Category: Creative Writing

Thinking Big With Starship: How to ask the right questions to the answer we all know

I don’t think it’s getting nearly enough attention, and that is the launch of Starship 3, which occurred at the SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas, on March 14th 2024.  I would place that effort as one of the top events in the human history of the world and will forever be remembered as a great leap for mankind, a leap more significant than the first moon landing with Neil Armstrong.  I know some people believe that the moon landing was faked, and based on this government and the temptations of government propaganda, I can certainly understand that.  But Neil Armstrong lived near me and was never the same after it, and his exploration into Ecuador, looking for the secret library of an ancient race of people, revealed more than what has been said under classified breaths over the years.  And humanity has been waved away from space travel, which should have never happened, for our governments have behaved like jealous parents who are afraid of their children moving out of the house.  They have done everything they can to stifle the human race from reaching into space, which has been ridiculously stupid.  But then comes along Elon Musk and SpaceX to make good on a promise not so long ago, 19 years or so, to take civilization into space, and their launch vehicle, Starship, is a tremendous engineering feat to perform just that.  And that it flew into space and achieved many of the mission parameters was stunning, and jaw-droppingly significant.  I was watching the launch from Japan with friends, and I can tell you that the next day, many people I met were stunned by what had happened.  At breakfast at the top of the Oriental Hotel in Kobe, a couple of Americans celebrated with me in a moment that no matter where people were in the world or what their politics were, the launch of the Starship into space successfully, and it maneuvered and was able to behave like an actual spacecraft was more than just another significant event.  Life is much better off because of this magnificent achievement, but a company that could only be born in America and produce such an independent objective on a massive scale was more than encouraging.  It was validating.   When you want to understand the miracles of capitalism, look at SpaceX and that Starship launch.

As I spoke to people after the launch, I was thrilled to hear that the essential philosophy of SpaceX came up.  Probably the greatest philosopher of our modern age was Douglas Adams, the author of the five books of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series produced during the late 1970s through 1990s.  Many people think of them as comedy writings, a kind of Monte Python literature series consistent with the type of material they produce on the BBC, precisely, Doctor Who.  However, Elon Musk is a tremendous fan of the first book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I am a massive fan of the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.  There are three more that are all good.  But they are excellent in what I call “conceptual faculty, ” the ability to think about something in a way that wasn’t previously achievable.  The Adams books take away through humor all the drama of origins and the meaning of life and make the universe as a whole manageable, as a way of thinking about huge things in manageable bits.  It does this by figuring out how to ask questions and providing answers.  The SpaceX philosophy has been to solve horrendously complicated engineering problems, with a Douglas Adams flair to them in what the hidden genius truly is behind the purpose of the work. 

Everything built by human intellect

The point of the books is to understand the meaning of everything, which in the book the answer is learned at the end of the first book is the number “42.”  Everything in life can be summed up by that number, which is the comic element of the literary classic.  The other four books then ask the more important question: what questions do you ask to learn the answer to “42.”  How do you ask the right questions to get to the answer?  So, from there, the critical question of any philosophic premise is to learn to ask the right things to get to the answer you wish to seek.  So, if you know you want to go to Mars as a civilization, what questions should you ask to achieve that objective?  Do you build a rocket to go there?  If so, how big, how many, what kind of fuel does it use?  How many people would fly on it?  Those kinds of things.  Once you know the answer, you can ask the right questions leading up to it.  It’s the way humans can focus their imaginations properly to achieve great things that the universe can’t do for itself.  In that way, the meaning of life is to bring meaning to it through the mechanisms of invention, which then becomes a running theme throughout the entire book series.  As I watched Starship fly in space, preparing to land in the Indian Ocean, the SpaceX method of science and invention proved Douglas Adams more correct than any other method of thinking so far utilized in the human race, and it was a pleasure to watch, which I will never forget. 

The famous Kobe Beef

Later that night, I discussed the launch with some knowledgeable people, and we talked about its significance.  We were on the top floor of a costly bar, looking out at one of Japan’s most cosmopolitan cities, Kobe.  We had just finished at a very top-class restaurant eating Kobe Beef where the cook explained to me that the way they made their sweet potatoes so sweet was that they kept them in a dark container to keep the light from damaging the cell structure of the food, which gave it a unique taste.  Just as Kobe Beef had the human imprint of cultivating nature with intellect to get a distinctive flavor.  And I pointed out to these brilliant people that everything we saw, from the fancy whiskies available in abundance around the bar to the stacks and stacks of buildings we could see as far as the eyes would allow, all started with human intellect taking the tools of nature and bending them to the will of human imagination for a purpose that is our answer for the number “42.”  Things are worth doing, and most importantly, unleashing the shackles of the human race with a proper philosophy that teaches us to ask the right questions is the purpose of our lives relative to the universe and everything in it.  Governments try to suppress this universal need for their silly attempts to be gods and the centers of power relative to their place among the stars.  But when an intellect like Douglas Adams unleashes those limits through art, and someone like Elon Musk and companies like SpaceX put that thinking to full use, magnificent things can and do happen.  And I have a feeling we are seeing just the start of a splendid future that will quickly outgrow the politics of Earth and need to be redefined by the needs of the human race and the tools the universe provides for the answer to everything, that exists just outside the known universe, and its multiverse brothers and sisters, to the heart of it all.  And we must ask and fulfill the many trillions of questions to get there.   It’s all very fascinating.

Humans strive for greatness and the questions we need to get us there.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Government Could Never Run SpaceX: Technical innovation works best under capitalist markets

Again, let’s make something clear.  The government cannot make things, and most everything it does in most cases is terrible.  However, we need the government to maintain national and statewide concerns.  You need just enough government to manage a community but never enough to become tyrannical.  So, I’m not an anti-government guy, but I am an anti-stupid guy.  Dumb people tend to be drawn to government work because they hope the power of government will cover up how stupid they are and can hide it from the world; government tends to have all the wrong people in it from top to bottom, so what we let them do has to be managed to a minimum.  Those same people never become magically competent and suddenly make things better by attending a few meetings and acquiring some name tag at a meet and greet where they draw their name on it with a marker.  So it is absolutely absurd that anybody in government thinks they could do anything with SpaceX other than fill out a permit, which they can’t even do promptly.  But that is the word on the street, now that they’ve seen that the Starship from SpaceX is going to be successful, with the third test flight coming up soon, there are leaked talks that the government wants to take over the Starship as a “national necessity” and make it part of the military.  First of all, I do not doubt that the government in any form, through the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the Space Force, the Air Force, or any branch of government, thinks that all civilian enterprises as valuable as SpaceX have become, should be held down to the limits government can provide.  Many in government believe that no company such as SpaceX should exist beyond the control of government and that they can’t be the first to claim the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies as a private company, set up bases, and govern people in the far reaches of space. 

