for a better life has put chains on the hearts and minds of innocent students

There is a lot of discussion now about how and why corporate cultures have gone so Woke and are no longer opportunities for jobs and product development, but are drivers of communism in our culture in America.  As I’ve pointed out before, college is not how you achieve success in life; those sentiments were given to us from Europe and the early American sensibilities that they were the gateway to aristocracy.  To this day, parents who want good things for their children are convinced that a college degree will give their offspring an entry point into aristocratic society, which is how the game is designed.  The genuinely successful usually find that to develop an idea independently, college gets in their way.  But to serve someone who is doing all the risk-taking, college can help them get a job working with those people.  It all depends on what you want out of life.  However, communists have infiltrated that education process, and they did so early on. With everyone learning the same kind of communist garbage in college, it’s no wonder many students find they spend the rest of their lives deprogramming themselves from what they learned. And it is through that method, the communist dog whistles work when China plans some passive-aggressive attack on our culture, and we find ourselves defenseless to take a stand, as explained in the video below. 

Colleges Teach Wokeness

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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The Dream of Being Awake: Vivek Ramaswamy and his book ‘Woke, Inc’

Vivek Ramaswamy

I had an excellent opportunity to meet Vivek Ramaswamy, talking about his upcoming book, Woke, Inc., at a Butler County event sponsored by several great Republicans.  Butler County Treasurer Nancy Nix and her husband are a few of the best people anybody could imagine. They were responsible for setting up the event, which features a discussion on the problem of “wokeness” in American business and is a topic I am very concerned with.  I always appreciate when I have an opportunity to learn something new, and I did as Vivek spoke for an hour and a half at the Republican Victory Center in Middletown, Ohio.  He said that the definition of “woke” was waking up from the dream of being an American, which startled me as a metaphor.  I suppose it’s an obvious definition, but the way Vivek presented it was pretty alarming.  Ramaswamy, you might know from Fox Business and Fox News in general, he’s on several shows regularly, specifically Tucker Carlson.  So it was quite a treat to get him for an evening all to ourselves to discuss this critical issue as I talk about below.

Talking about Woke, Inc.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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