Category: Creative Writing

The Root Cause Analysis of All Political Problems: Mankind was meant to have dominion over nature–nature by itself is pretty dumb

The root cause analysis of all political problems is a very ancient one. I would say that it goes all the way back to the start of our present recorded history and likely goes back much further than that. What was invented in America was very special and has been part of an evolution that well exceeds the last 10,000 years, but is best expressed in the opening books of Genesis in the Bible, particularly Genesis: 28 “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be Fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” I would say until that passage was written in the Bible, put together by the Romans to unite their empire, mankind had been stuck on the Vico Cycle rut that always created a society of perpetual beginnings, moving through the standard cycles of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, then anarchy. Over many thousands of years of civilization, the Egyptians never figured it out, and they look to have built most of their society on a previously unknown ancient civilization, and what they gained from them was only a fraction of what was. Greek and Roman societies studied the Egyptians, who were essentially oriental in their approach to the everlasting, and saw themselves as perishable, except when it came to the embodiment of reincarnated Egyptian gods born again as Pharaohs. The Romans put together selected parts of the Bible but left out many others to control mass populations in Europe as they pushed their competing religions East into the orient. There has been a lot that went on, but everyone got it a little bit wrong until at least mankind began to think in the way of that which was put in the first pages of the Bible in the Book of Genesis, where God gave mankind dominion over nature. Not the other way around. 

Suppose you dive down with a root cause analysis of all the major political and religious movements of our current time and ask why so many people hate each other. In that case, the problem starts with mankind’s relationship to eternity and the misplaced idea that materialism is bad and that dying into a spirit is good, without question that is the core problem with the current climate change activists. Suppose you speak to them with the cameras off where they are comfortable and unguarded, perhaps with a few glasses of wine down their throats. In that case, they will admit to some variation of the four major religions presented to us by the standard bearers of humanity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. Of those four, all of them view the modern world’s materialism as evil and the ascendency into the world of the dead as good, to leave the material world behind and embrace our spiritual natures. But, and I would cite the great work of the great Peruvian shaman Pablo Amaringo, a hero of the climate change religious fanatics of the world, that the greatest thing in the entire universe that includes quasars, black holes, concepts of a multiverse, anything and everything is the consciousness and imagination of the human being. I don’t say that just because we are all human and we can’t think of anything better due to our own human limits of perception. But in the observations of the universe and the rules that govern it. The creative force of the mind captured in a human form takes the tools of nature and puts them to the best use. The concept of America, while it might have been formed in rebellion against the tyranny of the Catholic Church, guided by what was left over from the Roman empire, what was created, as I often state in my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is a unique new kind of human with a different kind of religion in America, where materialism reflects the boundless energy of nature captured and put to practical use by human beings and their wondrous imaginations. And the importance of this is that it has broken a destructive cycle of continued rebirth that has been limiting human development for many thousands of years. As intelligent as the Egyptians appeared to be, with lots of lost technology that we are still trying to figure out, it’s evident that their civilization wasn’t the first to rise and fall. We see those forces at work now in the modern age, violently and with great panic.

The current political order, especially Democrats and progressives, is trying to fit the world to that old religious model of sacrifice to the gods and yielding to the forces of nature. But our human intellect, captured whether on purpose or by accident in the creation of the Bible and passages like those in the Book of Genesis giving mankind dominion over nature, to use the tools of nature to create and perpetuate thought, which looks to be the greatest power in the universe, or the multiverse, then now we see what all the fuss has been about. The world’s religions, as the limits of mankind’s translations, presented them, have not been big enough to consider the true implications of what it meant to be human. To begin with, what role did humans play in the cosmos, and why did they have such vast imaginations? Even though the human being may be very small in relation to the rest of all matter in the universe, which may just be but one little cell in the grand body of God, the conscious reality of that small contribution looks to be the key to everything. Imagine if the cells of our own body decided to allow disease to manifest within us and did not fight them. We’d become sick. And so it is with the schemes of the universe. Our role in the whole thing is not to sacrifice ourselves to the body of nature but to act with our minds to correct nature with our imaginations and ability to think. 

