I suppose I have done just about everything there is to do in life.  Along the way, I didn’t think about it; I just said yes to many adventures and jumped into many of them without ever worrying about how I’d get out.  And this came to my mind as I learned that the Sundance Film Festival had passed on Cincinnati as a host city, leaking to the media that the Midwest city didn’t have the right vibe, it wasn’t cool enough. Instead, they are seeking a mountain town in Colorado or Utah as a much more hip destination.  Well, there is a lot more to that story and I have some unique understanding of the contents leaving to reflect a bit on all these many experiences, which I don’t spend much time thinking about, but when I do slow down long enough to do so, it would be easy to wonder how I made it through life at all.  But this Sundance story has some meat to it that the media didn’t cover, other than reporting that the Sundance people didn’t like what Cincinnati had to offer.  Now I have experience with film festivals, as I have talked about my desire as a young person to be a film director and a writer of movies.  I have been to film festivals and received awards, and that was where my life was headed for a long time, until the Tea Party movement started in 2009.  My wife and I were in Cancun having a nice vacation and I decided to make a very controversial change in my life for the good of the country, and that I’d put my efforts in that direction because as we talked about at a nice dinner on the beach there, what good was telling stories in movies when heroics in real life were needed much more.  So I made a career change, and the rest is history. 

But when I was 19 and wanted to learn to direct people in front of the camera, I was a fashion model, as was my wife.  She was being groomed to be a New York model and hated all that came with it.  It was not a life for her; she was beautiful, everyone wanted to hire her, but she only wanted to find a nice man, settle down, and start raising kids.  On the other hand, I wanted to work in Hollywood, make movies, and I liked the modeling world because it was so interesting.  And I learned many valuable things during these years, but mainly I wanted to know how things were supposed to look in front of the camera so I could direct from behind it.  A lot of people thought I was a very attractive young man, and they wanted to hire me for all kinds of entertainment projects. So my wife and I did little projects for a while, with me wanting to go one way, and her wanting to get out of it.  But as a couple, we were invited to all kinds of things that taught me how the entertainment lefties think about things, so I learned firsthand what they were like.  And it wasn’t good.  When we would go to photo shoots around Cincinnati to do clothing advertisements for various department stores, the photographers would always poo poo Cincinnati for being such a conservative city.  If we were modeling jeans, for instance, they would want the models to unbutton the top of their jeans to evoke a provocative sexual tension.  But would be upset that the zipper couldn’t be lowered, otherwise the Cincinnati market would reject the photographs.  And they’d go on and on about how great the New York and Los Angeles markets were, and of Paris because you could get the models naked and the photos would get awards for the nudity, but not in Cincinnati. 

Because we were being groomed, my wife and I were invited by the director of the new play Equus to attend the premiere in Cincinnati, which was quite a scandal at the time.  It was a play at the Taft Theater that had full nudity and sex on stage and was an outright assault on the sensibilities of Cincinnati morality.  I knew this director well; she loved nudity.  I never saw her at her home where she wasn’t naked.  She only put on clothes when she had to go somewhere, and she was planning to use this play and assault on Cincinnati to launch her career in the more significant coastal and progressive markets.  Now when I say that she was always naked, that does not mean she was attractive.  Most people do not look good naked.  And she was one of them.  She would have looked better with clothes to hide her imperfections, to put it nicely.  I thought it was all bizarre, but we were young and beautiful, my wife and I, and all these people wanted a piece of us.  So we were given access to this play.  So we went and were stunned by what we saw.  Right in front of our faces was full nudity and sex on stage, and my wife wasn’t happy about it.  She didn’t like any of those people, and it became very clear to me that I couldn’t work in that business and be married to my wife.  Because the entertainment industry had so many liberal flakes in it, it took me another 20 years to finally give up on the idea because you couldn’t change what they were.  But the process for me started at that play.  We didn’t enjoy it, to say the least, and we stopped attending social events organized by people like that director. 

So when the entertainment crowd makes fun of Cincinnati, and with the Sundance people, it’s the Robert Redford crowd.  They are not good people and have all kinds of mental problems that they hide behind entertainment.  I learned a lot from those experiences, which gave me a unique perspective to this very day.  But when they reject you, consider it a badge of honor.  I learned to hate those people over the years, not because I wanted to be a filmmaker, but because I did not want to work with labor unions and crazy lefties who saturated the industry.  But because the business gave them a cover story for vast evil, they saw Cincinnati as something to destroy, not adapt to.  And that same mentality is what is behind the anti-Trump movement.  And why I got into the Tea Party when I could have done many incredible things if I had joined the Sundance types?  Every time I’d get the invitation, my wife and I would decline, though, because the people involved were all like that director of Equus.  And we’ve watched some of those people we knew from back then turn into disasters over time.  None of them are happy.  None of them knew what they were doing.  They are all living train wreck lives.  The arrogance of their social positions filled with sex and nudity took them over a cliff, and we all saw it coming even at 19 years old.  And I’m glad for the experience, it has given me the ability to speak with a lot of authority on these matters now.  But when you hear that Sundance moved on from Cincinnati, that’s great.  We don’t want people in our town who think desecration of all value is the only way to be calm and hip.  And that to have a good social vibe, you have to destroy value.

Rich Hoffman

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