There are many people who think only a government can have power that is then accountable to voters, and they can never get their minds wrapped around the purpose of government in the first place, which is why we have the current Civil War that we do in the world, the corporations against free people.  Who does the government report to, and what is its purpose?  Corporations use the power of government not as capitalist, free market enterprises but as clubs to beat down their competition and secure their stake in the marketplace.  Pfizer comes to mind in its relationship with the World Economic Forum to be in the business of making bioweapons in a Wuhan lab and releasing them during election years to control who runs countries through stolen elections so that they can then use government to force private people to consume their product.  I don’t think SpaceX will let the government take over anything.  They have shown that they can partner with the government, such as they have with NASA, to have success, but such relationships have slowed SpaceX down a lot, not made it better.  But because the government regulates so much of the space industry, such partnerships are essential, if not stupid.  Amazingly, SpaceX has managed to do as well as with such government partnerships.  But now that SpaceX has been successful, with the Falcon rockets and the Dragon programs, now that Starship is ready to make its mark as a very efficient space taxi, many in the government are having delusions that they could run SpaceX better than the private market and that is just absurd, and will never happen.  It can’t happen. 

Government workers cannot perform at the rate of technical innovations required for the space industry.  They don’t have it in them, and the nature of government prevents such a possibility.  So, for the government to take over SpaceX in any way is unrealistic.  Like everything they do, from building highways to teaching children in schools, the government cannot perform the task better than free markets.  The concept of profit fuels ambition, and the typical government bureaucrat, even in the military forces, can not do great things without the idea of profit being used to fuel the task.  And profit doesn’t just come in the form of money.  It can come in the ambitions of a future task, but those who can provide opportunity tend to evoke such ambition that creates invention.  All government work tends to fall under a structured concept that limits the work to the scope of the people doing it.  In the private industry, people tend to rise to meet the needs of the work.  However, in government-managed enterprises, the work is limited to the skills of the people who manage to get into government work because of multiple psychological problems that draw them to it.  This is why there aren’t more companies like SpaceX: they never grow so big and powerful in such a short time and on such a scale that the government doesn’t see them as a threat and destroys them well in advance.  When you watch a SpaceX launch, and the crowd cheers the way they do, there is a collective celebration from the human race with each new achievement that is quite audible.  That’s because people know.  They know how significant many of these technical innovations are and that SpaceX has been able to outrun the limits of government to achieve them for the betterment of everyone.

It is a problem that civilization has reconciled that has not occurred yet in our development over many thousands of years.  Work is done best by free people who benefit from the invention, as opposed to controlling powers manipulated by a few administrators who can distribute that power based on favors.  Depending on the ratio of those effects, you can know if your civilization is good and successful or oppressive and tyrannical.  And no tyrannical civilization has ever been successful at innovation and invention.  That’s why communist countries like China must steal everything they do.  They cannot think independently because they use the power of government to hide their incompetence through collective government power, so they stifle creative thought instead of unleashing it.  To do what SpaceX wants to do over the next decade, there are literally millions and millions of inventions that will have to occur from many more sources than SpaceX to make it happen.  But the effort starts with them and their free ability to meet marketplace demands.  But without profit being the key to their operation, none of it will occur, and the government will regulate the industry back to the stone age, which is the only thing they can do predictably, holding back innovation and the spirit of invention.  America and American capitalism have been more successful than any other place in the world because we have a country that prevents government from harming people more than any other place, so companies like SpaceX can form.  A company like SpaceX would never occur in a communist country like China.  They can copy but can’t create, which is the rule in most endeavors.  In that way, anybody who is worried that the government will take over SpaceX can rest assured that it won’t.  They might try, but once they did take over SpaceX operations, they would ruin everything they had built, and it would be just a matter of months before the government would celebrate screwing in a light bulb rather than unleashing flights into space.  And that is being kind to the light bulb. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The 1776 Report: One of the greatest things President Trump did during his first term

I personally think it’s one of the most extraordinary things that President Trump did during his first four years in office, but it was published during that tumultuous time as he had to leave and Biden was inserted.  As soon as the election results were in, I hunkered down, knowing there would be some dark days ahead.  We had just struggled through a horrendous year with Covid and now the tunnel in those cold days of 2020 going into 2021 had just gotten much longer.  But like all things that the Trump Organization does, and President Trump himself built up the brand in ways that greatly accentuated America, even with all the chaos of election fraud and talk of insurrection, the President in one of his final moments of power commissioned The 1776 Report, which was to be part of a larger project, The 1776 Commission, that would evolve into a new kind of Mt. Rushmore park dedicated to American patriotism.  I even noticed that an old friend of mine, Joshua Charles was on it as the President picked a handful of people to record what America was supposed to be so future generations wouldn’t forget, which was clearly at that time and now, trying to be erased by globalist forces hell-bent on our complete destruction.  When it mattered most, Trump was a patriot who wanted to counter The 1619 Project, which was a hostile Marxist organization established to rewrite American history into victimized slave state criteria, when it was obviously the opposite.  America, because of its Constitution, ended slavery.  It didn’t build the nation off it as it was being proposed by the American-hating political parties who smelled blood in the water, blood they poured in deliberately.  Yet in those dark moments, Trump showed best who he was and just how dedicated he was to our country, and he truly showed that he loved it as much if not more, than the rest of us.

I didn’t expect anything out of Trump at that point, and in November of 2020, right after the election, I turned to someone I like a lot to gauge my opinions on the matter and recharge my patriotism, Cleon Skousen, books like The Naked Communist, The Naked Capitalist, and The 5000 Year Leap.  It was clear to me what was happening. Skousen had warned about it in the 1950s and 1960s, and his words were actually coming true in 2020.  I was so angry about the election, and so many people around me were asking me what to do, they were ready to pick up arms and retake the government.  So, I needed perspective as Biden stepped into the White House.  My wife and I hit the road to get away for a while as we traveled all over the United States in our RV to “think.”  It started in the deserts of New Mexico but ended up in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and South Dakota for a while and I didn’t notice myself the report that Trump’s 1776 Commission had written.  It was published to the public in several forms during that exact time, first as a PDF and then as a softcover book.  Then, as a hardcover during that following summer.  But by then the damage was well under way.  The first thing that Biden did on day one in office was decommission The 1776 Commission and attempt to stifle the report.  The Biden administration, along with their globalist insurgents, was attempting to erase America, and they were starting with all the patriotic acts President Trump had been implementing in order to demoralize our nation into submission. We weren’t witnessing a transfer of power popularly elected by the people.  We were seeing a hostile coup disguised as a free election but intended to quietly conquer us all with a well-planned trojan horse sent by globalists who were making their power move. 

