Tag: entertainment

Why I Don’t Dance: Of course, there are lots of hostile forces looking for devices of mind control, and music for them is easy

It was one of those weird conversations you have with people who ask unusual questions that do not have usual answers. I was having dinner with some people from the East Coast on the river in Cincinnati, and small talk was the qualifier for many reasons. There was music in the background, which naturally provoked the question of what kind of bands I liked and what music I liked to listen to. And from me, that does not get a usual response to a band listing my favorite music. Most people do have a few musical groups that they enjoy a lot, but I’m not one of them. I have always viewed music as a device for psychological warfare and a fundamental element of mass mind control. And for that reason, it answers the big question, why I never dance to music, anywhere, ever. I do not allow myself to be moved to the beat of music in any way, shape, or form, which is an unusual position to take in any kind of society because music is often seen as a unifier and a bridge builder, which is why it came up in that dinner conversation. I’m not a wet blanket on music when people play it. I don’t point to certain types of music and decry it as “the work of the devil.” But I don’t trust the music to my mind in any way. In a world where many maniacal forces desire the subtle rule of everything, music is an all too tempting playground for the occult to rule in ways they have desired from the beginning of time. Of course, it’s happening now to people in ways they cannot relate to. I only mention it now because I see many people realizing that there is a lot more to the Wizard of Oz of our culture now that the curtain has been pulled back on lots of mass mind control through election fraud, Covid tampering, and politics in general. It’s hard to know who the bad guys are and the good guys are when we see how top-secret documents were handled by the FBI for Trump, for instance, as opposed to Biden. We see there is something wrong that is beyond our grasp, and our trust has been violated, yet we aren’t quite sure how or why. 

If you want to believe that all there is to reality is just the visual spectrum that you can see or the audio waves we can hear, I understand. It’s hard and complicated to reach beyond a human’s perceptual reality and to ask hard questions or not to assume that those who want to rule the world wouldn’t be obsessed with controlling all perceptual reality from the means of strategies that exist outside it. For instance, there is a plant known to the Arabs as the Golden Plant, called Baaras which is supposed to grow on Mount Libanus, underneath the road which leads to Damascus. It flowers in the month of May after the snow melts. At night you can see it with torchlight, but in the day, it’s invisible. Does that mean it doesn’t exist if you cannot see it? Or does it mean you do not have the biological sensitivity range to detect it? I would say that humans have evolved into seeing and hearing what they need to, but there is a lot of outside perceptual reality. All those lifeforms compete for attention in a hostile universe motivated by its transgressions. And that it should never be assumed that reality can be trusted only by what you can see or hear. Many dogs and other animals can see things beyond the hearing range of human beings, and they react to those noises often, barking out the window at what we would call “nothing,” but to them, there is something there. 

What often bothers me about music and those who write music, and knowing something about the entertainment industry over time, and how governments do like to tamper with mass populations, as they were caught doing with Covid and elections, is that drugs often assist songwriters, under the influence, all kinds of elements can be brought into the matter as what is considered an inspiration, but might actually be mind control by hostile forces. How many bands brag about how straight they are while playing music or writing it? Often drugs come into the mix or some other chemical element, and as I have reviewed the matter of Ayahuasca a great deal, I believe those people. I think what they see is not just hallucinations produced by an overly stimulated brain but a glimpse into what we call the spirit world. The correct way to reference it is as “competing” life forms on several dimensional realities. Do we really understand the lyrics to the songs that are sung? There are many references from thoughtful people who look at the concerts of Katy Perry or Madonna, who openly offered free oral sex to anybody who would vote against President Trump, occult references that many suspect point to an Illuminati influence over the music industry. Based on the behavior of most musical artists, people would not be crazy to draw that conclusion. So knowing what we do about corrupt governments and how they would lie to us about Covid, election fraud, and even the importance of classified documents from presidents or former presidents, why wouldn’t we assume that published music released to mass markets isn’t attached to deep occult rituals designed to invoke spirit world help from beyond the grave? And suddenly, innocently, we find ourselves mouthing the words and tapping our feet to a catchy tune that might be trying to invoke some ritualistic menace intent on destroying all humanity. Yet we rationalize it as just “entertainment.”

One of the most ancient conflicts that have been recorded was the one between Yahweh in the Christian Bible and his archrival Baal. Millions and millions of people were killed in this conflict, and it all came down to those who followed the Ten Commandments or worshipped at the altar of Baal. And with all our technology and the noise of modern society, I would say that the point of the noise is to saturate our minds with nonsense so that we don’t pick up on the intent of those who would otherwise call themselves our enemies. The music industry has always been suspected of having motivations beyond just making money. Whether it was playing records backward to detect hidden messages or the ritual nature of mass drug consumption at a rock concert to the beat of seductive music that takes people out of a conscious state of decision-making and makes them artifacts of desire, I think music is a vehicle for mind control by lots of forces, whether they be governments wanting to invoke a compliant sheep-like society, or maniacal demons of the underworld looking to make their mark in the world in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have the power to do, my answer to the music question is that I don’t trust any of it. I don’t think it’s possible just to enjoy entertainment without considering its motivations and the impact on the psychology of the listener. So for all those reasons, and many more just hinted at, I don’t dance to music. Not at weddings. Not at sporting events. Nowhere. When my daughters were married, we did not do the “daddy-daughter” dance because I don’t dance. Anywhere, with anybody, ever. Responding to things, not in your control is not healthy, fun, or smart. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Woke Politics is Killing Disney: We are not “global citizens” we are Americans–the world follows

You can’t kill Indiana Jones. But that is the word from test screenings or previews that are coming out of rough cuts of the movie. And it wouldn’t surprise me that they would try. In this new ESG world for which Disney is offering itself as a leader, killing off an 80s representative of toxic masculinity with a time travel story that ends with Indiana Jones sacrificing himself to the next generation female woke hero is consistent with everything that Kathleen Kennedy has done since she became president of Lucasfilm in 2013. I’m sure George Lucas had good intentions, but he never expected this from his former company and the brands he worked hard to build over many years. For all the reasons he hated corporate filmmaking while trying to finish his famous film, THX-1138, now he is seeing that, left in the hands of corporate control, they could screw up anything. Filmmaking is not a collaborative enterprise, even though that’s what they tell everyone in film school. It is a top-down driver of unique minds who tell other people what to do to obtain a strong vision that audiences can then enjoy. The previous Indiana Jones movies were all from the mind of George Lucas, and that’s what people wanted to see. And what will be interesting about Indiana Jones 5, which is getting some press with about six months until the release in June of 2023, is how different it will be without George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. You can put the same actors, music, and color pallets into a movie, but it won’t be Indiana Jones without George Lucas. And clearly, Kathy Kennedy didn’t understand anything; she thought these popular movies would be vehicles for woke politics and would hold up. But ultimately, audiences will reject them.

