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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