But The 1776 Report was like Noah’s Ark in those dark and stormy days that clearly announced what a second Trump term would look like and is the blueprint for our resurrection from the ashes of that purposeful destruction.  I returned from those trips out west in the deserts and mountains with a renewed sense of patriotism, and I was thrilled to read the Report, which I’d recommend to everyone now.  For those looking for revenge in 2024, we have long waited for this moment, and the guide for what to do next is right there in the Report.  Anybody who questions President Trump and his intentions can only read that report and know what he has in mind.  And I’m excited about it because I don’t see just the start of a second Trump term to get back to the good days we had under him and the patriotism that was sure to be established in the wake of it.  But I was invited recently to a kind of open discussion on Elon Musk’s X platform where J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Musk himself were discussing current events in ways I have never heard before.  There were other speakers there, but it was an exciting debate that showed me what life after Trump could look like.  It all started with The 1776 Report, published in a chaotic time as almost putting Moses in a little straw boat to save America from a treacherous pharaoh wanting to preserve his power from the forces of freedom. 

It would be a good idea to get this report and pass it around to friends and family as we approach the 2024 election.  I would call it the battle plan for the next few decades of American sovereignty and the goals of our republic, and it will be one of the most significant contributions of the Trump presidency for many hundreds of years to come.  History will remember these dark days for the leaders who emerged, and I couldn’t help but think all that while listening to that event with Ramaswamy, Vance, and Musk all at the same time and place.  I could see Trump retiring after a second term, turning all this over to them and us for a continuation of The 1776 Project so that young people would never forget.  I would consider Vance and Ramaswamy very young and the country’s future.  And their guiding light, as should be everyone, is The 1776 Report.  That is what America is all about and how we need to be thinking about 2024 and beyond.  We have seen now what the world wishes for us, and yes, revenge is the correct word for it, because there can be no justice in the world if the people who did all this to us are not punished.  But punishment comes in many forms.  Living well is one of them.  And in the spirit of that report written and published as the Biden administration was attempting to erase America for all time, some of American life’s best attributes emerged.  I saw it as my wife and I traveled that year, camping in a different spot almost every night and spending my mornings and evenings reading books and writing myself.  Touching the face of America and all its glory that Trump managed to capture in The 1776 Report which future generations will understand to be the miracle of America which might end up saving humanity after all from the clutches of evil in all its forms, expressed most destructively through globalism and corporate communism that has showed us its teeth for history to remember.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

They All Have it Coming: The Beltway is preparing for the Trump revenge tour

With all the positioning propaganda against Trump that has come out in the 2023 election cycle, the purposeful Christmas Dinner conversation meant to steer people away from Trump to neocon losers like Birdbrain Nikki; the truth is lingering behind people’s actions. Most notably, the way Marco Rubio and others acted regarding the recent NDAA signage pushed recklessly through the House and Senate for continued spending.  The baseball insiders know what’s going on with Trump and understand that the media will not be able to shape stories as they have in the past and that all these attempts to knock Trump out of the 2024 presidential race will fall flat.  The SWAMP doesn’t want to be drained, and the alligators and snakes are fighting back with a brutal sentiment.  But they all know what’s coming, which is precisely why they put a provision in that latest NDAA bill that will prevent Trump from pulling out of NATO over support of Ukraine’s fight with Russia over border disputes.  They know Trump will be in the White House again, and they are already working to protect their nest eggs, so if it wasn’t already apparent to the world, it is now.  The inside baseball people in politics know that the inevitable is about to happen, and there is nothing they can do about it short of starting a Civil War, which is actually on the table from their perspective.  Before they hand over the reins of government to the MAGA political wave, they are going to pull every dirty trick in the book.  This NDAA thing is just an easy one to spot because it always involves Republicans like Marco Rubio, who are just whores for distributing government money confiscated from taxpayers and giving it to big globalist goals like the support of NATO, so long as America funds it while other countries don’t. 

These tricks have worked in the past because a level of trust came with them.  People trusted the media because they didn’t want to waste their time doubting them, and they trusted politicians enough to let them make up bills like the NDAA NATO supporting horror that it is because it didn’t affect ordinary people very much.  But we had a stolen election in 2020, and we had a bioweapons attack that killed people.  We shut them up in their homes, destroyed their businesses, and broke up families in a truly terrible year, and people have not forgotten.  The arrogant people who perpetrated this attack thought they had it all figured out.  Disney would help them create “global citizens” in America, the media would steer everyone into the slaughterhouse compliantly, and globalism would be well on its way to world domination.  And people wouldn’t be any wiser to it.  All the pinheads in media who can barely write 300 words without consulting an AI program thought they had it all in the bag.  The plan going into the election season would be that lawfare would keep Trump off the ballot, planted news stories around Christmas time would steer the public away from the troubled Trump during the Holiday of 2023, and the bad guys would win once again because the dumb, gullible public would be too busy watching football and unwrapping presents to understand what was happening.  The scam perpetrators, like Dr. Fauci before them, would get honorary degrees and peace prizes and be invited to Davos to speak at the World Economic Forum as celebrities. Leonardo DiCaprio might even sit next to them at a round table event. And globalism would continue to grow unimpeded.

But that plan blew up over that same period, the entire fourth quarter of the 2023 year.  The bad guys were going through the motions, but the results weren’t returning as intended.  Going through the Holiday season, Trump was pulling way ahead of Biden, leaving the other GOP competitors in the dust.  The Colorado story about taking Trump off the ballot was going nowhere.  The Supreme Court was signaling that it wasn’t going to support the Jack Smith insurrection case as a fast track to impact the primary season, which the Colorado story depends on for a Constitutional verdict, and Nikki Haley is not catching Trump the way Fox News tried to sell it.  People who saw these stories said, “We aren’t going to be suckered by you people again.”  And they turned the channel and watched something else.  People are ready to vote for Trump for one primary reason.  Globalism has cost them money, and they are tired of sending money to places like Ukraine while China continues to abuse old man Biden ruthlessly, indicating they are planning to take Taiwan back as a part of their country, putting all of us at risk of losing computer chip manufacturing.  The conversations I was in with people who never think about things like this are concerned about one thing: their money isn’t worth as much now as it was before that 2020 attack against American sovereignty.  When Trump was in the White House before, life was better for them.  What they have seen over the last three years has terrified them.  And they want their country back.  I’m not going to say, “I told you so, all of you,” But “I told you so,” all along.  I can think of many Christmases in times past where I was the only one talking about these things.  Now, everyone is. 