I often point out what a mess nature is if allowed to grow independently. What the human mind brings is conceptual understanding and an ability to organize. Nature by itself can only do so much. It needs the human mind to make it better, and when the Book of Genesis was created as a conceptual faculty of thought, and America was the first time in history it was allowed to be put to use, then great things started happening, and the greatest country in the history of the world formed, and everyone wants to come to it to enjoy what can be done with a free mind and the toolbox of nature to perform great things. Yet, the rest of the world, the nations, and the religions that control them have not yet accepted this new way of thinking, this morality of materialism that runs contrary to all the things they understand about how the world works. I would say that all of them, millions and millions of people over many tens of thousands of years, have been wrong. They missed the point. Nature says that in its chaos of calamity, we can have a Younger Dryas period that has a comet hit Saginaw Bay in Michigan and created a life-ending cataclysm that likely destroyed a civilization that was much more advanced than the Egyptians were, that everything the Egyptians knew was part of the Vico Cycle where much was lost in the translation. But dominion over nature says we destroy the comet before it destroys the earth, and humanity continues to think about big things rather than wasting all their time sacrificing to the gods and trying to catch enough food to live another day. Nature is dumb; it’s not in charge. God, whatever version of God or religion that gives a relationship to such conceptual needs, is a thinking human being that can act with imagination and make nature better. And until the rest of the world figures out what Americans already know and defend it with their guns, they will continue to struggle as civilizations always have. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Kari Lake Wins in Arizona: McConnell is wrong–America is not a 50/50 country

It was a bit of a cliffhanger during the election night, August 2nd, 2022, and I was up and stayed with the story when Kari Lake finally pulled ahead of Karrin Taylor Robson, her closest rival for the Republican primary, to face off against Katie Hobbs in November. Before Kari could take on that challenge, she had to get through a multitude of RINO money poured into the Arizona primary to attempt to derail her Trump-like campaign for the MAGA movement. Everyone knew that it would be a fist fight election. But this time, people were ready for the evidence of election fraud; the fraud from 2020 is now well known, so people voting for Kari knew what to look for, and it wasn’t easy for the cheaters to push Robson over Kari. Early in the night, it looked like Kari Lake wouldn’t win the election, but as the evening progressed and the same day voting totals came in, the MAGA challenger pulled ahead and was poised to be the winner. The same disgusting cheating that had stolen the election from Trump just two years before was much harder to perform this time. Even though it took days to count all the ballots, the counters were desperately looking for ways to steal the election. The math just didn’t work in their favor, and no matter what happens in the future, everyone knows that Kari Lake won the election. Her lead a few days later was two percentage points above her rivals, with 82% of the vote counted; there just isn’t any way, except for cheating and counting a bunch of made-up mail-in ballots, that anybody will overtake Kari Lake. I thought it was remarkable; I stayed up and watched the whole thing pacing around my living room just as anxious as everyone else was. Because we all knew that Arizona had a cheat machine built into it that the RINOs were trying to keep alive so they could control elections, and it would take a lot of momentum to defeat it. Because of same-day voting in Arizona it did not allow for many opportunities to steal the election this time. They certainly tried, but the momentum of the MAGA movement didn’t allow it.

It’s quite clear, based on what we observed in 2020 and then a year and a half later in 2022, is a pattern of behavior where elections have been routinely manipulated. Not everywhere, but states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona obviously have election cheating built into their voting counting ability. I recently spoke to our Secretary of State in Ohio, Frank LaRose, about how he went about providing election security. I believed him when he said he thought they were very secure. I think LaRose is a good guy, and I think he knows what he’s talking about. But not every state has a great Secretary of State, and even in Ohio, not all administrations are as ethical as previous ones or future ones. As I was voting, I paid careful attention to our voting machines, and the kind we use has a digital interface. But ultimately, it has a paper ballot that you can verify your vote with a receipt, and it’s that which gets counted. So, I don’t think every state always has election fraud by party politics. But I do think, based on what we’ve observed, that every election has fraud in it. Some states are worse than others. Ohio is pretty good right now because Frank runs a good ship. But in places like Georgia, where Kemp was able to fend off Trump challengers, it’s evident that voter behavior was not consistent as it was elsewhere in the country and that cheating was still very much a problem. And going into Arizona, with all the controversy of election fraud that we knew happened there, the big question was whether or not Kari Lake would have a real chance. We knew people and polling favored her, but when it came to who counted the votes, everyone was very wide-eyed for election shenanigans. I wasn’t pacing around my living room at 3 AM in the morning because I trusted the officials counting the votes. 

