Category: entertainment

A Love Letter to America: Season 5 of ‘Yellowstone’

Now that I have watched the Yellowstone series it has confirmed something that I had suspected, which made it a more urgent project.  There is a lot more going on with it than just an entertaining television show.  Taylor Sheridan and the gang are making a point and they know who their audience is, which was obvious at the start of Season 5 if you know what you are looking for.  Of course, Yellowstone is the popular television show for Paramount Plus, which many have called a love letter to the MAGA political movement.  Over the various seasons, Sheridan and the gang obviously struggled with this impression.  After all, they are Hollywood lefties and they didn’t want to be viewed by their peers as a bunch of radical right-winged lunatics.  However, the show has become increasingly popular over the five seasons because the topic of a modern Western has captured the hearts and minds of an audience hungry for content that represents their concerns.  Taylor Sheridan has become a scorching commodity since all the shows he’s producing suddenly are doing very well, not just with Yellowstone, but also the spin-off shows like 1883, 1923, and Bass Reeves.  There are more in the works, but these are all excellent shows, and in my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d see them on television.  They remind me of the old westerns I grew up with, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie, and I didn’t think Hollywood could produce anything like that ever again.  However, with Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner, along with others, there is a revolt against Hollywood that has been going on in Montana and Texas, which has its own kinetic energy that is giving voice to America, which is crying out for its own existence. 

If you’ve ever dealt with Hollywood types you will know that they are cosmetically, outright Marxists.  But around the catering truck, they are like everyone else.  They are mostly Marxists because they have to be to get work, and the financiers of their projects want global communism; otherwise, their projects don’t get greenlit.  But on rare occasions, sometimes you can flip the script on that process, and when someone like Taylor Sheridan is successful, the greed factor takes over, and the finance people forget about Marxism and turn to the glitter and glory of massive profit, which is one of the great attributes of capitalism.  Yellowstone is not a show that could have been made for state-run television.  It is a love letter to the foundation of America, and it is oozing in patriotism.  With the success that Taylor Sheridan has found with these projects, he is moving in a more obvious direction politically, which is similar to what we’ve seen with Elon Musk, President Trump, and Joe Rogan, all people who voted Democrat but have changed over time, based on what they have seen.  At the beginning of Season 5, when John Dutton becomes governor of Montana to essentially save his ranch from developers who want to build an airport, during the swearing-in scene, there is a long pause before putting his hand on the Bible, where Kevin Costner is throwing obvious red meat to the Hollywood community.  The purpose of the scene was to show that the Yellowstone production had not gone native and thrown their lot in with God, even though Kevin Costner does end up doing so and swearing to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic.  But the scene’s purpose, even if Taylor Sheridan will never admit to it, was to throw the Hollywood Reporter types into a tailspin of doubt.  Because the rest of the season, the next eight episodes are a love letter to American life that I never thought I’d see in a Hollywood production again. 

In real life, Sheridan and much of the cast have found themselves enamored by the majesty of the flyover states, which has rarely happened to famous Hollywood personalities.  And rather than hiding from it, they have embraced it more.  In the case of Sheridan, he has bought ranches and is desperately trying to tell the story of everyday Americans in this struggle with a true phantom menace of Marxism without calling it that.  There are many parts of Season 5 in Yellowstone where Beth Dutton, the daughter of John Dutton and the apparent future of the show, delivers some of the best pro-American lines that have ever been done in entertainment, on the level of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne.  And they were possible because of that setup of ambiguity at the start of the season with the Bible.  Usually, with these kinds of projects and the success that comes with them, any romantic notions that a producer like Taylor Sheridan receives take the ambition out of the projects, and they become more corporate as more people are interested in attaching themselves to the success.  But not here; Yellowstone has become more authentic.  And even though they probably find the idea repulsive, Yellowstone is more MAGA in the notion of Make America Great Again.  They may not want to admit that they like President Trump.  However, they are after the same things Trump and his supporters wish for in life.  We want our country, and we want to love it.  America is speaking and doing so loudly at the heart of the Yellowstone series and all the Taylor Sheridan projects. 

I don’t think Yellowstone planned to be this way from the beginning.  But what it has ended up becoming, and Taylor Sheridan himself, is an authentic love letter to the creation of America.  As I became more interested in these Taylor Sheridan shows, I caught him on a podcast with Joe Rogan talking about the western 1883 and the genuine plight of a new nation needing to fulfill the needs of Manifest Destiny, where advertisements around the world were begging people to come and settle America for a piece of it.  And much of the world, under various forms of tyranny and the early versions of Marxism, wanted more than anything to have a piece of their own life, even if it meant having to come and fight Indians to the death just for the opportunity.  Taylor Sheridan, throughout his various television series, is grappling with this problem, and it all leans toward the reasons America needed to exist in the first place and is stepping away from the Hollywood Marxism that has so ruined entertainment to its present condition.  And because of all that, people love Yellowstone and the other Taylor Sheridan projects.  I am indeed a fan.  There is some real heart in what is being produced around the Yellowstone series, much better than The Godfather or Dallas, which it has been compared to.  Yellowstone is a love letter to America that has needed to happen for a long time.  And it’s a story told by people going through their own transformation into patriotism.  I have always been conservative.  But I am happy to see more people becoming that way as they learn the real history of America, even if it takes success to free them enough to have that point of view.  Watching Yellowstone is worth the effort to get to Season 5.  And whatever happens in the future with the show, what has happened up to this point can’t be undone.  It’s part of America’s story now; and many people will be better because of it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Why Birth Rates are Down: Communists have set family building policy in the West

This is a good story because many people do not realize how manipulated they are from moment to moment in their daily lives.  They do not know where their thoughts come from; they follow the social trends created by others for them.  That is the problem with the sudden realization that birth rates are down worldwide, and there is a real danger of the human race depleting themselves in the future.  Now, there is a ritual aspect to this where the ideas were started about feminism, attacking the concept of a Biblical church, and the perpetuation of earth worship as a replacement for old Mesopotamian mythology.  And they reside within the global communist movement, the people I used to talk about in Socialist International.  People giggled in the United States when I said things like that because they didn’t see socialism and communism at their high school football games or NFL draft picks.  They did not know that they were being manipulated like a cat might play with a ball of yarn by malicious people who want the end of the human race to save Earth from the parasitic destruction of their earthly habitation.  I spoke about those kinds of things from traveling extensively worldwide, so I saw what was going on in other places, and most of the world was leaning toward global communism, as China was an example.  So, the One Child Policy in China was not just an anomaly but an international strategy to reduce birth rates and deplete the human race’s impact into something more manageable by centralized authorities.  So far, when people talk about reduced birth rates, they miss the big-picture terms and report the facts they can see.  But they ignore the cause because that creates other kinds of problems that most people are not ready to deal with, the level of deceit we are dealing with, and the number of people who knowingly and unknowingly participated. 