And the Beltway insiders know it too; everyone knows it.  This won’t be an average year for anybody.  People want Trump back in office for normalcy.  Continued ANTIFA riots are only going to make people angrier and less supportive of progressive politics.  Either way, a continuation of the radicalism of 2020 into 2024 is going to turn people away from Democrat priorities, or Trump moving back into the White House will set it in motion with a revenge tour that is perfectly justified.  Lots of people need to suffer for what they did to us all.  And we see it in our bank accounts.  All these globalists who thought they were going to crush the American economy to reset global expectations with their Great Reset forgot that there were people who would be angry about it.  And they were going to blame the globalists, people like Marco Rubio, who plays a Republican on television, but as a senator, sees his role in protecting global military police, NATO, and other partnerships that are grossly one-sided, to impose border disputes on nationalists to make them states of the United Nations.  All those flights of fancy in previous years sounded like ambitious plans that didn’t impact Hometown USA and everyone’s Christmas Dinners.  Plenty of presents were under the tree, and food was easy to get.  But this year, not so much.  Food is costly.  The cost of all goods and services is dramatically higher than during the Trump years, and people are furious about it.  So Little Marco and his gang of government thieves have stuck support for NATO into the NDAA while they still have the power to do so.  Because they know what’s coming, and they are bracing for impact.  And from my perspective, they will need much more than a seat belt.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

What the 2023 Macy’s Parade Tells us About the Economy: It’s Back to the 80s

I watch the Macy’s Parade from New York on Thanksgiving Day as a measuring device for our public health every year.  I usually comment on the kind of balloons they have on the parade route and what type of music they feature creatively.  And also, what is the tone of the broadcasts, and the commercials?  There is usually a lot going on to report that provides a good indicator of other economic factors that say a lot about us as a culture.  And sure enough, the 2023 Macy’s Day Parade had a lot to say.  If I had to pick a theme that was decidedly a major part of the decision-making process in putting the parade on this year, it was “Remember the 80s.”  Because most of the musical acts and creative selections were attempting to rub off the magic and music of the 80s to bring happiness back to the consumer culture, in the past, it was always common to exhibit very progressive themes, like “gays teaching class,” “drag queens make a cake,” or some similar social intrusion.  But I’m telling you, and Disney is a great example of this; going woke has made a lot of corporations go broke.  And that’s more than a catchy tagline.  You can see in the behavior of most corporations that they are reeling from terrible advice from Larry Fink and the gang at BlackRock and, ultimately, the intruders at the World Economic Forum.  By this point in the global insurrection process, we were supposed to be on another currency controlled by the centralized banks, digitally, China was to have surpassed America as the dominant economy, and President Trump was supposed to be in jail, and have all his political capital removed.  So there is a lot of soul-searching going on that many people who thought they controlled the world are embarking on, and it’s not a pleasant experience for them.  And all that shows in the creative decisions at this year’s Macy’s Day Parade. 

I’ll go even further than that, this Taylor Swift lunacy with the NFL and the Kansas City Chiefs is part of the story.  It’s a constructed monstrosity from a corporate brand that needs something to spark interest in the product, and predictably, because Taylor Swift is suddenly at NFL games dating a famous player, women are watching football.  European soccer has been appealing to this younger generation, and the NFL had to do something, so there is nothing better than a romance between the most popular “anti-Trump” pop star on the planet now, where they play her music during NFL games abundantly, and one of the premier players in Travis Kelce.  I noticed that this romance didn’t start until shortly after Taylor Swift played her concert series in Cincinnati, which is a kind of melting pot of heartland sentiment.  It just so happens that Travis used to be a Cincinnati Bearcat football player, so there is something of a connection with Cincinnati that they both have, in some ways, they are wholesome products of one of America’s most wholesome cities.  Some people measure such things as obsessions.  I believe the matchmakers who put these two together, such as Erin Andrews, played a role in understanding corporate politics through such imaging.  “Hey, you guys should date, it would be great for the game and for your careers.”  Taylor Swift and Kelce go on a few dates, talk about how great Cincinnati is, and pretty soon, they are swapping spit in the shower and sharing a towel.  A new corporate romance is born, meant to carry public sentiment positively.

The musical selections at the Macy’s Parade were along the same lines.  They had Cher, references to Back to the Future, and many Broadway plays with people in cowboy hats, as if they were trying to appeal hard to mainstream America but weren’t sure they knew what it was.  What they didn’t talk a lot about was progressive politics, to the point where it was avoided by everyone involved in the presentation.  At the beginning of the parade, a bunch of Palestinian protestors were blocking the route, and they were disposed of quickly so as not to impact the show, which I thought was great.  The show must always go on.  And if you were watching it on television, you never would have known.  It was interesting to watch Cher perform because she is one of the biggest Never Trumpers out there and would generally be one who would throw support to Palestinian supporters, but here was a 70-year-old all dressed up singing sexy songs from the 80s.  Later that day, I might add, Dolly Parton dressed up like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader in her 70s, trying to show that age and sexiness were not lost during the Thanksgiving Day tradition of the Cowboys playing football during a halftime show.  The NFL could have picked thousands of other people.  Entertainment had millions of different options, but they decided on Cher, Dolly, and the safe music of Taylor Swift to sell their corporate image.  There were no Black Lives Matter references, no bending the knee at the National Anthem.  There was almost a desperate hope that these corporate images might politely be invited into the public trust again by giving audiences everything they sought and more. 

As I have been saying for a long time now, the BlackRock stakeholder capitalism idea was never going to work, all that goofy stuff they have been yacking about at Davos was never going to be accepted by the American public, and it is there that world cultures trend.  European rock bands and entertainment must export their art to America to make money.  Not China, as the entertainment industry used to think it was possible to sell to the public.  Not Africa, Russia, or Europe.  If you can’t tap into the greatest economy in the world, the one that every economist everywhere should be studying instead of trying to change into a socialist utopia, then there is no market.  And the ultimate feature of that art is the Mainstreet options seen in features like the Macy’s Day Parade.  This year, it was all about an olive branch to the MAGA voters.  Over the last three years of Biden, it’s evident that the public wasn’t seduced into the World Economic Forum monstrosities cooked up under their economic view.  And people wanted optimism in their art again, in their music, movies, and Broadway plays.  It wasn’t that long ago when Broadway was utterly shut down due to COVID-19.  Well, people moved on to other interests, and getting a ticket to a Broadway play isn’t so hard now, just like Disney Parks, where attendance is low.  People didn’t need the corporations.  They don’t need NFL football; all the progressive activism has hurt their brand.  They are turning to Taylor Swift to help them recapture the magic, but it looks like there is permanent damage to the NFL because of their anti-Trump activism that will never come back.  The Macy’s Parade of 2023 clearly states that significant changes were on the horizon, not the kind they politically support.  Yet that is the world of tomorrow, and they are trying to embrace it today.  Their actions are an admission of good things to come that they aren’t all that happy about, but if they want to be in business, they had better embrace it.