It’s clear that the establishment types who have control of enough election systems that they can manipulate elections to their favor have been assigning Mike Pence to states that look to deep dive into the election fraud from 2020 with actual decertifications. Mike Pence by himself has no chance to overtake a Trump endorsement. But with Fox News obviously very invested in portraying the illusion that America is a 50/50 country and that they prefer RINOs over Trump conservatives, you can begin to see a pattern emerge where election fraud is most obvious where they are putting Pence to challenge Trump endorsements. I don’t think Pence is savvy enough to play an essential role in the fraud. He is a nice guy who does what the boss tells him to, whether that boss is Trump or the people who want to take over, leading the Republican Party back to the controlled opposition. These election fixes have been going on for a long time; it wasn’t just the 2020 election. But because of the ground game in Arizona from MAGA supporters, they just couldn’t pull it off. Then when Kari Lake proclaimed victory, it took all the air out of the media story. That’s the game we are playing, folks. 

I was watching a Fox News segment the day after the election when Brett Baier had on Mitch McConnell during his 6 PM show to talk about the state of politics and the future of the Republican Party. There was a subtext to the story, which obviously Fox News, guided by Rupert Murdock, was trying to plant “the narrative,” but it wasn’t sticking. When Mitch McConnell told Baier, “we are a 50/50 country,” he was trying to fit the story to the Fox News position. Murdock and his sons and their wives want to think that they are the kingmakers of the Republican Party, and they have made it their mission to get rid of Trump from the public stage. Only what Rupert didn’t understand, it was Trump that helped make Fox News what it was. And it was people like Roger Ailes, and Bill O’Reilly who understood the people better than the Murdocks outside the New York and Washington D.C. markets. Sure, they still have Jesse Watters, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham on their primetime coverage, which is all very good. But all other hours of the day, Fox News has become much more like CNN, unwatchable to the people who really care about their country. And Fox News has only hurt themselves with the activism against Trump. Trump and Kari Lake are the future; they just can’t accept that reality. Election fraud to them is a necessary evil to keep the illusion that America is really, like McConnell stated, a 50/50 country. In truth, it isn’t, not even close. And when elections are held where the controlled opposition can’t cheat, we see that people like Kari Lake will win every time. Even when the deck is stacked against good people, they will win if election fraud is taken away as an option. 

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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Fast Draw at the Annie Oakley Event: What the world looks like out in God’s country

For me, the western arts is a religion of sorts, it’s something I think about every day, and I work with some aspect of it several times a day in just about everything I do. And for context, the white hat I wear so much came from my favorite hat shop in Jackson, Wyoming, on an extraordinary pilgrimage I made there with my entire family. I’ve traveled worldwide and seen many of the world’s best things up close and personal. And I’ve been to rodeos they have out West, specifically the one at Cody, Wyoming, which is fantastic and about as good as it gets. A rodeo experience out to Cody, Wyoming, is in itself worth a vacation just to do that. But I will say that the Annie Oakley Festival they have every year in Darke County, Ohio, in the town of Greenville, is one of the best displays of Americana on planet earth, and I never get tired of attending. I look forward to it every time they have it, and when they do, I usually am involved in some aspect or another in the shows they put on. This year I was in the bullwhip competitions, as I usually am. But additionally, I was able to be in the Ohio Fast Draw Association’s competition, a two-day event that I have always thought brought the Annie Oakley Festival into the realm of uniqueness that establishes it as a vacation destination all its own. For people looking to get in touch with America again, I would recommend everyone to mark the last weekend of July on their calendars and make the trip to the Annie Oakley Festival when it’s happening in Greenville and to put the noise of life aside for a few days and experience the festival in all its glory.

I’ve been participating in the Annie Oakley Festival for a few decades. During that entire time, I worked with my friend Gery Deer at the Western Showcase to put on Saturday bullwhip competitions that are always crowd pleasers. I started working with whips on my grandparents’ farms when I was very young, so they have always been a part of my life. When I learned that my great grandfather could crack a fly off the wall with a bullwhip, I decided that was something I was going to do, and over the years, it has become my own version of a martial art. In my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I take many of the concepts I have been thinking about over the years from the Annie Oakley Festival and apply them to the ways of the world that have influences from everywhere. I have thought of the Annie Oakley Festival as a kind of unique American philosophy that shows what all people, no matter where they come from, gravitate to when they have the freedom to be away from government and go to God’s country without a lot of United Nations influence. And from the showman side, I have watched the audiences and come to some very definitive understandings that are unique to the Annie Oakley Festival. The Buffalo Bill Wild West show has always been a definitive presentation of what America uniquely is. Without Annie Oakley, it would never have become the global phenomenon it was. And I find that Greenville festival every year to be the embodiment of that definition, more so than in places like Cody, Wyoming, which is the authentic real deal cowboy life, right in the middle of a desert in the traditional way people think; of the “West.” But it’s the swagger that came from the Buffalo Bill show that Annie Oakley specifically brought to the whole exhibition that I have always loved so much. It’s why that event is a yearly reset period for me, where I clear my thoughts and push the noise aside for a few days and just soak up the American flags and the smell of gunsmoke.