Instead of a One Child Policy in America, the communists working from the political left created the feminist movement to frustrate the creation of the American family and, by design, significantly reduce the creation of children because parents didn’t have time for them.  Instead of having prominent families with 6 or 7 kids, families dropped to 1 or 2 by default because they had careers to maintain and had to save up six figures a year to send their kids to college by age 18.  So, the birth policy in America was established through social peer pressure driven by the communist left, not official government policy as it was in China.  But the intention was the same.  I suppose I was fortunate to have a front-row seat to all this, too, so I can talk about it now.  My mom was a housewife, and I had very traditional grandparents.  So, I watched this conflict when all these forces started imposing themselves on my family early in the 1970s.  As a housewife, my mom was severely attacked on all fronts by other family members and neighbors, along with community members.  The idea of a family was being destroyed by leftist political philosophy right out of the pages of Karl Marx.  I later learned that this was not a regional concern but a global one attached to everything the United Nations involved itself in.  So it’s not something that happened by accident but by design.  Of course, I liked the traditional manner of family building and couldn’t wait to do it for myself, so my wife and I married early and started having kids immediately.  By the time of my five-year high school reunion, we were the only ones in several categories to be that far along, to have been married the longest, had the most kids, and the oldest kids, etc. 

To this day, I still have never washed dishes.  My wife and I have always held very traditional roles in family building, and I see it as critical to a happy marriage.  We have just celebrated our 36th anniversary, and when we went out to dinner, and people heard about it, they looked at us like we were from another planet. Nobody stayed married that long and had the kind of traditional life we had.  I do all the work outside the house and keep things fixed.  She takes care of most of the domestic front.  It works, and we adopted it early in our life.  And one of those things is the roles men and women play in the family.  And doing dishes was a woman’s job.  When other family members heard that kind of talk from me, they felt obligated by the political left to entrust themselves in our affairs, and they put a lot of pressure on our marriage to essentially emasculate me to the feminist movement and recruit my wife to their marching orders.  This caused a lot of trouble and a lot of nasty fights and eventually we removed most of them from our lives.  When we would attend family activities and the first thing out of their mouths was, “Does your wife have a job yet,” or, “When is she going to get a job and help out,” my reaction was to go in the opposite direction and dig in harder.   The anti-family movement was wrong, and I wasn’t going to play along at all.

Of course, most people had no idea why they thought about what they did; they were following social trends.  And many people don’t understand where those things come from and certainly don’t associate them with a global communist movement that is highly politically motivated.  People trust too much, which is how many get suckered socially because they trust where ideas come from without the scrutiny necessary to live a good life.  They are teaching communism and anti-family behavior in public schools, so of course, people are vulnerable to it.  But the result has been a significant decline in the birthrate and in people getting married and staying married, which has screwed up all kinds of economic factors along the lines of housing, buying cars, and how groceries are distributed throughout society.  But there isn’t a scientific reason that birth rates are down, where more alpha males are now betas, making the sperm count too low to have many children.  Those are the leading causes of the injection of communism into family planning in the West and the results of several decades of practice.  Because I didn’t do it in any way, it’s easy for me to see as opposed to the family who forced the man to wash dishes so that the mother hens of socialism didn’t denounce a couple at the next family gathering where submission to feminism, not femininity were the value systems being utilized.  The difference in those terms is about 100 extra pounds of weight into a perpetual fat ass that can barely fit in a lawn chair.  Not a well-put-together woman oozing sexuality and filling up the bedrooms of a large house with a lot of kids produced from vigorous sexual conduct.  Who had time for that because the man was too busy washing dishes to show how socially obedient, he was?  As a result, family building has been destroyed, and the birth rates are down because the communists of the world were the idiots who created our social policy in the West.  After all, if you want to lower birthrates, then give the men a bunch of fat feminists to deal with, and make them share in domestic utility.  And the idea of leading a family goes away quick.  And so does sleeping together in a bed to make a family in the first place.  Who wants to engage in that kind of activity with a plus-sized monstrosity who complains all the time about everything?  As a result, birth rates are detrimentally low, and not improving any time soon.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Nature of Power: Bill Barr endorses President Trump

I will tell you something likely more valuable than anything you’ve ever learned about the nature of power.  And you can use it in infinite ways every day of your life.  But I can tell you that President Trump understands it very well, which is why he should be in the White House representing us in our Constitutional Republic.  I think I tell this story at least once a week; when I give speeches here and there, I usually talk about the nature of the gunfighter at the bar with his back to the room.  I’ve also done a few videos on that trait, and it’s the secret to all power in all interactions with any lifeform, anywhere in the universe.  The gunfighter knows that the room he is in is a bunch of cutthroats, criminals, scum bags, looters, and parasites of all kinds because that is the nature of all life as God designed it.  Life was meant to feed off life, so why would anybody assume otherwise when dealing with others, even on intimate matters?  Perhaps my perspective has much more to do with it than most people ever experience.  I had a pretty wild beginning to my life, and it has been quite a ride along the way.  But I have known quite a few “hit men,” personal assassins who made a living killing people.  And the courts knew all about it and encouraged the behavior.  From them, I learned a lot about human behavior that they don’t teach in college or any other way.  Certainly not from the church pews.  People are always looking for ways that they can rob people of something, so they never think to kill them first.  That is why the gunfighter, who is known to all to be a threat to everyone’s existence, does not get shot in the back while he’s at the bar.  He knows that everyone in that saloon wants to find some way to get something from him, and if he’s dead, then he’s no use to a parasitic society.  People would instead make friends and build alliances to their advantage rather than take responsibility for actually killing someone and removing them from consideration for existence.   

That’s how it is with Bill Barr, the former Attorney General for President Trump, who was America’s top cop. After spending much of the last three years as a devout Never Trumper, he recently gave his endorsement.  It was never President Trump’s job to go out and repair his relationships with people, as the world assumed would have to happen before Trump could ever think about getting back into office.  No, Trump gets it and understands the nature of leadership in ways that very few people do.  Bill Barr and everyone else will always do what is in their self-interest.  They don’t do things because they are ethically upright or morally sufficient.  They do them because they want to survive, and they hope that by looting off others for their sustenance, they will find a way to survive the day.  It is always their first and only genuine concern.  Most people spend their entire lives trying to make friends so that they can perform this essential task.  Very few people ever figure out the truth or have the courage to understand it.  But Trump does, and now that he’s the leader of the Republican Party, everyone who wants to be relevant has to come to him to kiss the ring. 