Rich Hoffman

An Amazon.com Pricebreak: A guidebook to capitalism to step out of the darkest period of American history

There is no shame in being good at what you do

I have had many of these over the last five years: super-secret meetings with people in the back of some restaurant or shooting range where people want to talk. Only this one was 30 or so people who were fans of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and they wanted a little private class on the subject matter. I get the secrecy; I think of it as enslaved people learning to read during the Underground Railroad Period. People want to learn how to improve themselves in a world that doesn’t want them to accomplish such a task. These people were Chamber of Commerce types and were concerned about other people knowing they were meeting with me because it was a social taboo. But I was happy to attend the event and give a talk, which everyone enjoyed. But during the Q&A section at the end I learned something from the class, that my book was being offered on Amazon.com for $4.59, which is practically giving it away. Normally, most of the sales that I see come from the publisher’s website, is $16.99. When I get the sales report, it usually has a long list with all kinds of prices shown, and some of the lower numbers I had thought were likely Kindle downloads. So, I didn’t pay much attention to them. But at this little seminar, a fan told me about it, and sure enough, the book was listed by Amazon at that very low price, so low that it’s likely cheaper than what it cost to make the book. Yet I wasn’t surprised upon hearing this; it didn’t make me angry. I think it was meant to make me angry, to be very insulting to me. But my reaction is one that I’ll share here: if you can get the book for a cheaper price, then I’m happy to let you know about it.

A pretty good price

I personally like Amazon; I get a lot of books through them. I also am a frequent visitor to bookstores all over southern Ohio, going as far north as Dayton and Columbus regularly to get books that I don’t want to wait for to arrive in the mail. I read three or four per week on average, so it’s a major priority for me to have access to new books. For books that I must have that afternoon, I go and get them at an actual bookstore, the old-fashioned way. And I prefer hard copies of books because I don’t like the bad guys out there to know what I’m reading or looking at on the internet, because I am watched by just about everyone who wastes time watching people. And the algorithms set against me are outrageously difficult, for getting visibility. I frequently get offers from IT people wanting to “fix” my foundation links because my Google score is so low that people searching for me don’t find me on the top picks because of all the blacklisting I am listed under. I typically say no to all those offers because most of them are likely the same people doing the damage, and they’d love for me to make it easier for them to rob the stagecoach. Amazon does not like me politically, and they’d love to make me feel that I’m at the bottom of a well nobody could hear me from. That is a common strategy for them, so I never expected a fair shake from Amazon. They offer the book because they are a prominent bookseller and want to say they offer such books. Even if they hate that people want to read from someone like me. So I put them out of my mind and never really took the time to see what they were selling my book for, or to check reviews because they set algorithms on their server against me that obviously were not encouraging. So, I put my mind elsewhere. The sales listings tell a different story, so much so that I didn’t even notice the Amazon pricing.

There will be a major shift in the economy over the next decade

The book has been out for a few years now, so I don’t read it every day. When I wrote it, I had been thinking about the contents for a while, but after Biden was put in the White House and Trump wasn’t there anymore, admittingly, I needed to take a break from the world for a few weeks. My wife and I took our RV out into the desert of New Mexico to escape Biden and the COVID protocols that were such a dark period in American history. I knew the economy would take a hit and that corporations had been seduced by this World Economic Forum view of the world and would need a guidebook out of their wokeness. So I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, applying my favorite sport, fast draw, with a genuine love of history. I enjoyed touring all the John Chism and Billy the Kid sites in Lincoln County during the winter of 2021, which had a lot of snow on the ground, even in that part of the world. It was a very revelatory experience for me, and it shows up in the book, which, looking back on it after a few years, is very good. Like I said, I read a lot. I have just finished a few books by Johan Norberg which I think are great, but they aren’t as good in my mind as my own book. Not just because it’s my book but because the contents are revolutionary compared to the large amounts of Marxism that have taken hold in all corporations around the world. I wrote the Gunfighter’s Guide to give people a weapon to fight against that trend, which turned out great.

A large worldview helps see things more clearly

The book as I thought it would be, has been a slow burn. It’s not one of those books that makes a splash and then fizzles out. When I wrote it, I was thinking of a book I love called The Machine That Changed the World, which is about Lean Manufacturing and is filled with many assumptions about a Marxist world without ever naming the beast. I wanted to write an antithesis to that which businesses could use to improve their situations without destroying their essential character. I have read many hundreds of business books, and most of them make it a point to declare their hatred and unfairness of capitalism, which is quite obvious in the Lean Manufacturing movement, which seeks to centralize power to the people and is antagonistic toward management, which is consistent with the labor union view of the world, which is always socialist in origin. In 2020, with Trump out of the office and the world on lockdowns, corporations thought the best strategy was to play along to get along. But after three years of the Biden economy now, people are looking for answers, and many of those answers only come from a source like mine, who has made it a point to declare the answers in spite of the social poison that wants all such voices to hide for their lives under a rock somewhere. My point was never to hide but to engage the enemy as they present themselves, like a gunfighter. Fight the villains in a dusty street and gun them down metaphorically for their intentional destruction of the world. And to be proud of it in the process. As I gave my presentation to that audience, I couldn’t help but reflect on how good the book was. I’m very proud of it; it has helped people who have read it and applied it. I don’t just reflect on the times of the gunfighters during American expansion but also look to the future with AI and improved technology. It’s more of an attitude than a reverence. But the world for the next few decades is going to move much more toward capitalism and away from socialism, and already many corporate leaders see the writing on the wall. And they were looking for a translation, so we were all meeting secretly, not for my sake, but for theirs. But if I learn of a price break everyone can take advantage of to get the book, I’m happy to share it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings in the least. I like seeing people getting it, finding inspiration, and achieving success. That is, after all, the best compliment I can get and why I wrote the book in the first place, for people to enjoy and be helped by. So the more people who have it, the better it is in my mind. And at that price, it makes it very easy for people. I can’t promise that the price will stay that way, but when I hear of a price break, I certainly will pass it along.

Diversity, equity and inclusion was always going to fail in business because it’s not rooted in real social value

Rich Hoffman

Disney Has Failed due to Woke Politics: And its never coming back

I told everyone, don’t say I didn’t warn you.  Disney stock is down, and it’s never coming back.  I have had many people who think they are competent to tell me that the company would bounce back and that all this political stuff was recoverable.  And my reply to them has been they were smoking crack.  Once a company like Disney loses the public’s confidence, it’s over for them.  This was the clear indication coming out of the Thanksgiving weekend of 2023, where their new film Wish was struggling to break 32 million when it should have been closer to 100 million.  It used to be that Disney would crank out movies like this that all made a billion dollars, but now, for the second week in a row, where Marvels also fell apart in a dismal way, the writing is on the wall for Disney and all those people who thought they should argue with me about the fate of the entertainment giant.  Like I have said now for years, “Go woke, go broke,” and Disney is.  What executive at Disney thought that by putting a bunch of girls in a movie and having them throw a bunch of magic around, people would show up and throw a billion dollars at it?  Because that’s what they thought when they put out Marvels.  If Bob Iger had listened, I would have told him that you can’t go out and buy up all these properties like Marvel, like Lucasfilm, then fire all the top minds, or isolate them from the industry because they were old white guys, replace them with female directors, get rid of all that toxic masculinity and replace it with a cast of women who don’t look like they could pick up a heavy box, let alone take on a universe of monstrous villains, and that it would all work out OK?  In the original Marvel movies, some characters appealed to young boys and even grown men, like Captain America, Thor, Hulk, and Iron Man; they had big muscles and were charismatic and funny.  But that Disney was going to get rid of all that and replace those tough guy characters with women, and people would love it?

