Another reason I felt I had to write The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is because many people consider America a great place, but they don’t understand why.  I thought I had always understood its essence, but how its evolution played out on the world stage leading up to some of the monstrosities we see in our current events, people didn’t have the proper context to grasp what was happening.  To write the book, I needed to visit some places to confirm my thoughts, and one of them was the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.  I was after the essence as to what made America tick, and to get there; I needed to step back to before the progressive era and into the end of the reign of Queen Victoria to put my finger on it.  I would say that I discovered what I needed to, not just at the Buffalo Bill Center. Still, I visited along the way in many places, including the area where Wild Bill Hickok was shot in Deadwood and exploring the reasons for the murder, which is compelling.  For me, these events told the story of today, how we got here and what was wrong with it.  These discoveries certainly made it into my book, a unique collection of thoughts about American business and why they so quickly outwork other industries in the world.  And why there is so much global jealousy toward America.  It’s not something we did, but instead, it’s that we left the world behind, and like a jealous lover, they can’t get over it.  Well, I can say that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West gets it, and I honestly think that all youth in America should go there and study.  It would do them a whole lot more good than in going to their first year of college.  The same holds for all Americans and people worldwide who make the pilgrimage to that Center to touch the essence of Americana as Buffalo Bill showed it to the world at the turn of the last century. 

I always warn my kids about Liberal Springs (Yellow Springs, Ohio) because Antioch College is such a liberal institution that attracts all the dope-smoking hippies and other progressive degenerates.  It’s one of the most liberal areas in all of Ohio, made that way by the college that has been there for so long.  Most Americans have been made to feel guilty for passing judgment on a place of higher education, that is until recently.  But in the case of Yellow Springs, they would have saved themselves a lot of pain if they had been willing to call bad, bad from the beginning.  One of my daughters and her husband wanted to go up to Clifton Gorge to hike, and to get there; they stopped by Yellow Springs to get a Coke.  Because my daughter wasn’t wearing a Covid compliance mask, the server there refused to serve her and wanted her to leave.  After some dispute, my daughter went to McDonald’s next door to get her Coke, and they proceeded to hike at the Gorge.  While there, resting on a rock along the trail, a mall cop type of park ranger wanted to give them a citation for getting off the path by a few feet.  After more debate, they were told to leave.  The area of Yellow Springs had heard the Biden dog whistle and was moving toward full authoritarian, the kind of world liberals want for all of us.  Instead, my kids left the area, returned home, and went to a place much more conducive to their personalities, Premier Shooting in West Chester.  They spent the rest of the day there shooting and enjoying themselves with like-minded people who had not become corrupted by liberalism. 

The reason for that little story and the tie back to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is that Edward Abilene had toured America with the daughter of Karl Marx in the late 1800s to measure the temperature the new nation would have for socialism.  Abilene had a strange attraction to Buffalo Bill in trying to understand Americans, which is why that Center was critical to understanding how Europe saw America.  At that time, Americans weren’t considered a threat, so England appeased the Buffalo Bill show the way a parent might indulge a child putting on a magic show for the first time, with a pat on the head and some upper lip encouragement.  But what they saw was a raw example of masculinity and weapons work that had conquered the wild frontier that had a new kind of art and culture to display, industry, endurance, tenacity, and courage.  The men of English society were more than a little threatened when English women were clamoring for these Buffalo Bill types, just as England as an empire was well on the decline.  They thought that America had no art, no history, no culture, and Europe was far superior.  They convinced many Americans to chase after the European standard and copy their religions, their colleges for higher learning, and other aspects of culture.  That is how the liberal was created in America.  Many other Americans like those in the Buffalo Bill show were new and mysterious in the world. They were not just attractive; they might become the most dominant organization of people on the face of the planet.  That was a threat to Europe and the old powers, and they have been anxious about it ever since. 

Liberals in America started creating colleges in the United States, like the one in Yellow Springs, to bring European culture to the new country.  Not so much to help America but to slow down its growth and ambitions.  During his tour of America and his relationship with Buffalo Bill, Abilene realized that Americans were looking for recognition from the old world the way a child seeks the approval of a parent.  So the plan to bring socialism to America was through such a process of shared art and culture.  Since then, America has had a restrictor plate applied to it, slowing it down to Europe’s liking.  It has also created a kind of subclass of European in the American liberal that is all the cause of conflict to this very day.  Such as the waitress in Yellow Springs who refused to serve my daughter a Coke or the overly zealous park officer at Clifton Gorge.  Americans have been made to feel guilty for all their ambitions and lack of culture, which Europe provided in exchange for a limiting relationship that has hindered America’s growth.  Now that all the cards are on the table and true feelings about each other have been revealed since Trump became president, it’s time to review all these relationships and decide how to move forward.  I would propose to leave the world behind and to force them to catch up if they want by adopting capitalism.  That would solve many of the problems in the world.  No government can provide that solution; it has to come from individuals who set the bar high and force the world to live up to it.  It might be a nightmare for Europe and Asia, but it is the way of the future, and for anybody curious about it, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West tells the story in ways that no place else does.   The world has bet on liberalism.  But what America created is what everyone wants, so that bet toward China will fall short because it’s not the best. 

Investors like Ray Dalio and companies like Walt Disney may have invested everything assuming that the world would turn back to the old and that hierarchical power would resume its work globally.  For them, they picked China and have hedged themselves behind that decision.  But, they should have read my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  It would have saved them billions and trillions of dollars in lost revenue, which they will experience over the next decade.  I can understand their anxiety, but it’s their fault for not understanding what America was and thinking they could change it through academic means.  The Buffalo Bill Wild West show led to a yearning for freedom that created the country despite the world’s governments, and those forces are still at play.  Peer pressure isn’t going to return Americans to the grip of the old world. Instead, the entire government of America could be stripped away, including those compliant losers in Yellow Springs, yet Americans would still have an incredibly high GDP.  It was always a mystery to Edward Abilene and other Marxists who wanted to take over America and still do.  But they won’t be successful.  To understand why the Buffalo Bill Center of the West shows it.  Or, you can read my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. 

Rich Hoffman