Our entire education system, even at the collegiate level, is based on this premise of friendship.  We are taught to make friends to be successful.  When the truth is, if you make yourself into something valuable, everyone will be at your door looking for some way to appease you.  Even killers, cutthroats, and maniacal lunatics of a vile reputation.  Trump knew Bill Barr and his “lethargic” fat ass would be there ready to please, to be on the right side of power.  So when Barr gave his endorsement at the end of April 2024, after all the terrible things that had been done to Trump through the court system and the Uniparty of the American government, along with the betrayal of the Deep State, the Administrative State, and every criminal conjured up by ill intent, and Trump survived them all, Trump did not feel he had to please Barr with nice words and appreciation.  He made fun of the loser because what’s Barr going to do?  He wasn’t trying to help Trump get re-elected; he was trying to use the President to stay close to power himself, just as I say about the gunfighter with his back to the room.  People don’t kill you when you are a person of absolute power.  They try to use you for their lazy reasons.  And that is a universal concept.  If a bunch of aliens landed from another planet, far away from their home, they would do precisely the same thing.  If their technology did not give them decisive power over others, their first relationship to existence would be appeasement.  Many would assume that if he wanted to win as the President, Trump would have to be the most popular guy, so the power was on the shoulders of those who might give that friendship and make him powerful through those relationships.  And that everything in life was built upon the foundations of “whom you know” and how they can help you.  And, of course, this is all completely wrong, and people have been taught all the bad things about the power of human relationships and what motivates them.   Appeasement and friendships are not power. 

Trump always knew, just as he understands about all the boot lickers who are around him now, that people like Bill Barr have no real power on their own, so they always need to appease people like Trump.  It is not the job of Trump to reach out and appease people like Bill Barr, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Fox News, or anybody in the world for help.  Once power is established, by whatever means, they will all come to you whether you want them to or not.  They will likely bug you day and night for your whole life to be your friend, giving you little time for anything else.   And what is this power that offers such an advantage?  Well, it comes from value.  When you establish value, whether as a person, services rendered, or thoughts from your mind, people will want to take some of that value from you.  So, the power comes from the things you have in life that other people want.  You can be considered influential if you have things others want to steal because they all do in some form or another.  Even the fraternity brat from college who let “the one” get away from a one-night stand and marries the woman his mother told him to, the compliant sorority sister that would make the family proud, who grows up to become a plump Ohio celebrity at the area wine tasting with Jimmy Buffett playing in the background.  And that guy spends the rest of his life befriending that lost woman’s husband so that he can at least know something about her life and stay close, even if she completely forgot about him.  Power is in those who have something others want.  And the more you gain in life, personally, the more power you will have by default, and the rest of the world, filled with Bill Barrs of all kinds, will always come crawling on their hands and knees to your door looking for friendship with endorsements of all forms.  And it will happen so often that it will drive you crazy with their pesky nature.  But few understand the rules of the universe, much to their detriment.  But Trump understands fully and well. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Smoke Shops in Ohio: Nothing says ‘Loserville’ more than a pot economy

Nothing says loser like a smoke shop.  I used to make fun of them while traveling through states that had legalized pot, such as Colorado.  They trash up a community.  But now they are in Ohio because a bunch of leftist losers took advantage of a bunch of stupid and naive people and convinced them to pass marijuana in the state, which then says to the world, our community is a bunch of dope-smoking losers.  I can avoid them daily, but recently, while going to Dunkin Donuts to get breakfast for my grandchildren, my wife had to look at two of them right by our house.  Smoke shops have become the new go-to for brick-and-mortar plazas, struggling to find tenants as most companies compete against online sales.  I understand that, too; I was shopping at a brick-and-mortar store in Columbus, Ohio, with a long list of needed items, mostly books.  But they didn’t have everything.  I ordered on Amazon and was able to get everything I needed, fast.  So brick and mortar’s are struggling.  Plaza builders and strip mall operators have too many products chasing too few goods.  Most of them have their usual nail salons and Chinese restaurants in them.  Or if not one of those, a Mexican restaurant.  But it’s been tough to keep them filled with all the brick-and-mortar failures.  Add to that the effects of a Biden economy with massive inflation and over-regulation that has crippled economic flow and you end up with a lot of strip malls at 60% occupancy.  It probably would have been a good idea in our economic planning to say no to some of them before they were built.  But the plans were all rubber stamped and now the owners of those developments are hard pressed to fill them.  So, to save the day, comes smoke shops along with Cheech and Chong to sell pot to a desperate public dazed and confused being taking full advantage of by a criminal government exploiting them until the public rots away with pain and betrayal. 

If I have to look at pot smokers and smoke shops, I can assure everyone that I’m going to be a far less nice person.  I despise pot.  I once had a group of friends in my very first apartment who smoked pot in it while I was gone.  I was 18 then, so I was in the prime age for people who did that kind of thing.  It was everywhere, especially at rock concerts.  I always had, and continue to now, a strict policy of no pot, anytime, anywhere, under any condition.  I had a little parakeet that I kept in a cage in my bedroom.  Yes, I was a weird teenager.  I liked those kinds of things, and while the apartment was a bachelor pad intended to pick up many chicks and have wild nights, I wanted to be married and start a family.  I was tired of party life, and I never liked it.  So that little bird was special to me, and a good companion as I started in life.  When I came home one particular day, after working very hard on one of my first sales jobs, three of my friends had smoked pot and tried to get the little bird stoned.  I was furious.  Actually, beyond furious.  Not only had they gone into my room with pot, knowing how much I hated the stuff.  But they blew smoke onto my little bird to get it stoned.  I had been friends with some of these guys since childhood.  That was the last day I ever spoke to them.  They reached out over the years, but I did not reach back.  Some found the light much later in life, but I did not forgive them.  If Jesus wants to be an idiot and forgive people like that, have at it.  I despise people who do things like that, and I, in general, despise pot users. 

Just because a bunch of loser politicians listened to their donors about the need to get into the pot business, it doesn’t change my sheer hatred of the stuff.  I’ve heard all the arguments; believe me, some really intelligent and powerful people have worked hard to change my mind.  After all, Speaker John Boehner, who is a neighbor and we share many mutual friends, left Congress because he saw the writing on the wall with Trump entering politics, and he became a pot lobbyist.  People like him for years have been talking about the medicinal properties of pot smoke and how you can make a rope out of it.  They have looked for every excuse to use the pot industry as some expansion of business in the state of Ohio, to make it a business-friendly concept to attract businesses to the state.  They tried to justify pot advocacy with economic expansion.  To me, if that is the best you have, then you are a dying economy with a dying workforce run by a bunch of suckers and losers.  John Boehner cries a lot, smokes too much, and was a globalist sellout when he had the third most powerful seat in the world as Speaker of the House.  And he went from that to being an advocate for pot in Ohio, and now we are seeing the results of what people like him have brought to our state.  Smoke shops everywhere. 

