There are likely fewer people in the world who wrote as much about Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars property in entertainment as I have, or the fate of a multibillion-dollar investment, the Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida. I was excited about it. I have been a Star Wars fan most of my life, which is reflected in my work. But it’s not just Bud Light that woke policies have crushed that the global push for a certain kind of CEO to now run these corporate boards ran by BlackRock have destroyed. Knowing Star Wars as an entertainment property and a work of modern mythology, I could see early on the impact and ultimate failure of Disney’s quest to appease BlackRock and the other elements of the Desecrators of Davos, the World Economic Forum’s view of the world. And it was evident in 2015 when the first of the next generation Star Wars movies came out in The Force Awakens that the future destruction of globalism was making itself most apparent. What we have now is a kind of stubborn tenacity of globalism to impose itself on reality. Whereas I have been saying for a very long time, many decades now, in writing, that the trend was going to destroy itself. That was never more clear in how Disney as a corporation handheld Star Wars as soon as it purchased George Lucas way back in 2012 and have now chased off their audiences, which, prior to, looked to be eternally loyal. I warned early on to all those who owned Disney stock to sell because the brands they, as a company, were building would fall apart, and that’s precisely what is happening. As Disney is falling apart, so is globalism everywhere in the world.
As scary as a post-President Trump world has been with all the horrible revelations that have been revealed, we are actually better off because market forces are proving that wonders of capitalism envisioned by the great Adam Smith book The Wealth of Nations to be as reliable as anyone could hope it to be. Out of all the presently trained economists with PhDs in the study of social behavior and the flow of money, it really all points back to that seminal work that was released to the world when America was founded that has turned out to be exclusively true. Disney had the money and power to hire anybody they wanted to be successful. Just ten years ago, they looked to be an unstoppable entertainment company, but like the world presently is in general, all members of the Bilderberg group, and the World Economic Forum, Disney is a dismal failure that literally can’t do anything correctly. They can’t produce new content that anybody wants, and what they do put out from their entertainment classics is so burdened with woke politics that it has turned away half the nation from enjoying their products. Disney bet on their brand and thought it was so great that no matter how much wokeness they proposed, they assumed, as they all did when they adopted this Chinese communist model of corporate rule of the world, that people would follow them as leaders of culture and that progressive politics would rule the day. Yet what they found out has been completely the opposite. Markets serve people; they don’t shape culture. They represent culture.
That was never more apparent than when Disney built the Galactic Star Cruiser Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida, connected to the Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars land at Hollywood Studios. I was very excited about Disney’s attempts and wanted them to work. I was a big fan of the Star Wars Land and went to it as soon as it opened with my wife, and we made a nice vacation out of it. I thought it was a stunning experience for a kid who grew up loving Star Wars, so I wanted the experiment to work. But I saw the trouble too and had been talking about it, at first, very politely. I did several radio shows with various guests around the country talking about the danger of woke Disney, which at that time, nobody understood what “woke” was. And sadly, everything I said as a warning sign for Disney turned out to be true. Disney didn’t understand Star Wars. It was being run by a woman, hand-picked by George Lucas, to continue what he had built. But she got swept up into this New World Order of the global citizen movement and turned Star Wars into what a little sister would do to your Star Wars toys when everyone was kids. Girls might take your Star Wars figures and put lipstick on them, and instead of them having epic battles, she would sit them at a table and have them drink tea. Kathy Kennedy essentially did that to Star Wars, designed for 8- to 12-year-old boys, and started producing all the content for girls. And she thought that the boys would stick around and that the market expansion would now be more inclusive of girls and empower women.
So when the Star Wars hotel opened as a kind of cruise ship last year, right after the Covid lockdowns, after ten years of development and over a billion dollars in investment, fans were stunned to learn that the $6000 per room 2 day all immersive experience was essentially the little sister version of Star Wars. Star Wars is about rebellion against tyranny. Not singing songs and drinking drinks in a bar with aliens walking around. But Disney didn’t listen to the fans; instead, it lectured them about what it would be like, and the results were devastating. Just over the hotel opened to great fanfare, it is now projected to close in September of 2023 because it just never took off. People rejected the idea, and it wasn’t so much the money; the lack of the Star Wars experience ultimately destroyed it, really, before it ever got off the ground. It proved something that will eventually happen to all corporations who have embraced woke policies, from Ford and General Motors to Bud Light, Miller Light, and Target. Corporations don’t and never will run the world. They will always serve society in general. Not the other way around. I warned everyone. Some people listened, and those that did are better off today than they were. Just as I have warned about the climate that still wants to vote for President Trump as opposed to the corporate approach of Ron DeSantis, they don’t know what they are doing. Professionals who make their living off these kinds of things have drunk the Kool-Aid and found out that there is a lot of bad stuff in there, and they’ve learned it too late.
In general, what happened to Disney and the Star Wars hotel and brand is a warning of what will happen to everyone in the future of corporate globalism. People don’t want woke and corporations who assume that their products are so beloved by the public that people will follow anything. Corporations who believe that have another thing coming. And that was never more obvious than in the closure of the Star Wars hotel so soon after it opened. The smartest people in the world with the most financial resources could not change the kind of reality that Adam Smith articulated in his economics studies. And those rules apply in every market sector. Entertainment just being one that is obvious. Which is a fine indicator of things to come.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 