I thought the trailer preview looked pretty good, but the problem was it confirmed all the rumors that also indicate that Indiana Jones dies at the end. So like the ESG values of BlackRock have indicated, the way to give audiences a last look at an 80s icon of heroics and toxic masculinity is to erase him from history and to replace him with a woman. Without question, Kathy Kennedy would sign up for that. Whether they stick with that ending after the terrible online reaction is left to be determined. Are they that radical at Disney these days? Well, of course, they are! They are crazy, so I don’t have much hope for the new movie, just as I don’t for the new Avatar film coming up. People don’t want to go to the movies to see woke propaganda and gay rights messages. They want to be free of that, which is one of Indiana Jones’s appeals throughout movie history. But the ESG values of stakeholder capitalism are all about social governance, and Disney has dedicated itself to that leadership, and it is showing in their stock. They have brought back Bob Iger as the CEO to help them make the transition from value-driven content to the traditional way to make good movies; they earn a lot of money at the box office, and Disney is rewarded with a lot of cash. But over the last few years, those values have changed, at least on the corporate side. Driven by Larry Fink and the Klaus Schwab types at the World Economic Forum, stakeholder capitalism is the new value system and a global currency. And Disney expects Bob Iger to navigate that new world in a beneficial way to show other corporations how the stakeholder model will work. So there is much more going on here than Disney killing off one of the most beloved screen heroes of all time. It’s about replacing the value system that western civilization has for this new global view of the world.

But people are people, and what they value won’t change. As Disney has learned with its release of Strange World, which feature a gay plotline for the primary characters, and the weak showing for Black Panther II Wakanda Forever, wokness doesn’t excite people. There was a lot made of Bob Iger’s statements about taking politics out of Disney to repair the brand a bit, but what didn’t get talked about much was that he went on to say that he didn’t believe that Disney was very political. Rather, he saw much of what they were doing as the responsibilities of a “global citizen.” He said that Disney has been telling stories for over 100 years and takes its responsibility to be good global citizens very seriously. And to the ESG values of the World Economic Forum, gender-bending is much more important than box office votes. So Disney is deep into it now. They are off on their projections, and stockholders still measure value in dollars, not ESG scores. And that will continue as we move into 2023, and they find out Avatar won’t make the kind of money they are hoping because nobody wants to waste more than 2 hours on a climate change lecture about nature being more powerful than imagination and productivity. And if Disney sticks with the previews of Indiana Jones that have him being killed, that will kill Disney in ways they can’t even imagine right now. They thought Crystal Skull damaged the Indiana Jones brand. Killing Harrison Ford and replacing him with a woman just isn’t going to work. 

Oh, I wouldn’t mind a female type of Indiana Jones story. I loved Lara Croft until they gave her a stupid bow and arrow instead of the double guns she used to shoot. There is nothing wrong with strong female characters but much wrong with wokeness. And Lara Croft went woke years ago. And yes, the people who want to bring down western civilization and big media companies who have told lots of great stories selling western civilization to the world want to see it all come to an end. Disney these days is a woke company that has permanently damaged its brand. Of course, China and its partners at the World Economic Forum are happy to have that competition removed. But the world is truly at a loss. Yet, people will get over it and move on. They won’t care if there is never a Star Wars movie again. They can live without Indiana Jones. If this movie Indy 5 goes woke the way reports say it is, it will fail, and Disney will further slide down the ESG pit of doom. And Bob Iger won’t be able to save it. Disney was already slipping when he left as CEO just a few weeks before the Covid lockdowns hit in 2020. He knew all about it from the role-playing that went on at Event 201 at the end of 2019. Disney was always built on a house of cards of value that depended entirely on the public sentiment to enjoy the movies. And if Disney isn’t making movies people want to see and instead is committed to woke politics that nobody wants to see, then everything will dry up for them, and their stock will tank. And ESG isn’t going to catch, leaving Bob Iger and the gang holding all the losses for history to remember. People will paint this Indy 5 from their minds, just as many have Crystal Skull. And they’ll live their lives. But Disney will not survive, and Bob Iger looks like he’s going to dig in, much to his own demise. The preview confirmed the rumors, and that has already damaged the brand.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Liberalism Behind ‘Avatar Way of Water’: It won’t turn out the way Disney hopes

Usually, the people reading the tea leaves on television and radio get it all wrong because the leaves they are reading aren’t the right ones. I would suggest a different approach: to read the leaves of media currents themselves and to study what the public likes and doesn’t like as a much more accurate measure. And to that effect, much of where the world is going by way of populism, corporate control, and the way many treacherous characters hide their acts of malice behind liberal causes are on a crash course with destiny and collapsed diabolical intent. With that in mind, I’m talking about the new Avatar film, Way of Water, as if the world is being steered back to nature, into some oriental wisdom from the ancient past to reveal to our modern selves how far we have fallen from the tree. Because the tea leaves that Jim Cameron, the director and writer of the film, and the parent company of the new Avatar films, Disney, are reading the tea leaves of a wilted plant from the past that has long died. The world is a much different place from when the first Avatar movie came out, which earned a record-breaking 2 billion dollars at the box office. I was doing some work with Hollywood then, specifically with RealD 3D, so I knew what many producers and distributers wanted to do with 3D to convince movie goers to put their butts in seats instead of staying home watching movies on their magnificent home theater systems. And the first Avatar movie benefited from a good story, a great filmmaker, and outstanding cutting-edge 3D technology. But people at that time were comfortable with their lives; they trusted that America would always be there and that government wasn’t nearly as corrupt as we know it to be now. And the World Economic Forum was something that nobody knew much of anything about. People lived their lives and were open to strange ideas about environmentalism because there was room in a comfortable life to accept such ideas, so long as they could go home in their gas-powered car and had a full bank account. Church on Sunday put their minds to ease about what would happen tomorrow. 

It will be interesting to watch how audiences accept this new Avatar movie, released over a decade after the first. Disney hopes it will make a lot of money like the first, but I think it will be far short of the original. As will the subsequent films that are already planned will be. People will go see the movie for the same reason they are waiting in line for more than two hours to ride the magnificent ride at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom because they want to step out of their lives and into a unique experience. The Avatar ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida is one of the most outstanding technical achievements I have ever seen for human imagination. The whole Avatar land there is a monument to what the human imagination can produce, and I think it’s great. But, the cat is out of the bag now on Disney and Jim Cameron, who are both much more liberal than they used to be, and the country of America isn’t that liberal. The Desecrators of Davos “back to nature” message is not the priority for the people living in the world. With an overt message of environmentalism versus technical achievement, humans tend to cheer on the products of their minds, not the pagan superstitions of the past, which is the true intent of liberalism and its desire to reset the Vico Cycle into anarchy and back to a theocracy where nature is worshipped as the modern Earth Goddess. The first Avatar walked a very fine line between overt lectures about the terrors of corporate greed and the majesty of nature’s wisdom. And that redeeming message is the heart of the Desecrators of Davos plan to unite all the corporations of the world behind their pagan religions and to drag everyone in the world who uses those products with them to the Liberal World Order priorities for existence. 