My wife is less tolerant about pot than I am.  We have family members who have bought into the whole “I need pot for my chronic pain” argument, and we have no respect for them or anybody who uses pot for that matter.  We’ve heard that the Indians used pot, so we should too, to be more aligned with “nature,” is what they say.  The Indians ended up a culture driven to extinction with their rain dancing and peace pipes.  And that’s what happens to all cultures that embrace intoxication in any fashion as a driver of economic means.  And my wife returned from that particular visit to Dunkin Donuts very upset that she had to look at those smoke shops because they were signs of an invasion into our community.  We’ve lived in Liberty Township for a long time, me much longer than her.  So we have watched the changes to the negative as all these East Coast people bring with them their Democrat ideas from socialist influence in the places they moved from.  Generally, we put up with it with as much understanding as possible. But seeing those Loserville smoke shops in our nice little community was too much that day.  And for me, it’s the parakeet all over again.  I have no tolerance for evil, and certainly not vehicles of evil, such as pot consumption.  I see nothing good about it, not medicinal, not by making rope, not in a Cheech and Chong movie.  And a pot economy is a drain on all other aspects of economic growth.  Any society that is built on the degradation of the mind, which is what pot is, even as a pain killer, will destroy your society.  And when you see a smoke shop catering to pot consumers, that is the kind of world you are building.  It is disgusting to see and hear about it from people who should know better. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Benefits of Trophy Wives: How women really make the best economy possible

Communism has been presented to us in many forms and in ways that many never suspected.  However, the perpetrators have been caught in how they structured stories for COVID-19, election fraud, and many legal cases against President Trump.  In the desperation to keep Trump out of political office, all the old games have been utilized, and outright communists and their wealthy donors have revealed the game plan.  And how assumptions flow through society as values, such as feminism, racism, or wealth distribution.  And how people find themselves followers of some communist political movement without ever realizing it until it is too late.  Specific to our topic here, what is the real essence of hatred for President Trump and his lifestyle?  I have pointed this out before, but perhaps not in the required detail, especially now.  And much of it traces back to Melania Trump, the President’s supermodel wife.  She represents an aspect of capitalism that the enemies of the world want to destroy.  The counter to communism’s basic premise of “equality.”  How can you have an equal society of beautiful women marrying men just over their money?  To obtain such beautiful women and show that you are better and more hard working, men generate a lot of financial wealth as job creators to access such women.  The criticism of the classic trophy wife is that it’s shallow for a woman to marry a man for his money and power.  People should marry over “love” and friendship, and men should cry and let their spouses feel their emotions as a soothing venture.  Trump doesn’t cry; he doesn’t seek comfort in the bosom of his woman.  He audaciously pursued wealth to access the most beautiful women in the world, and he married one, and now she has the opportunity to be the First Lady of America again.  To the communists of the world, this has been a massive problem because that was an attribute of human society that they have been trying to erase. 

I was in Japan recently with some friends, and our host told one of our young and single members at dinner that he needed to find a nice Japanese girl and marry her.  In Japan, even though they have gone through the motions of letting women work with men in the workplace, traditional marriages to traditional Japanese women who devote much of their lives to sustaining their husbands’ happiness are treasured.  And still, around much of the world, arranged marriages to unite family powers and political associations are very much at the core of their society structure.  Arranged marriages are expected and encouraged from the Near East to the Far East, such as Japan.  People don’t marry over love and personal fulfillment of choice.  They do so to align with rigid social structures.  And upon considering that and meeting several Japanese women who were working very hard to be good wives to their Japanese husbands, this trouble about feminism in the United States becomes grotesquely apparent.  The concept that men and women should marry over issues of equality and that the man should do the dishes and share in all Mr. Mom’s duties has its roots in communism, as a way to attack the economic engine of America and replace it with the destruction of the family and the relationships between men and women.  And it wasn’t an “organic” movement that just happened; it was created to destroy our culture.  And you don’t notice that until you travel to other countries untouched by such parasitic utterances.  Traditional marriages are still valued in Japan.  But because they are collectivist-based, they don’t emphasize beauty as the measure of a good wife, but in her domestic skills.  As is generally agreed upon there, an overtly attractive wife is not put on a pedestal like in the United States because there, they don’t value individual input but absorption into the net of society as a contributor. 

But still, in America and under a capitalist system, women are free to marry anybody they want, and pretty women have power that women not so pretty don’t have, to find a man of great wealth and to use her looks to buy her way into a comfortable life where money comes easily.  Women who are not so attractive have to settle for what gets left over, and that may not seem fair, but it has produced one of the best economies the world has ever seen.  Which then lifts all boats in the process.  Compared to other places in the world, the wealth created by the American economy allows most people to have a much better life, especially people who aren’t very good-looking.  In President Trump’s case, he worked hard to make a lot of money and have all the best cars, homes, golf courses, and attire so that he could have access to the best-looking women.  And attractive women know that if they have good looks, they can avoid marrying some dope-smoking loser who is too lazy to get out of bed.  We all see as a crisis the poor young woman who was pretty in her youth but listened to society and married some slug for “love.”  Only to find out that love doesn’t pay many bills or earn you respect when you walk into a room with your spouse, which everyone hates because they are of poor quality, and everyone knows it. 

The communist idea of not being shallow and marrying people just because they are wealthy is one of the first things that was attempted in the United States to erode the powerful economic engine of capitalism.  To the Marxists, it wasn’t fair that some ugly, comb-over man could marry such beautiful women just by working harder than everyone else.  However, many jobs were created in that process, and society improved significantly based on that one premise.  A hard working man wants to marry and produce children with the most attractive woman he can get.  So he works hard to do so, and in the wake of all that activity, a massive GDP is produced that communist countries can’t compete against.  So, of course, if your goal was global communism, you would have to put a stop to this mating ritual between ugly, hard-working men and the supermodel wives who would not feel guilty at all being the trophy wives and give their husbands all that he was looking for in a mate, respect, domestic tranquility, and a club to beat over the head of all his rivals in social occasions by having such a woman on his arm to remind everyone how much better he is over his peers.  And in a capitalist society, you want that.  You want competition.  You don’t wish for sameness as communists do.  Not everyone can be a trophy wife or a man who can afford one.  However, everyone benefits from the results of such an exchange in terms of better economic activity.  And that is why there is so much hatred toward Trump and his wife, Melania.   She is a nice housewife who is a supermodel and is not embarrassed that she is a trophy of a man who worked his butt off to have a woman like her on his arm when he wants her.  In a world full of arranged marriages for social alignments, the premise in America works great for values over economy and freedom.  A woman has the right and ability to marry anybody she wants to.  And attractive women can significantly elevate their lives if they can use their looks to get a powerful, wealthy man.  This gives the man a reason to work harder and be better than everyone else.  And that is the trait in America that the communists have been attacking.  And how so many people have been suckered into destroying their civilization over the simple premise of fairness that the rest of the world has been choking on since the dawn of the very first city-state. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Secret to Elon Musk’s Success: An obsession with risk and the management of its destructive elements