Here’s a little secret, everyone: women don’t care about movies or stories in the same way that men do.  They want to find a boyfriend and snuggle up with him for two hours.  They don’t care what they are watching.  They certainly won’t be going out to buy tickets with their girlfriends to watch a superhero movie.  They want to buy pants and purses so they can go out and find a boyfriend, possibly a husband.  That is their biological inclination.  They want to see what kind of guys they are dating, and if they can respond to some admirable character in the Avengers, then maybe they might be worth a second date—maybe more.  However, Disney thought it had the power to restructure the nature of society and that their movies shaped society instead of reflecting it.  They bought the whole World Economic Forum view of the world to their detriment.  And here they are.  They put out a full slate of movies, such as the latest Indiana Jones film, which was a pretty good movie, that have all lost money.  But they have all fallen flat because people have lost their trust in Disney itself.  And once that happens, there is no way to get that trust back.  And it’s too late to start over.  It took 50 years to build that brand Disney had.  It only took a decade of commitment to Larry Fink and the gang at BlackRock to destroy it.  Nobody wants to see equity and inclusion in their movies.  They want to see bad guys get their butts kicked.  They certainly don’t want some girl power nonsense, boys or girls, women or men.  Disney aligned itself with the wrong view of the world, killing them.

I was pretty serious when I stated I wanted to take my kids to Disney World one last time.  I’m old enough to have watched several amusement parks come and go in my life.  LeSourdsville Lake, near my Liberty Township, Ohio home, was one of my favorites as a kid.  It’s a park now; the lake and all the rides are gone completely.  The same thing could quickly happen to Disney World, and I wanted to take my family there one last time before it all went away.  Many people think it’s too big to fail.  I would say that it’s too big to survive so many bad decisions.  They lost their focus on who their audience is and disrespected the public by feeding them this garbage and expecting to get paid for it.  Embracing radical political views of the communist orientation was a terrible business decision.  And it showed up in the parks.  When my family of 9 people were all riding Rise of the Resistance together, at the first ship you get into, they had a drag queen ushering everyone onto the ride.  It wasn’t very comfortable.  We had kids 7 through 11 with us, and they noticed the long black fingernails and the makeup on a man’s face and wondered what was going on.  I cracked a joke and told them that this was Star Wars.  It was a species of alien, which they were fine with.  But it was an uncomfortable diatribe for the adults with us, not just in our family.  A woman not from our family beside me inside the ship laughed when I said what I did to the kids, and she said, “I’m glad you said that.”  Her little girl looked up, smiling because it seemed like a reasonable consideration. 

The park attendance was noticeably down while we were there, which was OK with us.  Seeing so many fantastic creations on life support made me sad.  Disney cannot operate theme parks of that size without a revenue stream of movies making billions of dollars a year.  They have produced some good content on Disney+, but as I have said many times, like Ahsoka and the Andor Star Wars series, it was a little too late.  Trust is essential in any relationship between spouses, children, or families, but also with fans and the public.  When Disney committed to a Democrat view of the world and thought it had the power and audacity to shape society, they were misinformed.  They worked against the MAGA movement, which is more significant than Trump, and it has cost them now in ways that cannot be reversed.  And I didn’t want to see it happen.  I wanted Disney to survive.  I keep hoping to be wrong.  But I’m not.  I think it is very feasible that we will not know anything about the Disney entertainment company in the future.  It will only be a thing of our current time.  Future generations will not know them or care about them.  And there certainly won’t be a Disney World for them to visit.  Thank Larry Fink and the losers at the World Economic Forum for that.  They whispered into the ears of Bob Iger all this progressive nonsense, and now the destruction in their wake is more than measurable.  And it didn’t have to be that way, yet it is.

Rich Hoffman

TikTok is a Deployment Weapon for China Against America: Social media was never supposed to be our friend, but it can be used to serve us

The thing that is obvious about all social media, especially China-owned TikTok, is that it must be viewed as a deployment weapon for war-like strategy. China uses TikTok to do what military weapons can’t, and we’ve let it into our country like a bunch of fools. That was, of course, the entire intent of the various social media platforms. I’ve told the story before, Facebook was never meant to be good for us, to keep us in touch with loved ones. It was meant to collect information on us that could be used against us. I was in California at the time when Facebook was buying up influencers to propel their product away from the social media platform Myspace at that time. I refused and never did open a Facebook account. Twitter, YouTube, and Google would head in the same direction. When you talk about algorithm control I have videos that have been there for 15 years, but since Google bought YouTube, my views have trickled to a complete stop, especially political videos. It could be argued that I am one of the most shadow-banned people on Earth. I had the exact same experience on Twitter until Elon Musk bought it, which improved it a bit. But my account is still heavily shadow-banned. It’s obvious when you compare views between my Rumble account and YouTube. One gets many thousands of views whereas videos I did on those heavily controlled platforms still only have 15 to 20 views almost two decades later. So, social media was always about information collection and propaganda distribution. And Facebook was so obvious that I deliberately never signed up. How did Zuckerbucks come up with over a billion dollars in value for a dating app before he was aged 21? Intel money made him rich, not the market-driven product itself.

I have learned to use social media as a powerful tool anyway.  My messages do get out in spite of the shadow banning and tight controls on message content that many have had.  I was one of the very first people on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform.  And I nearly exclusively use Gettr as my source of news these days because of their excellent streaming offerings.  Twitter’s conversion to X has been better for free speech.  I still see many problems with it and am not completely convinced that Elon Musk is on the “free speech bandwagon.”  Musk is more of a Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy kind of guy, so I think he sees for himself a better future under the merits of pure capitalism than when social media first came out and China looked like it was going to rule the world, so everyone better start kissing the ring.  Social media was designed to spy on us, manipulate us, and cut us off in the direction of social scores based on our behavior.  If we didn’t do right by the administrative state, we would have our profiles turned off and be cast out of society, which the World Economic Forum clearly stated was their intent.  If they could control and monitor social behavior combined with finance participation, where they could turn your credit card off in a cashless society because of your social media dialogue, they were intent on doing it, which is why China owns TikTok.  It’s not for fun and sharing.  It’s to destroy our culture in America by poisoning our youth with low IQ level behavior that would be devastating to the next generation. 