It’s not that the new Avatar film The Way of Water will be boring. I’m sure that after ten years of making the movie, Jim Cameron has done some great things in film. But the message itself, this Dances with Wolves in space concept of rejecting technology for the idea that we are all cells within the body of something greater than ourselves, is a political message that people don’t want to hear. It’s been crammed down their throats for a long time now. Since the first Avatar movie in 2009, we’ve been through the Obama presidency and all the terrible things that happened as a result. That led people to vote for Trump in 2016. And when the great America that came from the Trump administration was taken from people in 2020, the Desecrators of Davos through their election tampering, especially with Facebook, they gave us Joe Biden, an embarrassment who has declared war on fossil fuels and represents the forces which essentially want to create Pandora, the land from the Avatar films, here on earth and as a political platform. Through public relations trickery, they can attempt to show that elections are close in America, just as in other places worldwide, such as Brazil. But in reality, people do not vote against their best interests, and this evidence shows in other aspects of our culture the kind of things people choose to be entertained by.

And that’s ultimately the problem with the new Avatar films; they are essentially the Biden political platform, the new religion of the globalists around the world of earth worship, presented as entertainment behind top-level special effects and all the magic a movie theater experience can provide. There are movies scheduled all the way through Avatar 5 that I think are getting way out over their skis. If they were just entertainment, people might enjoy them. But if you have read Klaus Schwab’s books from the World Economic Forum, you would see that Avatar and Disney’s production of them is essentially the world they want to get to hear on earth; it’s a political platform and their goals for the transformation of the world. They want us all to strip down naked, make love to our animal powers, get right with nature, and bend to its will, like the characters in Avatar do. And because of that, I think people will reject the films aside from their initial spectacle and the lack of anything else to see at a movie theater. I predict that all the hard work that Jim Cameron has put into these films will ultimately be lost on a public that is sick of the politics of liberalism being pushed into their lives from every direction, especially in their entertainment. And the results will be embarrassing for Disney and Cameron in the end. It is one thing to visit the Avatar World at Animal Kingdom and to marvel at the technical achievements that essentially attempt to make a primitive life great again in the minds of the Desecrators of Davos. But when you get tired of it, you can go back to your nice hotel, get a nice meal, sit by a very modern pool, and enjoy the world of technology and business with all the audacity that American capitalism can provide. But the point of the Avatar films, and the liberalism behind them, is to get rid of that comfort and to return mankind to a primitive state, so there is nowhere else to go. And people don’t like that message at all, and it will show in the box office results and, ultimately, Disney’s stock.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

No, It’s Not Time to Move On from Trump: Nobody has unified American politics more, and that’s why “they” hate him so much

To make something very clear, I have heard from numerous Republicans on the matter, many of whom I respect a lot, that it is time to move on from Trump and start getting behind someone like DeSantis for 2024. They reason that Trump is in the news every day and that he is a distraction from the politics at hand. If we moved away from Trump, we could move away from all the negative news coverage but still get a good executive in the White House who gets it. After all, sending illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard was a good, bold move to protest the open border policies of the Chinese-bought Biden administration. It was a very Trump-like thing to do. Yet, DeSantis doesn’t come with all the negative daily news splashes, especially with the DOJ pressing down to abuse their authority and indict Trump on fake charges of anything just to keep him from running again in 2024. All this is a distraction dividing the country in painful ways, and many Republicans just want it all to stop. They hope that if they sacrifice Trump to the media gods that perhaps they will then leave DeSantis alone, or whoever fills in that massive political void of the “Trump” character, and we can all live happily ever after again. I’ll remind people that I warned about how things would be going into the Midterms. The Democrats have lied, cheated, and stolen power because they desire to abuse that power for power’s sake, and they won’t give it up easily. They have created an FBI in the intelligence community, a vital arm of the Liberal World Order, and they are playing for blood. And their constant attacks on Trump are to protect their long-established plans for destroying American sovereignty and to redistribute everything into the United Nations-controlled New World Order. If you think you have seen bad now, wait until the oil from the strategic oil reserves is gone. They are being depleted as we speak, and the lower gas prices are meant to borrow time until after the Midterms to trick voters into voting for some Democrats. 

And what they fear most is the kind of influence that Trump recently had over the Pennsylvania rally, then the Ohio event to pump up J.D. Vance. I have watched a lot of Trump rallies, and his event in Pennsylvania was undoubtedly one of his best. Very few people in the world could do what Trump has done, to become independently wealthy with a family business, not connected to all kinds of shady characters around the world. Or a personality who has dominated the media in the way Trump has over the years, writing so many best-selling books, creating top-rated television shows, and having a social persona that is so magnetic that people will show up to hear him speak without a rock band to accompany him. People show up at these rallies to repeatedly listen to the same speech, and they wait many hours beforehand just to see him. No other political figures can do that anywhere in the world. And here we have this magnificent person at the height of his powers who wants to apply them to the Republican Party. I’m all for that and happy to have Trump on the team. But then, what Trump has now mastered late in life is the art of public speaking, the ability to stand in front of a crowd for two hours and talk, talk, talk in such entertaining ways that people never want it to end. The people who are after Trump are terrified of these relationships that Trump has with the public. They know the truth about the 2020 election. They know what they did to conceal the steal sponsored by the American intelligence agencies to remove an elected president from power. Their actions tell us everything we need to know about who was guilty of the biggest crime in human history. Instead of physically killing Trump, as they might have done with Kennedy or some other obstinate political figure, they are attempting to create a police state like they have in different places and sell it to the public by destroying Trump with it. They hope that it will stick with our culture in the aftermath. 

What Trump has done that is the most valuable attribute is that he has truly unified the country in ways nobody realized beforehand that it could be. Trump was a former Democrat, as were Dr. Oz, Keri Lake, and several other characters who the MAGA movement has now inspired. Suppose you look at all the kinds of people who are getting elected into MAGA roles. In that case, whether it be for a senate seat, a congressional seat, or a governor, there are more women, more people of color, and more people from other nationalities who are becoming part of the MAGA movement that no longer are the stuffy white guy executive who doesn’t hire women attributable to the Republican Party. Trump has created the most diverse party to ever represent people politically in world history. That is precisely why the established order hates him so much and dedicates so much of its time trying to destroy him. Their only defense is to make so much noise about Trump that perhaps people might abandon him just for the possibility of peace. That is the nature of war, to wear out your opponent and to secure a victory. And for many Republicans, the constant barrage from the media and the intelligence community has made them want to surrender to those forces. 