It’s certainly worth a discussion, although I had been avoiding reading the book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, mainly because it was a Time Magazine view of the world, and I tend not to enjoy books like that very much.  I’ve read other books by Isaacson and enjoyed them enough to learn new things.  In this case, Isaacson was given access to Elon Musk for the last few years to study him and learn all he could.  So, it was worth reading about the daily life and details of a person who is often the wealthiest in the world and runs some of the most successful companies.  But politically, I think of Elon Musk as a Barack Obama fanboy and a global greenie weenie.  But I do admire how he built Tesla.  I’m certainly not a EV fan of electric cars, but Tesla has carved out a nice little niche for themselves that I think is valuable.  SpaceX is an incredible company that is doing wonderful things.  I’m a tremendous fan of the Starship program and what has been done with Falcon 9 and the Dragon program.  I appreciate them for what they are, and I think Musk is just a unique personality to continue healthily pushing society places it needs to go.  I think of him as a great case of “dynamic intellectualism” that I talk about with the Metaphysics of Quality and the philosophy of Robert Persig.  But Elon Musk smoked pot on the Joe Rogan Show and wanted to put fart apps into his very expensive Tesla cars, so he’s not my kind of guy and people like Isaacson tend to get the surface qualities of his subjects, but not the real intellectual gist of their value.  However, after reading Elon Musk by Isaacson, the unavoidable trait of the secret to success did emerge without question, which is why I kept hearing about the book from friends and respected business leaders. 

Since the book came out in the fall of 2023, I have had at least someone once a week asking me if I had read the book since I usually read everything that comes out.  But I typically avoid the trendy stuff and lean more toward big-picture things.  I wasn’t interested in another get-rich book by people fascinated with wealth creation viewed through a popular cultural lens.  But so many people were getting the book and passing it out to their management teams, looking for some secret sauce that Musk obviously has.  So when I was at dinner with some very important people at Son of the Butcher at Liberty Center in Ohio, and under great encouragement from those people indicated that I would love the book, I left that dinner, stopped by the bookstore, and bought it just before Barnes and Noble closed for the night, and I promised them the next time I would see them, I would have read the book and told them what I thought of it.  That was on a Thursday night, so by Monday, when I would see some of them again, I had read the book, it’s a pretty big book with a lot of details in it.  Many people had bought the book, but they hadn’t made it very far through, and they wanted to know my opinion on whether to continue slugging through it.  In truth, it was a good book; Walter did a good job for a Simon and Schuster publication intended for static society audiences.  And I would say it’s one of the most important books of our time, for a lot of reasons, which I’ll spend separate articles covering.  But the secret sauce, yes, it was there and in all its glory.  I understood it, and it’s something I relate to. 

Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but think of President Trump when I think of Elon Musk and how wealth has been projected over time.  Trump’s Art of the Comeback from 1997 was about knowing influential people, supermodels, wives, exotic cars, and tall skyscrapers.  And in the part of the book where Elon Musk went through his period of wealth acquisition, Walter Isaacson seemed to be on comfortable ground.  However, in the cover inserts were exciting value changes for Elon Musk.  The things that Musk thinks are successful and what Trump thought was successful have changed a lot over time.  Musk had exhibitions of massive engineering feats displayed in his book, where Trump featured the building of skyscrapers and the New York skyline.  But while the things that wealth could buy as a value may have changed, getting there had not.  Most wealthy people have some prevalent traits they share in common, which is the concern of Walter’s books, especially with Steve Jobs.  What makes successful people successful?  And everyone talking to me about the book wanted to know this.  “If I read this book, will it make me successful?  Can we pass this book on to our super managers and sales teams and learn something from Elon Musk to help us be more successful?”  The answer is yes.  However, knowing how to be successful doesn’t mean most people have the guts to do so.  You can’t cheat that, even though that is what causes most of the corruption in the world—the desire to take the easy way to wealth to have the benefits without the downside. 

The downside with Musk and Trump, along with many others who have done similar things, even Jeff Bezos, is that they are addicted to risk and obsessed with it.   Elon Musk is a classic riverboat gambler who loves risk.  But has the unique personality to be very intelligent enough to know when and how to mitigate risk.  But yes, he is an obsessive gambler who would play Texas Hold ’em’ by pushing all in for every pot, blowing a lot of money in the process.  But in so doing, he would also get the biggest jackpots.  And that’s clearly how he achieved success at the level he did.  Anybody wanting to succeed would have to learn to bring more risk to their lives to have the success that comes from winning big.  A gambler like that might spend a fortune on betting.  But mathematically speaking, people like Musk and Trump know that eventually, things will swing in your direction.  What separates them from everyone else is how much you can take until you fold up on yourself, broke and destitute.  Musk certainly has a personality that could be homeless and poor beyond any reasonable scale because he is a person obsessed with risk.  I get it; I have many of those same traits.  It’s not the money someone like him is interested in.  But its success in risking and surviving, that is.  And without that risk, there would be no success.  Elon Musk would be just another person with Asperger’s and too much brain power, applying it to a static society that is not interested in risk.  They wanted everything safe and predictable and would push themselves by nature as far from the Elon Musk types as they could, to maintain their safe lives.  That’s what makes Walter’s book so good because it indeed chronicles this risky behavior in ways that the public usually doesn’t get to see in people.  But just buying the book wouldn’t make people successful by itself.  What it could do, though, was let people understand that risk is critical to business and how risk is managed is the key to all successful enterprises, which is my general opinion of the book.  Yes, people should read it.  However, they should learn from it how to put more risk into their lives without becoming destructive.  Because there is no way to cheat risk, you either develop a healthy relationship with risk or get standard, predictable results that stagnate and rot you and your culture from the inside out.  Luckily for us, there are people like Elon Musk out there who are making things exciting.  But, there should be a lot more, and maybe yet, there will be.

Rich Hoffman

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

Kimonos in Japan: If America wants to be Great Again, perhaps we should dress for that greatness

You might have heard about Jimmy Kimmel’s recent trip to Japan, a topic of its own.  But he is right about several things: Japan is clean, and crime is low.  He didn’t understand why, which I’ll break down in a separate article.  However, one thing that is quite clear that I admire about the Japanese people quite a lot is their embrace of their traditional culture and their kimono dress.  I, too, was recently in Japan. I’ve been there a few times during this year, so I am very familiar with some of the unique customs that they have there.  However, during this most recent trip, I saw quite a lot of Kyoto on a Thursday afternoon and for an extended period, and I was surprised by how they dressed.  Most of the people I encountered there were walking around the streets, the temples, and the bamboo forest in full kimonos, both men and women.  And there were rental shops everywhere that kimonos could be rented to wear around town.  It wasn’t a samurai cosplay convention, which was what I thought was going on.  This was how people dressed all the time, and it was very refreshing to see.  It reminded me of something I have been saying all the time, that in America, we need to embrace more of our traditions.  While in Japan, I fully expressed American culture, which they appreciated.  In America, I tend to wear a poncho to my gun competitions and other Second Amendment activities, the kind of Western wear that is very traditional to Western expansion and hard, cold nights on the open ranges next to campfires.   I have several of them, and when I wear them, I always get a lot of strange looks.  But I don’t think they should be considered strange at all.  And when I dressed that way to go out to the store in the middle of the night outside my hotel in Kobe, nobody in Japan thought it was strange at all. 

