I wanted to enjoy the rocket launch of Blue Origin as it occurred in July of 2021. But, hey, it’s Jeff Bezos. I’ve written many good articles on Bezos in the pre-Trump days, but he’s come out as so anti-Trump, that it’s impossible to like the guy. But as a big fan of commercialized space and the steps Bezos had played in making it more of a reality, I did my best to put all that aside to support what he did when he went to space with three other people to prove that traveling into space could be so easy that anybody could do it. And it was, the space flight itself was great. The Blue Origin rocket itself was brilliant. It took off effortlessly with minimal infrastructure and flew out into space without any sign of struggle. The booster rocket returned to earth and landed like a special effect from some excellent science fiction movie. It was so good that it didn’t look real. Then, the capsule containing the passengers came back to earth and landed almost where they had all taken off. Nobody emerged from the vehicle looking chaotic or stressed out. It was smooth as silk and quite an achievement for commercial spaceflight. Jeff Bezos even wore a cowboy hat before and after to understand the kind of mentality it will take to commercialize space. That space flight itself did not have to involve pressure suits and other inconveniences. In all those ways, the flight was enormously successful. However, spaceflight was never going to be the problem. The problem was Bezos himself. As one of the world’s wealthiest people, that, of course, makes him a target of every bootlicker there is. Add to that the awkward nature of Bezos himself, where he always comes out sounding like a Bond villain, even at a birthday party, and the PR for the spaceflight was just terrible.
After what Amazon did to Parler after the Trump election of 2020, it was the final straw for me. Amazon is a great place to buy books and just about anything else you might want, but now they had made themselves political activists, and that was the beginning of their eventual doom. Their branding would be harmed forever. Now that won’t matter, but it will slowly rot Amazon in the years to come because they essentially alienated 80 million Trump-voting Americans, which will be a real problem in the future. I responded by moving my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, from Amazon’s Bookbaby and moved it to a more conservative publisher, which took some effort. Amazon is the largest bookseller globally, so my current publisher lists books there, but I was not about to publish my book with Amazon, even though they have tremendous resources. It comes down to Jeff Bezos and his activism that is the problem. I often forgive, to some extent, rich people and how they have to appease the mobs of progressivism. Still, Bezos has gone too far in trying to control the corrosive elements of progressivism by becoming one of its spokesmen. And that is what ruined his spaceflight. After the historic flight, Bezos gave $100 million as a donation to liberal causes to the communist Van Jones, which was simply unforgivable.
I get it; Bezos didn’t have any blacks on the space flight, so he had to do something for the black community to justify his picks for space. But that didn’t stop the onslaught of hatred that emerged after the flight, everything from the rocket looking like a penis to Bezos’s cowboy hat during the journey. People don’t like Bezos because he presents himself as a progressive hack. Like many other modern people of great wealth, they think the future is in globalism, so they have worked against American tradition to favor a change state government that liberals will run. And that dream is falling apart in their hands, running like water between their fingers, and Bezos seems to have an understanding of that. After all, Amazon knows that conservative books are outselling liberal books by a lot so that the trend won’t be going in the direction of Van Jones. Bezos has gone all-in on betting that liberalism would win anyway, and that has created a level of tension that is ever-present with anything attached to Blue Origin. Of course, Bezos shares that problem with the Walt Disney Company who has also gone all-in on a progressive world of tomorrow. But like Virgin Galactic’s journey to space, they made the mistake of miscategorizing space travel as an extension of preserving the earth rather than escaping from it. Bezos made comments about looking back on the earth from space and appreciating that we are all in it together or something stupid like that; it came out sounding terrible. Not something people could feel proud of.
That’s the sad part of the story; what should have been a great day came out as a bla. A perfect feat of engineering that involved many thousands of people turned out to be all about the odd personality of Jeff Bezos. Nobody cared about his mom, his brother, or the other passengers because the entire event came out as a pr appeasement of progressive erosion to give a rich person a ride into space. The scope of the effort was lost in the hatred toward Jeff Bezos by a public that decided it just doesn’t like him. And if he were the kind of person who could care less, it would at least be honest. But he tries to pull the shades over everyone’s eyes, including Van Jones. To cover that ground of oddness, he just tossed $100 million to a devout global communist from CNN, giving more power to an enemy of Americana all the while trying to appeal to the cowboys and Trump voters by wearing the cowboy hat. What he ended up doing was making everyone mad. The story of space was lost in the drama, which is saying a lot. With such an outstanding achievement into the vastness of space, all people saw was a way to poke fun at Bezos, one of the world’s most hated people. But people don’t tell him they hate him because they want a chance to maybe get some money from him at some point. Yet as I say all the time, you can tell a lot more about people by what they do, not necessarily what they say. And that is what came in the aftermath of the Blue Origin space flight; people could only find fault in an otherwise faultless flight. A journey to space without error, as predictable as the hands on a clock, but as hated as a pile of cow dung. The public would have instead had anybody else go to space aside from Jeff Bezos. That’s what’s sad about the effort; rather than advance space travel, it had the feeling of setting it back by decades. Giving that big check to a communist as payment for letting the socialists and the communists of the world let Bezos go to space came out as an ominous message of appeasement rather than freedom. It said to the world that we are slaves to it and the communist greenie weenies who inhabit its service like a virus of thought that seeks to chain humans to earth forever and never let go.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 