But Trump isn’t done politically yet. There is a lot more that needs to be done, but we clearly are not the same world as we were in 2015 when Trump and his wife came down the escalator in Trump Tower for their big announcement speech. All these elements were there, but we didn’t talk about them. We thought everything politically was on the up and up; we didn’t know how radical the FBI was in favor of Democrats, and we didn’t realize just how complicit the media was with the Liberal World Order. And we might have suspected election fraud at times. Still, we had no clue that so many forces had their hands in our cookie jar and were openly conspiring to put one political party in power in America for their own benefit and how much they wanted to destroy the other. They were the creators of the “uniparty,” a mixture of Republicans and Democrats who get very rich while in office as a kind of payoff to create legislation that harms America and redistributes our wealth to other countries in the name of globalism. Politicians like Mitch McConnell, for example. But Trump even made “China Mitch” a good guy by holding firm to get a good Supreme Court. When it comes to Trump, there are many great things to consider. But most of all is, the reason they attack him so viciously, and that is because they have nothing else. Through their hatred, we have learned much about our election system’s political forces. And it might be ugly, but it always was.   Yet now we can identify it; we have seen it attempt to defend itself. And the failures of the Liberal World Order are currently on the ballot in ways they never intended, and it’s because of Trump and the pressure he brings that has revealed it so spectacularly, perhaps for the first time ever.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What ‘Bob’s Burgers’ says about American Society: What people will do to have a good family

At face value, it would be one of those strange mysteries. But when you dig into the issue a bit, it makes a lot of sense and says a lot about what kind of society we really are as Americans. I’ll admit, I was perplexed as to why any studio would produce a Bob’s Burgers theatrical release. With so many streaming services that are out there these days, why would anybody make a movie of the somewhat popular cartoon on Fox called Bob’s Burgers, which is a version of the typical animated formula that they have made so popular over the years with other offerings like The Simpsons, and Family Guy? I’m not too fond of Bob on Bob’s Burgers; I think of him as a loser. He’s not very ambitious; as a dad, he’s perpetually broke. He runs a little New England burger place in a resort town, and he can barely rub two pennies together.

Most of the episodes are about the problems they have as a family because they never have enough money to do things. And of course, my famous saying to people complaining about not having enough money is just to work and make more. Especially in America, if you want money, you can have it. You may not make all the money you want in 8 hours of work. Forty hours a week may not be enough; you might have to work 80. When I was raising a family, I have told the stories of only having one car, and I rode a bicycle 25 miles a day, so my wife could have the car for the kids and worked two full-time jobs to make the money we needed as a family. So, I can’t relate to Bob in Bob’s Burgers, and I find it odd that young people like the show so much. But, apparently, they do. Enough so that they made a theatrical movie release this year as something they thought was justifiable. 

I also had a unique experience while attending various comic cons with my daughter, an outstanding illustrator who does exhibitions of her work at those types of events. As I have said, it’s interesting to watch people cosplay at comic cons, the kind of outfits they want to dress up in, and invest so much of their time to bring characters they enjoy to life in some way. I can understand the various Star Wars characters and those from the Marvel movies. Those are action movies that make you feel good when leaving the movie theater in some way, so it makes sense that people would want to dress up as those characters during Halloween and at comic cons. Bringing fantasy to life is a specific function of the human imagination, a conceptual vehicle that expresses inner values that manifest in mythological impressions during social exchanges. Dressing up as a favorite character is a way to vote for the kind of values that you see in pop culture. Imitation is the ultimate compliment. But while I was at these events, I was just a little shocked to see young people dressing up as characters from Bob’s Burgers, which is hard because they are all cartoons. It’s not easy to bring a cartoon character to life, yet people did, and some were really good costumes. Why? I’ve watched many episodes of Bob’s Burgers, and I just don’t enjoy the show that much. For me, it’s often filler in the background while I’m doing five or six other things. I occasionally watch it because I like the colors of cartoons. But I can’t relate to the characters much at all. 

Oddly enough, my wife likes Bob’s Burgers a lot. I’d say it’s her favorite show, so this problem has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Yet, in working to understand the current political sentiment of our mass society, I felt something was going on with Bob’s Burgers that was worth noticing, significantly if film executives believed that a theatrical release of a subpar cartoon series on Fox justified its own movie. So the one thing that really jumps out about Bob’s Burgers that is likable is that all the family members like each other. Bob, his wife, and his three children all live in a little dump of an apartment, yet they don’t act like a bunch of losers who are waiting in line with a bottle of booze to buy lottery tickets. They work hard for the money they make and love each other as a family while running the family burger business. Bob is always a few cents short of whatever the family needs, but his wife never talks about leaving him for a better life with a more ambitious lover. The kids are just happy to have mom and dad together in the house. The brothers and sisters aren’t out to kill each other; they go on many neighborhood adventures and solve problems like rational people. They are a very “traditional” family. 

And that’s what it is with Bob’s Burgers; like many of the other Fox primetime cartoons, they all have in common a mom and a dad in the home who love each other. That is certainly the case with Family Guy, a very progressive show that features a family that stays together. There aren’t step-parents and step-children in these cartoons. They are all very traditional. Other animated shows have tried to make it with more progressive storylines, but they always fail. The ones that stick around over the years are the cartoons that feature traditional family settings. The Simpsons have been on for decades now, a very long time. And yet, with many hundreds of storylines, Homer and his wife Marge still love each other and work through marital problems together in a way that never ends in divorce or a family breakup.   And that was the key to this Bob’s Burgers mystery. Here was a family on an animated show with many problems, and they seemed limited in their ability to solve those problems. But, they enjoy each other as a family. You don’t see Bob running around on the town to cheat on his wife. Or running away from the attention that the kids obviously want from him. He’s a good dad, even if he’s unambitious socially. And his family loves him for it. Obviously, the audiences who can’t say the same about their own families have found a reliable father figure in Bob’s Burgers. In Bob’s Burgers, they see the family they always wanted and never had in the fictional settings. And it has such an impact on them that they even dress up as the characters in cosplay. It says a lot about the true state of our society when those types of fictional stories indicate what people really feel inside. Their vote for the type of entertainment they wish to enjoy says what all people really crave outside of political theater. Most people would give up a lot to have a family like Bob’s Burgers, where at least mom and dad loved each other, and their siblings worked together to help make the family a family. In a world full of disappointments, at least Bob and his animated television family were willing to fight through disappointments for the key ingredient to all happy societies, a good family that might not have a lot of money, but at least they had what all humans crave, a genuine love for each other. And that is worth noting and something that should give us all hope for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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Why The New ‘Top Gun’ is So Popular: Americans like rule-breakers, not conformists