I had a few ponchos in Japan which I like to put on instead of a jacket, especially in inclement weather.  It’s like having a wrap-around blanket without worrying about it falling off your shoulders, so it frees up your arms underneath.  It’s suitable for short-term warmth without messing around with a cumbersome jacket.  And I like that a poncho hides a lot of what you might not want people to see, such as the many knives and guns that I carry all the time.  With concealed carry across multiple states, it is better to hide the big stuff with very baggy clothing instead of trying to contain the weapons in modern-day America’s conventional dress.  In Japan, their reverence for history, especially in their samurai culture, is unmistakable, and they openly embrace it, which I thought was very classy.  It was nice to see the women dressing up in these classic robes to go shopping and be seen around town.  And the men dressed similarly to accompany them.  Instead of being repealed by the display of my own dress, a few times on this latest trip, as I wore my poncho down to the local store to pick up supplies, people wanted to take a picture next to me in my boots, poncho, and Stetson cowboy hat to show they had met a “real American.”  And they were pleased about it.  As they snapped their pictures with me, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite quotes from the Dune books: “How else do humans invent the traps that betray us into mediocrity?” 

Mediocrity is what we have adopted in our modern Western cultures, with our associations with communism introduced through our education system.  They have rejected this mediocrity primarily in Japan due to their reverence for traditional values.  But in America, these days, we have associated fashion with an alliance with sportswear.  Nike, Adidas, and other brands seen from college sports programs have largely inspired our public presentation of ourselves.  These days, the idea of proper dress on casual Fridays is a golf shirt that shows we are interested in sports programs.  That is something that they don’t do as much in Japan.  They love sports, especially baseball, but they don’t go out of their way to show reverence for it out of disrespecting their traditional cultures.  But in America, we want to look like the coaches and players of our sports teams, which behind them have all kinds of corporate communism attached to them.  So, our American dress has shifted from individual expressions of a rugged outdoorsman to billboards for corporate influence over our sporting markets.  And the not-so-subtle message there is to accept that individuals are less important than the team’s greater good.  And, of course, behind that is that communism defines the greater good.  So, wearing a cowboy hat in America is quite a statement.  More people are doing it now than they used to, mainly because of the popular Yellowstone television show and the failed politics of the communist left.  People want to make America great again, and like the Japanese, they are turning to traditional dress to convey that trait.  But in America, our dress directly influences our society’s condition. 

I have always worn a cowboy hat.  But over the years, I have been less inclined toward sporting goods fashion trends in favor of my traditional gunslinger apparel.  I’ve been that way for many years.  I remember many late-night encounters in my twenties where I would wear my ponchos everywhere, including the Kenwood Mall in Cincinnati.  It’s one thing to do when you are in your 50s, as I am now.  But when you are in your 20s, many people look at you weird because you are so out of step with mainstream culture.  But it’s always been a visual hedge against mediocrity, which is how I view modern dress codes, and I largely reject the premise.  A culture should strive to stand out from the crowd in everything, individually.  Not to retreat into submission to the mob.  In Japan, particularly Kyoto and even Tokyo, even though the kimonos are uniformly similar in their loose-fitting robes, they are colorful and full of individualized expression.  I thought that seeing that expression was wonderful and was a major contributor to the quality of their society.  I had a chance to eat at a very nice restaurant in Kyoto with some friends.  It was a classic place; most people wore kimonos, and you had to take off your shoes while eating.  It had a spectacular garden to walk in while you waited for your food, and they provided you with slippers to do so.  I stepped into that place, mostly having to duck because the ceiling was low, and the whole place was primarily made of paper and wood.  They gave me a very large locker for my big cowboy boots, which is what they do when you enter to put your shoes in while you eat, but I still wore my cowboy hat.  And they took notice of it.  But it wasn’t in a “you’re not like us” way.  But rather, a respect for the culture that I came from.  And they were proud of their culture.  And what we all shared was a disrespect for sameness as defined by communism and an embrace of versatility as defined by capitalist markets.  They brought us mostly raw fish and vegetables, certainly not chicken nuggets as I might otherwise be used to in the States.  But it was a good look into a culture that embraced their uniqueness and certainly wasn’t shying away from their projection to the rest of the world.  And if America wants to be Great Again.  Perhaps we should start dressing for that greatness instead of playing everything down to some corporate version of casual and accepting sameness as a value rather than uniqueness. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The Communist Left is in a Panic Because Trump Doubled His Wealth: Why capitalism always beats communism

In the rock, paper, scissors game of life, capitalism beats communism 100% of the time.  It doesn’t matter that the world has been taught communism in their universities, public schools, and government centers of inefficiency.  When in direct competition with capitalist elements of any society, communism always loses.  So, as we prepare to become a space-fairing species as if we ever stopped being one, capitalism should be at the center of every culture that participates.  And there was never a more obvious example of this than in the battle to destroy President Trump by the SWAMP gas of the communist left of the Washington D.C. beltway culture.  They planned to bankrupt Trump with a bunch of corrupt courts and leftist judges and keep him from being able to run for President of the United States by the fall of 2024.  In the minds of the “left,” the political affiliates of Karl Marx, Trump would be serving 700 years in jail, have all his vast assets confiscated by the state, and his family would be broke and begging on the street.  That was their American-hating fantasy.  But what ended up happening was that President Trump, to defend his right to free speech, started Truth Social, and his total wealth value doubled to a present level of over 6 billion dollars. This infused Trump with more cash to fight all these Marxist criminal cases and took the air completely out of the plans of his political enemies, who are also our political enemies, and they are pretty desperate now.  They bet everything on this plan, and now it’s falling apart in front of their faces, as I said all along that it would.  Even a few months ago, when people said that Trump was done for in politics, I reminded them that he was far from finished.  And that he was going to win and win big.  Because capitalism always beats communism, and by the time all this work against him was done, the communist left would bankrupt itself in a way they would never recover.  Everybody laughed.

But news report after news report showed the anxiety of those who had bought into different levels of communism injected into American life, in a panic over their entire political philosophy falling apart right in front of their faces.  Where they thought the New York court cases were the end of Trump and that Trump Tower was going to be confiscated by the state, the opposite happened.  And there was plenty of desperation to go around on their part.  But America was set up so that people like President Trump could exist.  I gave an excellent little talk this past week to a group of people after I read the book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which I thought was astonishingly good, and I compared it to the Trump book The Art of the Comeback which I have been saying was the guidebook for the 2024 election.  If you want to know what Trump will do next, it’s all in that book published in the 1990s.  But the point of my talk, which I told them was likely the most crucial thing anybody would ever tell them, was that while how we measure wealth might change, the creation of it still has some essential ingredients that are important to the human race.  Wealth creation, specifically capitalist systems, requires the propensity of the human race to create new things out of risk.  To take chances.  And when you hit it big, the win may be celebrated differently.  Back in the 1990s, Trump was all about supermodels, fast cars, and tall buildings made of gold.  Elon Musk in 2024 has some compelling pictures of his most valued treasures on the covers of his book, one showing Starship stacking on SuperHeavy.  Then, on the back cover is a Tesla factory with a robot working in a nice, clean facility.  Both examples show the company’s success and how the people behind the enterprise measured that success.  But what made that success was always a risk and the ability to manage it for the betterment of all. 