After the bullwhip competitions, I always used to go over and watch the fast draw guys. But I couldn’t make fast draw part of my life for a long time. Getting the equipment to participate was a bit expensive, but more than anything was the time. Many of the shoots last entire weekends and are all over the place. You can’t just show up at Annie Oakley once a year to commit to the sport and compete. It has only been over the last few years that I finally have had the time to commit to it, so it’s something pretty new for me. But it was always their shoot at the Annie Oakley Festival that I looked forward to watching. So, it was really enjoyable to be able to attend as a competitor, and I made the most of it. This was the first year I did both events, the Ohio Fast Draw Association shoot and the Western Arts Showcase, so it was a very busy weekend for me. So busy that I didn’t even have time to look at my phone and answer the many text messages that were adding up due to the news of the world. I was able to get caught up after the festival, but the time off was well worth it. I have provided several pictures and videos of the event to capture a bit of the atmosphere, which I never get tired of.

That’s what makes my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business such a unique book on business and life in America in general. The Annie Oakley Festival has always given me a unique opportunity to see America for what it is and get to know people as spectators wanting to get a piece of that old Buffalo Bill Wild West show that so clearly defined our young country to a world perplexed by it. That challenge is still very true and even hostile at times. But when you are there, you can clearly see what people want and how much of that noisy world they are willing to take. Practicing the combat arts, the fast draw, the bullwhips, and the cowboy-mounted shooting are all exhibitions of the kind of skills that make America, America. And there is no need for apologies regarding the Second Amendment there. No hint to it. People generally agree on how the world is, understand right and wrong, and treat each other well and respectfully. The world does not look so screwed up when you escape the coastal media influences of Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. It’s always good to see people for what they are. Many from the liberal coasts would be horrified by the stoic tenacity of the people from the flyover states, especially those who attend by the thousands the Annie Oakley Festival. But what’s clear when you attend something like that festival in Greenville, Ohio, is that there are a lot more of those people than there are from liberal politics. You just don’t hear from them on the nightly news. They are out working in the fields, and living life as the coastal types fly over, high above in comfortable jets going from one big city to another, maintaining their bubbles that allow liberalism to grow as a concept. That is until they stop by some place like Cody, Wyoming, and see what people really think of them. Or, they drive into the heart of Ohio, way out in God’s country, and see the many yard signs dedicated to Trump, and get a sense that Annie Oakley never really died, and neither did the Buffalo Bill Wild West show. It lives on in Darke County, Ohio, and recharges me yearly. I spend my days between Annie Oakley events thinking about it. It’s never far from my mind. And given the way the world is now, they would do well to learn their own lessons from the Annie Oakley Festival. It’s a vacation destination all its own and well worth the time to do so. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Want to be Free: Learn to wear a hat

The problem is that people talk about fighting for freedom, but often by the time they are voting age adults, they are so beat down with compromise that they no longer know what freedom is or why they should be fighting for it. We talk about it all the time, fighting for freedom. Yet very few people are remotely free in their lives; they have bosses at their jobs, spouses often working at odds with them, and peer pressures in their neighborhoods. Medical professionals always tell us what to do, which was common before Covid became a government policy disaster. Then there are the various governments in our lives, the local zoning board as to whether or not a water garden can be built on our private property, whether a state governor can ruin our lives with lockdowns and other fears of economy, or an executive branch at the federal level who will sign a piece of paper that could actually destroy our physical bodies with a vaccine mandate. Most people are so burdened with obedience to many other people in their lives that they have no idea what freedom is or what they should be doing with it. So it’s hard for them to know why they should be fighting for it or even why they should value it at all. Oddly enough, as I was thinking about all these things, I have grandchildren who are at that magical age of deciding who they will be for the rest of their lives. They were asking about these matters, for which I gave them their first hats and told them why I have always worn a hat of some kind and what benefits it can provide them in the quest for personal freedom and benefit their lives in magnificent ways. 