It is funny to hear industry analysts trying to figure out why the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is doing so well going into its third weekend. I’ve listened to and read several hundred reviews of the film at this point. Unlike other kinds of movies, I have not yet found anybody who understands why the American market is flocking to see it many times now. Is it patriotism and the lack of wokeness that is in the movie? Or is it Tom Cruise himself, which many in the trades would like to think is the case? Well, Tom Cruise was smart to make Top Gun the way it needed to be, especially coming out of the Covid years. The film was done well before there was ever a pandemic, and Paramount sat on it for several years because of the uncertainty of the future of Hollywood, Top Gun: Maverick has the feel of a movie made in a different time and a different country, all the way back to 2019. I remember being on an airplane flying out of Orlando and watching Comic-Con footage of the movie for a 2020 summer release, so it’s been out there for a long time. But the film was released during a market recovery in a post-Covid world, and all kinds of forces were at play that inspired Americans to return to the movie theaters to see a movie worth leaving the house to view. Yet, there is an element to Top Gun that is very much reminiscent of the 80s when Tom Cruise was making so many blockbuster films, along with other movie stars, that say more about Americans to the world than anybody has seen in a while. It is that element that was on raw display in the new movie and is why the film is doing well without the rest of the world driving a majority of the box office numbers, specifically the Chinese market. 

The character of Maverick is a rule-breaker, and that is a trait that Americans love. They don’t like someone who follows the rules to the letter. Americans want out-of-the-box characters who will bend or break the rules to accomplish something great in the world, even down to the name of the Tom Cruise character. Tom Cruise himself is not like Maverick. But he was wise to play a character like Maverick and let all the elements of a rebel within the military shine in many reckless ways. Just the name of the character, Maverick, indicates a loner, a rugged individualist, someone who goes their own way in life. And that is not how the rest of the world is. Only American cultures celebrate such traits. The stories other cultures put on the silver screen are conflicts with conformity as opposed to what we see in Top Gun, a character so reckless that he costs the military hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just this one movie. Maverick crashes two very expensive aircraft and puts at risk many more in his exploits of individualism that are often audacious, unapologetic, and way over the top. In most cultures, Maverick would be in jail. But in America, he is considered the top navy pilot that the military has, and audiences love it.

Literally, in the movie, all the people who have trouble are those who follow the rules. There is a scene where all the best pilots are in a bar talking about the upcoming mission, and they wonder who will be able to teach them anything. And of course, it is Maverick who has been picked to lead the mission because for it to be successful, it will require someone willing to break all the rules and discover what nobody yet knows. There is a scene where Tom Cruise playing Maverick, stands in front of a giant American flag and tells his students to throw out the rule book because it’s what your enemy knows. To succeed in this movie, the characters must learn to “not think” and act on “instinct.” It’s really the message of the first Star Wars movie from way back in 1977 and is a yearning that most people often experience in their lives. The desire to be their own authentic person and not some caricature of social order. The only way a mission like the one featured in Top Gun: Maverick can be accomplished is by breaking all the rules because the enemy is stuck in rules and is their ultimate weakness. It’s not the military jets, the companionship, or even the music that makes people love movies like this one. They help sell the story, but the essence is that Americans love rule breakers. So does the rest of the world, but they can only experience such things in American movies, and that is precisely why all these woke politics have infected the industry to the extent they have. For the producers of Top Gun to turn loose a character like Maverick again into the movie business was a very deliberate act, and the results are apparent. 

In much the same way that ESG scores are failing the financial industry because the world does not value those measures, they have been artificially created to inspire liberal political change to a climate change fanatical religion. Real value is what people are encouraged to see in the movies, not just in the act of buying popcorn actually to see a movie just because it’s there. It’s what the story tells that matters to people, and in Top Gun, it’s about recklessness over logic. It’s about breaking the rules in a rigid military environment to do what the military itself can’t do. It’s thinking out of the box to solve the problems society at large gets stuck on. And that’s why this movie Top Gun: Maverick is doing such good business while other movies come and go, and people forget about them five minutes later. So there is much more going on with this new Top Gun movie than just great music, interesting visual effects, and a vintage throwback to the kind of movies made in America during the 80s. Americans love rule breakers, before and after Covid. Covid was everything that Americans didn’t want to be. They gave authority a chance in case it saved lives, but knowing what we do now in hindsight, they would never do it again. Instead, millions of Maverick types sit in a darkened theater cheering on the new Top Gun because they see themselves in the character. And they want characters like that to succeed, to win at all costs. That’s the American way of doing things, and the rest of the world is fascinated by it. Even though they can’t relate, they will still buy a movie ticket to see it in the fictional character of Tom Cruise’s Maverick. For them, it’s the closest thing they will ever get to a society that thumbs its nose at procedures and conformity and embraces adventure and the treasures found in recklessness. And like all great movies, because Maverick was so reckless, so brash, and such a rule-breaker, he saves society in the process, which says more about us all than any other measure of human achievement.

Rich Hoffman

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Disney Stock is Down 31% to the Year: And its never coming back

I warned everyone years ago, Disney stock is never coming back. Currently, as of this writing, it’s down 31% of its value for the year, and this was before the big battle with Ron DeSantis in Florida occurred, where the tax status and self-governing control is in jeopardy. The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Being a Star Wars fan, I was encouraged when Disney bought Lucasfilm, which makes Star Wars products. I have wanted it to work. My wife and I had one of the best vacations of our 34-year marriage in 2019 when we went to Disney World and enjoyed all their creations to celebrate the opening of the Star Wars ride, Rise of the Resistance. No company but Disney could have made a ride like that or built a Star Wars land like what they had in Florida at Hollywood Studios. So I don’t report this news about Disney happily. I’m a fan and have wanted it to succeed. But reality is headed in an entirely different direction.

I’m the guy who used to go to Target in September when the Holiday toys would come out for Star Wars and buy up the cool stuff before anybody else did at midnight. The toy aisle at Target and Walmart used to be filled with Star Wars figures just from the movies that were made in the 80s and 2000s. But after Disney bought the brand, and the company headed in the direction indicated by the Desecrators of Davos globalists, like Klaus Schwab, the brand of Star Wars has died. Gone are the toys or the demand for them. Kids have moved on to their favorite YouTubers, and when you see what Disney has done to a really solid brand, like Star Wars, you can see what they are doing to everything else that Walt Disney built. Disney as a brand is damaged, and it will never recover, and those are the facts. Get your money while you still can.