TikTok is so effective that it has a lot to do with abortion and pot smoking becoming legalized in Ohio.  Republicans have been very slow to realize just how powerful social media is.  In my area, my blog site is much more popular with people who know about it than local news sources, and I have an excellent track record for being an influencer despite the massive shadow banning.  But TikTok is a thing all its own, and it is how social messaging from political parties gets straight to them, which was undoubtedly the case with Issues 1 and 2 in Ohio during the elections of 2023.  And you can bet that if left unchecked, they plan to influence 2024’s elections significantly.  The use of sexual images and social silliness that is the foundation of TikTok in the United States is meant to be poison for the youthful generation.  China would never allow such behavior to occur in their own country, and they do turn it off.  Always remember, anything that is free, you are always the product.  Nobody gives anybody anything for free.  You might be able to turn the tables on their intentions.  But understand what the game is and know who the game’s players are.  Nobody, giant corporations, and countries do anything, unless it gives them more power over you.  There may be some rag-tag rebels who can use social media for good.  But don’t ever count on it.  From China’s point of view, like the drugs that cross into America from open borders, it’s poison meant to destroy America from within.  If you rot a mind and a body, there is nothing to resist communist tyranny through the slow cook of increased heat and pressure.  Social media should have always been viewed as a military strategy of a significant threat and nothing else. 

However, just like all military endeavors, a plan seldom goes as intended, which is undoubtedly the case here.  Plenty of good social media uses have turned the tables on our aggressors.  I think of the Libs of TikTok as a great example.  There are the Charlie Kirks and Steve Bannons out there who have broken through the firewall and can get their content to millions of people, and they are doing the opposite of what China wanted to do with their control.  They are freeing people and decentralizing the social message that used to be controlled by the establishment press.  I have learned over the years because I have seen the direct administrative views of my page counts, book sales, and new media from Rumble that I, too, get millions of visitors, even if the reporting mechanics are entirely controlled by intelligence agencies who purposely want people like me to feel socially isolated and disconnected as if my voice was thrown into the bottom of a deep well that nobody could hear.  That is real, but over time, I have learned that there are soft spots in the prison walls, and getting your voice out isn’t as hard as they’d like you to believe.  Their control is an illusion at best, more perceptual than actual.  But the intent is certainly malicious.  They let a few celebrities through to give an illusion of social freedom in messaging.  But for most, if their message is dangerous to the administrative state or the Deep State, especially my kind of messaging, then shadow banning by controlling the algorithms is part of the mechanics.  Yet, despite that, I have found the format to be a powerful delivery system that can be used against the bad guys in ways they never intended.  Social media, such as TikTok, is dangerous and here to stay.  But they can be used against the enemy in productive ways.  However, make no mistake about it; they were designed and introduced to control society and destroy those against their tyrannical messaging.  And as we move into the next election cycle, understand the tools being used against us because that’s their purpose by design. 

Rich Hoffman

The Best Way to Fight Terrorism is to Buy a Gun: Israel should have had private gun ownership

I think my wife’s reaction to the attack on Israel is similar to most people.  She is such a sweet, loving person, and not some radical ideologue, that her opinion represents the majority.   And as we watched the footage of all the poor young women being beaten and raped by the thugs of Palestine, she turned to me and said, “I want to buy more guns.”  I asked her how many guns she wanted because we weren’t lacking in that department.  For my concealed carry, I always have my .50 caliber Desert Eagle.  When people ask me about my leather vests, I always wear them because it’s the only thing I can wear that conceals that gun in public.  Additionally, I carry with me at all times a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum with an extra long barrel to keep the recoil down when firing.  Some people think that is too much heat in a civilized country like America, but I have much experience that says otherwise.  The default mode for all humans is just above that of a wild animal.  The only thing that brings about civility is good laws through a decent religion.  Governments have never been able to install a philosophy that protects people from a centralized state.  So, the key to a civilized society that ensures destruction from a villainous perpetrator is gun rights.  And instinctively, my wife understood that as she watched the carnage from the news coverage and heartbreaking reports.  So I told her we could go up to the gun store at the end of our street and buy as many guns as she wanted.  I’m always good for a few more guns.  They are the best votes you can make in a society that you want to be civil and law-driven. 

Israel’s most significant problem that facilitated all this carnage is that they don’t have gun rights for individuals, which opened them up to this attack.  They have a good military and generally a decent government, which is a deterrent in most cases.  But their lack of personal gun ownership allowed the house-to-house raids in Israel and the Hamas checkpoints, which stopped and slaughtered entire families.  I would further add that if not for individual gun rights, there would have already been terrorist raids like we saw in Israel in the United States.  I do not doubt that there will be attempts by some radical terrorist cells to bring similar horrors to our communities.  That is the intention of the open border policy people.  Hamas is just another terrorist weapon that agents of evil in the world can tap into at will to inspire fear and death for political advantage, and this attack in Israel was far from a spontaneous event.  It was the result of a culture that built into it the vulnerabilities of a liberal world order on purpose so that mass control of the population through fear would be easy to achieve.  I get the ability to travel extensively, and I can report that countries that do not have personal firearm protections and functional religions are ingredients for outright destruction.  Without personal protections and military-grade defense of private property, society cascades into chaos quickly.  The people of that society are either too compliant to be inventive and economically potent or too dangerous to coexist with other people.  Only through the maintenance of private property and a standard of value everyone can share does success in a social regard begin to function correctly. 

I could tell many personal stories I have had from my past where carrying such large caliber weapons makes perfect sense, even if it’s not the shared experience of the everyday business person or soccer mom hauling their kids around to sporting events.  On more than one occasion, I have learned how dangerous people can be just one carload away at a traffic light, so I keep myself prepared for the worst they can offer.  Government rules do not deter villainy; instead, they attract malicious characters like flies on a hot summer in July.  The more guns a culture has, the safer that society is.  And that would be my recommendation based on a lot of personal experience as a lesson from this attack on Israel.  Any government that says it wants to control the private ownership of guns is setting up that culture for personal violence, especially in the United States, where the open border policy in the south has purposefully allowed so many characters with a bad reputation into our country.  The same people telling us they want to take our guns are also creating a policy where Hamas-level terrorists are moving into our cities and communities with just as much hostile intention as they attacked Israel during Yom Kippur.  Only fools would follow such ridiculous instructions.  If they could, they would have attacked already and are always looking for a vulnerability to exploit.  Should society always be that close to complete mayhem?  Well, that’s up to the people’s values, and religion is a means to regulate society into some mutually agreed sentiment of value.  But in an open society with free expression, where governments tend to be corrupt on a good day, people must be able to protect themselves.  Because the government won’t, can’t, and is inspired to evil on its own.