Communist systems are all about averting risk.  They are the antithesis of creation.  It takes risk to do anything, so when you take the risk out of life, you take away the creation of things that are positive for the human race, which is why communist cultures, such as China, Cuba, Iran, and other places, are hellholes that depend on stealing from rich countries to sustain themselves.  That is why governments have to have massive taxes; they exist in at-risk environments that must be subsidized off the looted wealth of productive people who take many risks.  The more tolerance for risk a person had, and the better they managed it, the more successful they were.  Of course, those who don’t like risk and want a mother government to take it out of their lives will resent those who can handle it.  But what leverage can they inject into the world if they don’t bring any real value to an enterprise?  While the displays between the way Elon Musk displays his wealth as one of the world’s wealthiest people and President Trump may be different, it is similar to how they can handle more risk than others and use that trait to improve the world.

That was the swagger President Trump brought to his court cases.  When he was being hit from all sides by the communist left, he had the thought to use his money to start his own social media company, and I am proud to say that I was one of the first few hundred to sign up for it, which is how I was able to get my actual name in my username, @rhoffman.  And when Truth Social went public in March of 2024, it gave Trump access to plenty of cash to deal with all these pesky communists.   Trump could have spent these last few years working to be the wealthiest man in the world if he wanted to.  Instead, he doubled his billionaire status enough to stay alive for this presidential race, and the communists, because they count on systems to protect them from risk, were no match for someone very successful in managing risk and thrived in that environment.  This is why communism will never beat capitalism, even as much as the fantasy might wish such a condition to be so.  That’s why Karl Marx died broke.  That’s why the movement of Freemasonry in Europe failed to inject the entire world with socialism; group affiliations were intended to disguise people’s aversion to risk.  But it is always the risk-takers who succeed in life.  And there are always people who instead take risks to live the safe life of bootlicking their tribal leader in exchange for food from the confiscated wealth taken by mob rule.  It is that crucial designation that indicates why capitalism will always beat communism and why Trump has succeeded so well against these communist plots against him.  Most good things in life are created by risk, including asking out a pretty girl for a date.  Or driving a car that you just spent all day cleaning up for a night on the town, starting a new company, and making a profit.  People like Trump were successful because of their comfort with risk.  And what they create with that success makes the world a better place.  Which is why he’s winning, and the communist left is losing so spectacularly. 

Rich Hoffman

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

The New York Times Admits to a Deep State: People have learned that it’s not a conspiracy theory but very real, and deadly

I never used to talk about the Deep State, especially before what they showed us of themselves before President Trump was president.  People were skeptical about the CIA and FBI; there were always people who wondered whether Barack Obama was a foreign domestic terrorist and there were people who wondered who was responsible for 9/11.  Even though I have always been a very conservative Republican, I did work to get Ross Perot elected because I thought George Bush was a globalist.  There has always been a healthy suspicion of the government, but some of us knew it was more sinister than polite society was willing to admit to, while others wanted to remain blissfully unaware.  But people did not talk about a Deep State, an unelected group of government radicals who run everything.  Julian Assange and Snowden were warning us about the NSA’s nanny state and how much power they sought to acquire, and the big social media companies were assets for that data collection.  But people were not looking for that overt government control to rule their lives with every breath.  That is, until we saw what they were willing to do to keep Trump out of office, and after all those methods failed, we ended up with Covid, essentially to steal the 2020 election.  Then we watched that Deep State reveal itself and show what big teeth they had and how vicious they were willing to be.  And now, going into 2024, much of that Deep State is like the dog you tried to pet but bit off your arm.  People do not trust them or even the concept.  And now it’s not just conspiracy theory types who dare to question the trustworthiness of their government, but this extended out into the realm of ordinary people just minding their own business, filling out their March Madness brackets, and trying to use a sale at the grocery to buy one of something and get another free. 

But the New York Times, the paper of record for many, is trying to do damage control in the New York market over this very issue in attempting to put a lovely face on what the Deep State is, which they offer is just your average, every day, government worker: your postal worker, local regulator, school teacher, and inspection engineer.  The suggestion is that we are all Deep Staters, and our neighbors, our friends, are those people we should be concerned about.  I hate government employees because they are often driven without market value in mind, and they are created for the needs of the government, not an economy that represents society in general.  They generally make 30% more than market value demands and tend to be lazy because there are no suitable measures to extract performance from their positions.  The Deep State is not those people. Instead, and this is why the proposition is so insidious, we call it a Deep State because it runs under the layers of conventional government to pose a phantom menace to the rest of society.  Essentially, the Deep State is when the government seeks the power of the government to gain power for itself.  And in this case, it’s a collection of intelligence agencies in our taxpayer-funded government that uses a made-up 4th branch of government to suppress the public in a direction that the public doesn’t want to go.  Most obviously, with President Trump, people picked him in 2016 to run their government for them because they read his books and watched his television shows. They wanted him to bring those management skills to the office of the President and see how things went. 

And in truth, things went well.  President Trump did much better at running the government than the average government worker, and in protest, we saw just how radical many of those government workers were and what they were willing to do to hold power.  And now, going into 2024, as we have seen the full weaponization of government to throw people in jail, knock out political rivals, and abuse the public to hold power that nobody even knew the Deep State had, we have seen a very vicious dog biting everyone to protect a perceived power they should never have had in the first place.  When we talk about the Constitution being the law of the land, we learned that the Deep State was a collection of government workers networked all over the world steering us all into some one world government control through the United Nations, and they plan to ignore the Constitution completely, any notion of rule of law, or reference to America as a sovereign nation.  And it has scared people.  This isn’t Alex Jones or Glenn Beck going on and on about the latest conspiracy theory.  This was our nightly news, and the Deep State, in their hunger for power, couldn’t any longer conceal themselves behind polite society.  So, they have been exposed, and people want nothing to do with them.  Why do you think, dear reader, that Barack Obama was in England meeting with globalists recently?  He’s not the president of the United States.  But he’s acting like it and being treated that way around the world.  Why would that be?  Because to their eyes, the Executive Branch is just a cosmetic caricature, just like the Constitution and the concept of an American flag.  They allow those things to exist to appease the masses, while in reality, they function as a globalist community of earthly citizens bending the knee to the latest communist insurrectionists, whether they be in the United Nations or China. 