The truth is that in a free culture like America, the Davos plan for our complete economic destruction by hijacking our brands and destroying them from within with ESG scores will fail. If Disney isn’t going to provide a family-friendly place, then someone else will come along and do what Walt Disney did. America will not be deprived of what we want. We made it in the first place, and we can make it again. Disney World was built when I was a real little kid; I was there when they started digging out the big lake in front of Magic Kingdom. I remember it. It hasn’t been that long. If the family value dollars aren’t going to Disney, they will go to its eventual replacement, whatever that may be. But American brands won’t just go away, as has been the plan by those who hate America, and which to desecrate all the corporate branding directed through finance to a global change state to a one-world government managed by the Desecrators of Davos. The playbook is out, and people can now see what has been going on for a very long time. Being close to Star Wars, I watched how fast Disney destroyed the brand in just a few short years, and now we can see that brand damage everywhere.

Even the great Pirate films with Johnny Depp are going through a wake rethinking with his court trial, destroying his personal brand attached to the Pirate films. Not having anything really coming to rebuild the Disney brand, no new Johnny Depp Pirate films, no great string of Marvel movies like they had with the Avenger films, Star Wars damaged the way it is with woke politics, there is nothing on the horizon that will help Disney recover the damage that has been done to it. There are Avatar movies coming, and next year there is an Indiana Jones film. Those might be entertaining, but we are in a different world now with entertainment where streaming services are driving entertainment value, and the days of the billion-dollar blockbusters worldwide are becoming less reliable. Covid interrupted that cash flow for Disney. They played along with the woke politics of it, and now they are going full ESG, and that is not a replacement of value for investors or fans. That has left Disney in a tough spot that they put themselves in. They incorrectly played the wrong side of politics by fully embracing Rocky Horror Picture Show politics from the radical communist left. In truth, their real fan base is Trump conservatives. 

Disney has always been about family-friendly content and a safe space for boys and girls of all ages. But now that they have come out against the very popular governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, Disney has essentially cut off half of their audience. Some of the squishy Republicans who have booked their Disney vacation a year ahead of time don’t want to take a moral stand at this time. Still, as the trend continues, which it will, they will stop booking those vacations because the nostalgia of doing it is going away. And Disney can’t survive with its top-heavy costs. They are essentially where General Motors was before 2008. They are only floating along with inflated value perceived by theme park attendance. Their Disney+ service is struggling. The current show that is so hot there, Moon Night, which I think is fantastic, isn’t enough to justify its existence.

Disney can’t produce enough content to keep young people interested. YouTube is by far the preferred path for young people because daily content is new and refreshed daily. Production value isn’t a concern for young people of the Minecraft video game generation. They only care that what they see is new. Disney has lost that next generation, leaving them to desperately cling to these left-winged communist radicals because they bet all their chips that America would essentially become China. In 2022, that is clearly not going to happen. Trump is going to be back in the White House in 2024. Ron DeSantis is establishing the new rules for being a state governor, and the political pendulum is swinging back to the kind of America that Walt Disney provided entertainment to. The future of America may well be the most conservative in the history of the world once the smoke clears from all this, and Disney is nowhere close to appealing to those types of people. They are now positioned among the radical types, the anti-family movement. That doesn’t mean that good, family-friendly entertainment is gone forever. It just means that Disney won’t be the provider of that entertainment. They are not agile enough to react to these changing markets, and instead, they are digging in. So those stock prices are gone forever. Their value in 2019 and early 2020 was their high-water mark of real value. Inflation may make things appear to be better than they are, but the public sentiment toward Disney has been destroyed. And unfortunately, it has been destroyed forever. Yet, someone will come along and replace Disney. America will be what America is. The attackers of our culture want to destroy our companies and us like Disney. Like Star Wars. Marvel. But it’s not the company itself that makes the content or buys the product. They just provide the transaction, and anybody can do that. And they will. Disney can die, but the need for what they offered will live on, which will be the next great investment. 

Rich Hoffman

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DeSantis Standing up To Disney: Government as the good guy in an evil world

Maybe the most valuable thing that will come out of this post-Trump period and now the debacles of the Biden administration is putting to rest many speculations that have existed since the beginning of time, is what does good governance look like and why is bad government the perpetuation of all that is evil in the world? Because of the Trump administration, we had several examples of great government. We saw firsthand what bad government was in contrast to the aftermath of Joe Biden and the reaction the bad guys out there in the world had to the prospect of good government. I have spent much of my adult life looking and fighting for the prospect of good government like a good sheriff wants to bring justice to the town they live in, only to find it ripe with criminal elements profiting off misfortune and chaos. When Trump was elected, he accelerated the plans of a vast criminal underclass that had been eroding our country for many years. But finally, with a new sheriff in town, we could take theory and put it to practice. The result was what good government should look like, protecting individual rights and the safe foundation for a prosperous country. One of the creations of this new kind of good government with a new sheriff in town kind of mindset was Ron DeSantis, who has redefined what a good governor of a state looks like. He’s certainly his own man, aside from President Trump. Still, Trump brought executive-level leadership into vogue in politics. Desantis from Florida was the first to fully utilize those gifts in a way that has now shown a light for all the future to see, which of course, led to a clash with the Disney Company that has turned out to be like the Shootout at the OK Corral with legendary figures like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. But this shootout wasn’t with guns; it was over finance, and the massive impact that money management firms have over modern corporations, and the way the bad guys have now tried to attack America through woke policies and desecrating social impacts meant to take down what used to be one of America’s top family-friendly companies, the entertainment company that Walt and Roy Disney built to remind America what America was always meant to be.

The “Don’t Say Gay Bill” is the kind of legislation that a good government should propose in any healthy society to protect families in their development. Nobody in their right mind believes that it is a good idea for children to be exposed to sexual elements in their early years, from kindergarten to the third grade. No child should be thinking about sex in those years; there are millions of other concerns. They shouldn’t have so many enemies to legislation intended to protect kids from discussions that are already on the wrong side of history. But what was shocking was just how committed Disney as a company showed itself to these kinds of social desecrations. When we think of Disney, we think of Main Street USA, which is the way Walt Disney intended it. The kind of America where you could buy fancy chocolates in Victorian-style buildings with white picket fences and the glory of private property ownership looming over everything. But over time, we have seen the Disney company, and lots of other big corporations for that matter, descend into extreme left-leaning politics intent to undo everything that America stands for.

To some extent, we put up with it. Getting what was good out of Disney while holding our nose at what we saw was becoming bad. But quite shockingly, which is part of the woke culture of most corporations these days that left-leaning activist money managers control, like BlackRock and State Street, the control of money through publicly traded companies have become the weapon of choice to attack America and the lives Walt Disney meant to preserve, undoing them from within with radical boards of directors and executives that nobody would have considered hiring a few decades ago. Now they were radical political extremists who were running everything, and their social intention was to introduce gay sex and perverse sexual lifestyles to children as early as possible, with only one purpose in mind, the destruction of their minds for a social cause that is as anti-American as one could possibly conceive.