So, if you are considering getting a gun, I would say to do so.  I would also say to carry one with you all the time.  Everywhere.  Do not trust the government to protect you.  It’s great if they do.  But don’t be a sucker and expect it by default.  I told my wife she can buy as many guns as she wants.  I recommend purchasing a new weapon every month and supporting our gun manufacturers.  With more than 300 million guns in America, I want to see more than a billion in private ownership.  And the bigger, the better.  Criminals break the rules, and there is something to steal wherever there is value.  Something to bring harm to.  Israel is a country of value in a pit of vipers who live a substandard, collective existence.  To adequately protect their people, they should have had private gun ownership for those days when Hamas would attack them and perform such acts of terror as we have just witnessed.  It can happen in America, too, and while you can’t remove such intentions from the mind of the malicious, you can stop them once they start shooting and minimize the carnage.  To have a free society that protects private property from even the government gangsters, which, even under the best circumstances, they are, you must always carry firearms with you.  You must have your house filled with them.  And if you want to vote for true prosperity, you can buy lots and lots of guns to let the world know you are more than prepared for anything that might come your way from dangerous personalities.  Buying guns is an act of civility and law and order.  Without the maintenance of every individual in a culture toward that objective, there is no hope to wrestle away from the villains of a stable society of mutual respect.  Only with superior firepower can a society hope to thrive from those despotes of civilization that always want to crawl back into the cave and retreat and stop human progress to fear every approaching thunderstorm that streaks across the sky, unleashed by the gods because somebody forgot to sacrifice a goat.

 Rich Hoffman

The Company of Tomorrow: Political trends are shifting away from the World Economic Forum values, and that’s a great thing

Everyone is always looking for the next great business tip for a competitive advantage, so here it is.  You can tell because of trends like what is going on with the Washington Redskins NFL team and the Cleveland Indians.  The fans of those teams are getting petitions signed to restore their names to what they were pre-woke.  The momentum of wokeness has shifted, and we see the political pendulum swinging the other way.  The Marxists had their chance, which didn’t have a positive impact that society could see for themselves.  The Beatles song “Imagine” didn’t come out very well when the World Economic Forum was starting mass viruses for their Great Reset and turning the responsibility of enforcement over to your local human resource office to do through businesses what nobody would ever be able to do through government regulation.  The Marxists of the world figured out that by design, our political systems in America were established to go slow to keep the government from interrupting the machine of capitalism.  So, they turned their attention to businesses to attack them there, and what we have seen happening in business climates over the last several decades has been Marxism, and people didn’t notice until recently.  Because most people have an adversarial relationship with their employers, it wasn’t something people saw coming in the front door.  But now that it’s here, they want it gone.  And that is the future state of business.  I’ve seen this communist, Marxist approach in the industry for a long time, growing year by year, and finally, after Trump was removed from office after a government-organized coup, no different from the many communist revolutions around the world, people finally have had enough of it, and that trend began to go the other way after the last Covid vaccine mandates. 

Just as professional sports teams were tricked into changing their names into woke acceptance, this is not what society wants.  They want cool names for their sports teams, not the Guardians, but the Indians in Cleveland.  I was just in Cleveland, and that name change a few years into it is still a joke, and it’s not getting better.  I have had some interactions with members of the family of that team, and their woke acceptance has not gone over well.  People are turning on them for allowing woke politics into their sacred sports franchise.  And that is certainly the case with the Washington Football team in D.C.  People want their Redskins back.  This anti-capitalist approach to life is not what people want in the world.  They have been patient with corporations that became politically active toward Marxism, some of America’s largest corporations.  When we talk about globalism, we are essentially talking about Marxism because that is how it is everywhere else.  Americans have taken the advantages of capitalism for granted because they didn’t know any better.  And they assumed that the companies they worked for had at least primary American values.  But that’s not how most corporations are these days; they have drifted into this Marxist compliance because if they had manufacturing plants in China, Vietnam, or Europe, they were dealing with some level of Marxism, whether it was outright communism or socialism.  It was not free market capitalism that was the driver of their economies.  It was the slow-moving and lazy administrative state, and it was slowing things down to levels that have been unacceptable in America.  I’m old enough to know what it was like before, and I have watched over several decades of being on the front line how Marxism has migrated into the human resource departments to influence how people live their everyday lives.  But the final straw happened during Covid and the slow realization that most people have from President Trump being in the White House, then Joe Biden.  Bidenomics has not been good for anybody but the global Marxists. 

I have often pointed out, over a long period, how the Lean Manufacturing trend was filled with cultural Marxism.  Many of the central foundations of business ethics these days attack the notion of the golf-playing CEO with a nice car, a trophy wife, and is oozing with success.  In Lean Manufacturing, they want the members of management to come from their offices out to where the work is done, not just to become more effective in understanding a problem.  That is how it sold to them.  But it’s really to minimize management in the eyes of the employees, to establish a level of sameness among everyone that displays nobody is in charge but the centralized employees.  Not even the marketplace.  Compliance with regulators as they get their talking points from the World Economic Forum has been their weapon of choice and has been a slow burn.  The CEOs and CFOs who have survived the most were those bootlicker types who appeased the bureaucratic regulators and were not focused on giving the public what they wanted—but imposing on the public Marxist restrictions not just in the employer but in the marketplace itself.  Rather than march people into Washington D.C. at gunpoint as Castro did in Cuba and kill political rivals off point blank, the Marxists took a much more passive-aggressive route.  They regulated capitalists out of existence.  But the marketplace is catching on and is pushing back.  Because of Trump’s successful administration, people tasted the good life again and want it back.  So, the political sentiment is swinging the other way. 

The World Economic Forum is failing; many of their 2030 plans, as scary as they are for their intent, are falling apart, much the way the name changes in sports are getting so much public pushback.  I do get to talk to people worldwide for perspective, and the sentiment is pretty much everywhere the same.  They are upset with Marxism and don’t want it in their products or the companies that make them.  And they certainly don’t want it in their sports teams.  People were willing to put up with it as long as they had the illusion of capitalism functioning in the background.  But now that they know differently, they want their capitalism back, so the future of business will go to those companies who most embrace capitalism for the majority of market share in the future.  Further woke trends from the human resource departments, such as paperless paychecks into bank accounts that centralized bankers can completely control, are not tomorrow’s trend.  But quite the opposite.  Ownership was diminished by the Marxists, including how pay was distributed or whether or not your employer could force you to get a vaccine of poison to keep your job.  The Marxists got caught talking out of both sides of their mouth; while they were saying work from home, fair pay for fair work, and make sure you get an excellent ESG score, the radical leftist Larry Fink and the Wall Street insurgents were saying, if you value your job, you’ll get the government medicine from the world’s largest drug dealer, the federal government.  People were willing to listen before and in the years leading up to these ridiculous sentiments of globalism on American corporations.  But now they aren’t, and success will be measured differently.  The less compliant with Marxist measures globally, the better companies will be.  And that is tomorrow’s trend for those who want to get a jump start.  Capitalism works not just because it makes money for those who utilize it.  But also, it’s a measure of morality that the public can influence, which was always at the heart of all economic activity and always will be.

Rich Hoffman