The New York Times has been advancing this globalist vision for decades now and is at the heart of all progressive concepts, where progressives want America to “progress” beyond their idea of nationalities and traditional desires for nation-building.  But they see the writing on the wall, which is why they are trying to put a spin on this Deep State thing that is now out of control.  The Deep State assumes that the public will be willing to submit to being ruled by “experts” created in college institutions and trained in Marxist philosophy.  But after COVID-19, that fantasy flew out the window forever.  Out of desperation to get rid of Trump in the world, the “expert” class moved too aggressively and spooked the horses.  And they have all run out of the barn and aren’t returning.  The New York Times, in their experience, is seeing what’s going on in 2024, and they are trying to put a friendly face on what the Deep State is because it is something.  It’s not a conspiracy theory to witness that the government wants perpetually more power, and without a Constitution designed to limit those powers, then a nation, any nation, will drown in its corruption brought on by the needs of government to create a Deep State to protect itself from the judgment of a public that might reject them wholesale, which is what is happening politically in 2024.  As long as the government looked like it was doing some decent things in the world, people were willing to give it a free pass.  But once they learned how dangerous and presumptuous they were with election fraud, a coup against a famous American president, and the willingness to kill people with COVID to stay in power with growing centralized powers given over through an emergency caused by the Deep State, then their branding has been lost to judgment.  And that trust is gone for good.  And the New York Times and many others from that side of politics know it. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Interacting with the Spirit World: How incense provides a vehicle to a world beyond the living

I’ve been thinking about how the spirit world dramatically influences the politics of our lives, as most indicators point to massive manipulation of our politics from the realm best articulated in the traditional Bible.  I found myself in Japan visiting some of the best-known temples in Kyoto with friends and comparing them to what we know about the Temple of Solomon.  Even though there have been over three thousand years of evolution in them, I couldn’t help but see massive similarities and notice how a religious relationship with the politics of a nation has either a positive or negative effect.  The gods worshipped aren’t even the same; in the case of Solomon’s Temple, it was Yahweh.  In the temples of Kyoto, it was Buddha, but as I have been saying for a while now, even including the way that the original Hebrew Bible was written from back to front, right to left, just as Japan writes to this day, it is obvious that the influences along the Silk Road, even in ancient times were a massive culture of uniformity that has its influences even now.  It might be uncomfortable for many people to consider their regional specificity, but there is a common theme that is easily verified when visiting these religious places, and that is the use of incense to establish a relationship with spiritual entities for assistance in the here and now.  Watching people interact with incense in Japan by washing it over themselves and then stepping into the temple to pray to Buddha reminded me almost identically of the tabernacle rituals of Solomon’s Temple and many others worldwide.  However, the same approach to these sacred precincts established by the Jewish people was more than just a coincidence.  There was a science to the approach that worked at some unconscious level, and it had been established long ago and is still in use to this very moment. 

We don’t get to see such a spiritual alignment in the United States because we have allowed ourselves to be suckered into a church versus state argument that discourages public displays of religious value, which the Japanese people have no apprehension over.  As a direct result, you can travel the streets in downtown Tokyo at 2 AM and see nearly no litter and experience very little crime.  People are overwhelmingly respectful of each other, and much of the root of this behavior is their relationship with the spirit world, which they are very open about.  Visiting temples in Kinkakujicho, the Kinna-ji Temple, the magnificent Kiyomizu-dera Temple, and several others, the use of incense smoke to provide a place for the spirit world to manifest in our three-dimensional world is a foundation for establishing a relationship with those characters.  It is common for people to regionally associate their deities of worship with the specificity of their culture and give them names like people name their goldfish.  But in truth, there is much more than just mimicry across multiple cultures over vast periods.  There was a cause and effect that couldn’t be ignored and was at the root of all successful societies.  Much of the Bible deals specifically with the nature of having a relationship with God, as the purpose of the Tabernacle even before the Temple of Solomon was built, was so that God could exist with his people, to manifest upon the Mercy Seat over the outstretched wings of the Ark of the Covenant.  I often think of the Ten Commandments as being the key to a prosperous society, in having rules that work and structure people to work together with shared assumptions.  But even more than that, this relationship with God through incense smoke is unmistakably productive. 

When people stopped worshipping God, as chronicled in the Bible and stepped back into the worship of the high places with human sacrifice to Baal, those societies quickly crumbled into a heap of madness.  And that has been the same story of all cultures who stepped away from God over the many years, the God Yahweh, as the Jewish people came to know him.  As I watched people in Japan interacting with the smoke and washing it over themselves, I kept thinking that the smoke itself was something anybody could produce anywhere, from simple incense burners from Walmart.  There was nothing specifically special about the smoke.  It was only made at a place meant to take the participant’s mind away from the noise of their daily life and have a relationship with the spirit world and whatever Gods might answer.  They have their names for them.  Just as most religions around the world do as well.  But that the intent was the same was more than a coincidence.  If you wanted to see what temple life was like for the Hebrew people in the Near East and understand what a thriving culture looked like, Japan had its finger on it.  Whereas modern Israel is war-torn and under contention, purposely trying to suppress a successful religious experience, much of the world is in conflict over this essential relationship, I would argue.  This is not just for the regional aspects of nation-building but also for the soldiers of the spirit world themselves.  They are at war with each other, and they use the minds of men to corrupt them into conflict by interrupting a positive experience of chaos and maniacal lunacy, such as the church and state arguments. 

By eroding the values of a culture, people allow themselves to be manipulated like pawns in a grand chess game from rivals beyond the world of the living.  And in places in the world where that relationship is positive, they also have a political culture that is functioning correctly.  The best way to destroy a person is to destroy their relationship with the spirit world, no matter what they call their gods, whether those gods are the same character with different names or a pantheon of different characters sometimes called the same name.  It’s the relationship that matters and how it carries over into a political society.  And what about the smoke of incense that carries a relationship with God?  It’s a common theme we can learn from the longest-running, prosperous society of people, the Jewish people because they have been doing it for a long time.  In Japan, as I visited many temples last week in Kyoto, the functionary relationship with the spirit world is alive and well.  And it’s working for them successfully.  Few places on earth today are more successful culturally than what is witnessed in Japan, especially Kyoto, the old capital.  People had a relationship with the more significant aspects of dimensional confinement, and they were happy about it.  The incense smoke appealed to that relationship, which was tangible and precisely like the Tabernacle of the Hebrew people.  When people fell to Baal worship, they turned to appeasement of those gods through the sacrifice of the living.  Whereas to Yahweh, and eventually the Buddha, who came 500 years later, and then the influence of Christ from India, we see an approach that worked along the Silk Road many thousands of miles apart.  It can be shown that a successful relationship with the spirit world creates an opportunity for a prosperous society.  But the temptations to shortcut or abandon that relationship are all too common and involve politics beyond our lives, yet very much at the center of everything we do. 

Rich Hoffman

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