The balancing act in good government, as opposed to bad government, creates conditions where businesses and the lives they feed can thrive. But when they are working against those individual lives, to step in and provide protection. It’s like the difference between a Wild West town overrun by cattle rustlers and scandalous gamblers, prostitutes, and killers until a good sheriff comes to town to clean it up. Of course, the bad guys won’t be happy with the effort, and they will fight back for their own preservation. But in America, the classic gunfighter who comes to town with only a gun and the law at their back often did such a thing which allowed the town to survive and give the people living within it a chance at a happy and productive life. That concept carried America into being the world’s top economy. And it is that which the bad guys in the world want to undo, desperately. They have infected the Disney Company through the many investment firms of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street and imposed on them ESG scores which have removed the traditionalists loyal to the Walt Disney vision and replaced them with what I call the purple-haired people eaters, the Desecrators of Davos types who want global communism and a one-world order starting with the icons of American industry. They don’t care if Disney is destroyed in the process; they just want to see the sheriff run out of town so they can have an easy time at crime and malice. Good government, in this case, stays in town and enforces the law on the bad guys, and that is precisely what Ron DeSantis had done in Florida by threatening to remove the special privileges that Disney had enjoyed there and fighting back when the economic powerhouse showed its intentions to attack the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” after the legislature supported it as represented by the people of the state.

The plan all along by these liberal attackers was to embed themselves into our corporations and force us to accept their ways of desecration to get some little memory of what they once meant to us. The desecrators want to destroy the idea of all American life and the families of its creation. Under those conditions, we need government to preserve the constitutional intentions of life in America from the influences that invade our country in ideas and trojan horse style influence. The surprise that the woke political left has now had is Ron DeSantis standing up to Disney instead of doing what most all other governors would do, which would be to cave to one of the biggest economic influences in American life. Most governors would be eating out of the hand of Disney. Instead, DeSantis is doing what all good executives would do, and that’s always keeping in mind the big picture and the constitution for which he serves. And in so doing, it has brought to Florida something far more valuable than Disney as a tourist resort. He has confronted the bad guys in the street and brought them down for all to see, and people are standing behind DeSantis, not Disney. And this clear message is being noticed by the attack vectors of the Desecrators of Davos, who did not think such a thing would happen, and it has them in a bit of a panic.   The government was being a good referee, which should have always been its function, not an active player on the field tipping the scales toward the corrupt influence who wanted to win the game without playing by the rules. I’ve seen this process developing for a long time, but now it is in practice, and it’s not President Trump who is doing it. Instead, it’s the next generation of a new kind of politician. And it is one of the best examples of good government that we have seen in America to date. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Will Smith Hit: “Welcome to Earth” Part II

After hitting Chris Rock at the Academy Awards, the only thing Will Smith did wrong was apologize for doing it. The world needed some old-fashioned face-to-face combat. I thought it was a little wimpy to slap Chris Rock for making fun of his wife with an off-color joke about G.I. Jane part II because she had shaved her head due to an illness. A good punch would have been better, but in our overly legalized world of lawyer parasites, the difference between an open hand and a closed fist is a premeditation assault that indicates an intent to inflict harm. So, a slap it was, and it was good for the soul of America to see on what is supposed to be the biggest entertainment show on earth. However, ratings have been down. Hollywood has moved a long way away from Main Street, USA, thinking they could drag everyone with them as they bent the knee to China and a new middle-class there of over a billion people. I’ve been following this kind of thing for a long time. For many years, I really wanted nothing more in life than to make movies in Hollywood. So I know it from behind the curtain more than most do. As it turned out for me, I was way too conservative for the Hollywood of the 90s and the early 2000s. I would have fit in a lot more during the 70s and 80s, but Hollywood had gone woke way before the rest of the nation. America’s enemies targeted it for that very reason, and the attack always came from finance. Will Smith knew all that as he decided to go up on stage and hit Chris Rock. I didn’t just see the action, but many actions behind the move. It was a very interesting thing to do. 

Surprisingly many conservatives in the aftermath openly called for Will Smith to be arrested for assault. It was the standard law and order argument. How many young people now that they witnessed Will Smith hitting another human being on live television and repeatedly replayed on social media would now do something similar? A message had to be sent. That was the conservative rationalization. But as many know, I welcome this kind of thing. I would love to return to a world where we had duels in the streets over disagreements. And slaps in the face are harmless enough. What’s important is the protection of our individual sanctity, of our honor. Our integrity. And at face value, Will Smith protecting the honor of his wife, his woman, his family property was a great thing that many women yearn for, which was confirmed in polling taken after the incident. Despite what destructive woke culture says about men and women, the sexes are what they are, yearning for the same things they always have. Will Smith is no dummy; he has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the world. Despite being a great actor, he’s also a producer, and he knows the country’s temperature and where it’s going. Most good Hollywood types do, even if they deny it. They see the trends, and there is a tremendous hunger for American Main Street in the world. Not an America caving to global woke impediments. 

Meanwhile, down in paradise, Disney World, Florida, some radical employees took exception to the Ron DeSantis “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which doesn’t even say “gay” in it. But they were upset that there wasn’t going to be gay indoctrination of little children in public schools, and they were outraged, leaving Bob Chapek, the Disney CEO, with a heck of a pickle to be in. He couldn’t afford to have a massive employee walkout at the happiest place on earth. But he also must stand for what Disney is, a representation of Main Street USA. That is kind of the point of Magic Kingdom, after all. Guests going there don’t want to think about gay sex and rainbow flags. They want to see family values, the American dream, and good winning over evil. Of course, the enemies of America want to see all that brought down, so a small percentage of radical ESG score employees from Disney were attacking those aspects of the Disney product publicly, and it was having an impact on the brand. This is a fight that is happening everywhere. It is most notable in Disney because it’s a brand that interacts with so many Americans. But in general, it was present very much at the Academy Awards and Hollywood in general.  Americans have been turning away from Hollywood, and the people who make the movies know it. Aside from their feelings of abandonment that Main Street America has for the Hollywood product these days, as the realization over liberalism settles over them that America is a Trump-voting nation. Americans will never fall for progressivism when it is spelled out to them directly. So, what happens next? How does the entertainment industry continue on, especially if the China gamble doesn’t pan out as globalism fails everywhere? Main Street USA is still where the money is, and now Hollywood has alienated itself from them. 

Enter the hit by Will Smith against Chris Rock on national television, shocking the world. The incident may have been staged. It may have been pure outrage. But what it was, in essence, was a significant member of Hollywood trying to appeal to mainstream Main Street America and recognizing that the nation hasn’t changed at all from what it’s always been. Hollywood changed. Globalism changed. Finances changed, but people really haven’t, despite the efforts of many to change those people. Americans want to see their private property defended, women want to be protected by their men, and justice must be swift and sure. The way Will Smith marched up there on that stage was a call-back to hundreds of movies over the years where a good guy punished the bad guy, and Will Smith was playing that modern version of the “good guy.” It was very similar to when Will Smith punched the alien in the face in the movie Independence Day and said, “welcome to earth.” Hey, these guys aren’t stupid. They have their finger to the wind, seeing what’s coming. Trump is going to be re-elected. Globalism is failing everywhere. China is closing its markets more, not expanding them, and Hollywood knows it needs Main Street to live and survive. And more than that, Americans understand a duel in the street more than a bunch of sissy slapping passive-aggressive nonsense ran by corrupt governments and paid off judges. A man-to-man fight is much preferred, and if we returned to it, we’d have a much more honest society. That is how Main Street America feels, and ultimately, that’s what happened at the Academy Awards. It was a concession by them to what they’ve become and an olive branch to what they need to return to. Justice, Americans want justice. They don’t want excuses. They don’t want to surrender their life’s work to a mob of collectivists. There needs to be a point in life, and the fight against evil by the good is a goal worth pursuing. Will Smith obviously understands that and felt it was the time to do something to win people over because if he didn’t, Hollywood was headed for irrelevancy anyway. So why not do something? And he did.

Rich Hoffman

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My Defense of the ‘Star Wars’ Hotel: If it brings joy to people, which is does, its worth doing

I think it’s a huge story, even if it only concerns a small part of the overall population. After all, the topic of the day is shareholder capitalism that is attempting to be destroyed by the Desacrators of Davos strategy of stakeholder capitalism. And few companies are a bigger target for them than Disney Entertainment in the United States. Progressives have jumped all over the Disney Company. And now the Star Wars property they purchased from George Lucas in 2012 reflects the attack accurately from the Desecrators of Davos, the progressive incursion into all our lives not through the front door of politics, but through the backdoor of finance and business. Star Wars is an excellent meter to measure this kind of thing. It started out from the mind of George Lucas as a warning to 8 to 12-year-old boys how not to grow up to become evil. And today, it is the very definition of state control and authority to the compliance of the nanny state; everything Star Wars wasn’t. Naturally, fans are very upset about it and are letting Disney know. And now, after working on it for a decade and spending over a billion dollars developing their live Star Wars experiences at Disney World and Disneyland, the much talked about Star Wars hotel called, The Galactic Starcruiser is open for business, and all eyes have been on it. Many Star Wars fans are hating it and have been speaking out against it. So I have been watching it closely, and I have thoughts on it that are very much relevant to all our corporate problems in America. The challenge of wrestling away from the Desecrators of Davos insurgents our American concepts of capitalism from the imposition of state-controlled stakeholder capitalism is the challenge. Ironically, this Star Wars hotel finds itself right in the middle as a form of art displayed for all the world to see.

Star Wars is all about fighting back against institutionalized systems. But under Disney, they are all about yielding to that institutionalization. That was the critical error Bob Iger, and Kathy Kennedy made with Star Wars under the ownership of Disney. They should have followed the George Lucas plan. Instead, they ended up with a massive mess that will never be fixed. That is sad, but it’s why fans are so angry at Disney. However, I see some good in it all, and I think personally, Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World is one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever experienced. I will never forget my vacation there in 2019 with my wife. We had about two or three days of the best time I’ve ever had visiting the Star Wars park there at Hollywood Studios and other attractions. It was the first time she and I had been kid-free in about two decades, and we were able to enjoy all that just as a couple. So I am still grateful for that experience, and I can see why people would want to go to the Galactic Starcruiser, which is essentially a Star Wars cruise in space. It’s very ambitious; it costs around 4 to 6 thousand per person to do and is essentially a Fantasy Island experience.   For three days and two nights, you enter the world of Star Wars all immersively and practically live a live Star Wars novel, which I think is pretty cool. Now I’m a gun at my hip kind of Star Wars fan. Not a sit around and play games kind of guy, and eat food and listen to music. If I don’t get to wear a DL-44 on my hip and go laser tagging, it’s not a lot of fun for me. It would cost me about $100K to take my clan. I checked it out, thought about it, and decided they’d like it, but not for that price. But, I know quite a few employees at Disney, many at the executive level, and I understand what they’ve done. They did their best. I also follow quite a few influencers on YouTube who work in the Orlando region, and they love the Starcruiser. They are much more social butterflies than I am, and I think it’s great in the world we are living in today that there is something like the Starcruiser for them. And in that context, I hope the Starcruiser is successful for Disney. Because I’d like to see, it remain an option. 

While at the Cincinnati Comic-Con this past September, I had a chance to talk to Timothy Zahn about this modern Star Wars stuff, and he’s pretty much where I am. He’s the guy responsible for all the great novels that came from Star Wars, going all the way back to the 90s when he started the trend. My wife and I have read well over 200 Star Wars novels. We are not fans of the new stuff since Disney bought Lucasfilm and turned radically more progressive. But at that Comic-Con, as Zahn signed a few books for me because I do love his books, we talked about the joy of those comic cons. There are people there who have had bad childhoods, society has let them down, religion has let them down, and they find refuge in Star Wars. They like to dress up and escape the world’s disappointments with some form of art, and Star Wars gives them that refuge. And I remember how it was in Hollywood Studios in the early days before Disney bought Lucasfilm. There were Star Wars weekends in May that were actual celebrations. I can’t blame Disney for wanting to give those fans what they dreamed of, a Star Wars land all their own, and even a hotel experience that allowed people to cosplay for three full days eating, thinking, and living Star Wars in a much better way than they would a comic con. That’s one of the reasons I read so many Star Wars books. In my crazy, very stressful life, those books were great places to relax and think about big concepts. I love them or have loved them. The Star Wars hotel was a chance to throw away the disappointments of politics, life itself, and live a fantasy. And that I think is a very useful thing. 

Even with all the politics, I might still do it with my family at some point. Seeing what Disney has done, they have tried hard to thread the needle and give everyone what they want, which usually means everyone is a little disappointed. But, knowing what we do about the world, I think we should all feel proud that we have a culture that can actually pull off something like this for this amount of money and commit resources to even attempting to do it. The Galactic Starcruiser is enormously ambitious, and if it survives, it could evolve over time in a positive direction. My grandchildren would get quite a kick out of it because the experience is essentially an escape room, a broadway play, and a novel all wrapped up into one experience. I can think of people who are very sick and dying of cancer, who are kids who would love for this to be the very last thing they did in life. They would die happy. They want to escape their problems, and art does that for human beings at its highest form. It’s not so much hiding from the pains of life as much as it gives the mind emotional distance from massive disappointments. And if this Starcruiser experience can do that for people, at any cost, then I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I hope that Disney can keep it going because there sure was a lot of love that went into it for all the right reasons. 

Rich Hoffman

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