One of my favorite hat stores in America, at Jackson Hole, Wyoming

It was a pretty good moment to explain why I have always worn a variation of a cowboy hat all my life to my grandchildren because they wanted to know. But the message has value well beyond family advice on how to live a better life, which is worth sharing. I learned early in my life that being unique was a freedom that had value in it, and to protect that freedom when you are too young to fight it off physically and mentally, is to shake off your attackers with audacity. So, I wore hats to declare my own unique look. Being young or old and having hair or not are conditions of nature, but wearing a hat was a proclamation of controlling your own appearance by choice, by invention. Even in the third and fourth grade, I started this process, and I wore my hats even to bed at night, and I found that within that simple measure, I was teaching myself to love personal freedom and making decisions that showed I had control over my appearance and was not a victim to public opinion. Of course, whenever you make such a declaration, people will make fun of you for it. And sometimes, those opinions can be brutal. It is amazing how threatening to people a kid wearing a hat can be, but I heard some of the worst and most violent talk when I was age 10 through 15 that you can imagine, just because I showed up in public places always wearing a hat. But those were some very valuable years because I learned not to care. And as I learned not to be shaped by the opinions of others, I learned to have real independence in my life, which has dramatically frustrated a significant number of people. 

We all wear hats in my family, always have

We were indeed a better society during periods where people wore hats, even though the social stigma favored them, such as during the Revolutionary period with the tri-cornered hats that were common to the day. Or the cowboy hats of western expansion. Then there were the fedoras of the roaring twenties up until the socialist incursions of the 60s. Hats were a statement of independence and control over nature. If it started raining, you could use your hat to shield your head from the elements of chaos coming in the form of weather. If you were balding, you could fashion your own style of cosmetic appearance with a good hat. Hats showed individual taste, they could be whatever color you wanted, and they projected your values to the world. But to those who wanted to reject those values, hats were dangerous because they showed individual expression, which was a real threat to the collectivist intentions of Marxism. Some of the cruelest comments that came in my direction about my hats as a kid came from the drug user class of long-haired hippies and dope smokers. When I wore a hat, it threatened them and their desires for social conformity. That safe place where a stoned mind and social camouflage could insulate them from the opinions of others. They certainly didn’t want to stand out in a crowd; they wanted to blend in. And when they saw someone who didn’t feel those social fears, it truly scared them. 

At that Jackson Hole hat shop, getting my latest one steamed to shape

I told my grandchildren that people would ridicule them for wearing their hats in public. Anything they show to the world that they valued would be ridiculed to no end, and if people could steal their hats and destroy them, they would do it to punish them for even wearing them in public. I explained that people are cruel because they don’t want to live up to the expectations of personal independence and crave to hide in the shadows where it’s safe. Wearing a hat publicly was a declaration of independence and a real threat to their existence. So be ready for anything and everything. But the benefit would be that by the time you are an adult, which will be most of your life, you will have been well practiced in being your own person. Nobody really cares what you look like after age 30, so don’t waste your lives trying to look like a teenager.

Enjoy your life no matter how old you are. Wear a hat that reflects who you are and how much you like it. Don’t let them make you feel bad for self-expression. And by the time you are 40, 50, and 60 years old, nobody will care if you wear a hat in public. They’ll avoid you most of the time, but making fun of you will stop. So the task of being young and out of control of your social circumstances because so many other factors are still governing your lives is to learn not to care what the opinions of others are. And when you do that, you will gain valuable freedom that will spill over into other parts of your life and enrich yourself. To have real freedom in life is to be free of the opinions of others. Once you do that, you can understand freedom’s basic premise and why it’s worth fighting for. A society of people who have worn hats to express that freedom had a better ability to maintain that freedom. But a society of people who care too much about what other people think are not going to understand why freedom is worth fighting for. Because essentially, they aren’t free anywhere in their lives if they constantly fear what the opinions of others are. So as I told my grandchildren, wear your hats. Don’t listen to what people say to you, and learn to love the controversy. Because when people’s opinions no longer control your actions, you can start to see yourself as a free person.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Elephant in the Room: Why the new ‘Top Gun’ movie is so successful and what it means to ESG scores in corporate America

I have always looked at box office results as a kind of vote for what the temperature of the political world truly is. As we know now, elections are often rigged, especially regarding the digital machines and ballot stuffing efforts that have been common in big American cities for years. So political votes don’t often reflect what people really desire culturally. But when a person is willing to get out of their chair and go out into a darkened theater and share a movie experience with perfect strangers, which is a discomfort of its own, the kinds of choices people make reflect a lot about their true character. So I have always looked toward box office numbers to understand what’s happening worldwide and the kinds of mythologies the human race responds to. Knowing all that, I was not surprised that Top Gun: Maverick did well at the box office; it looks like it will come in over 1.2 billion dollars for the summer of 2022. It has been remarkably strong for what I consider a typical 80s movie. I grew up in the 80s, so I remember when there was a movie like Top Gun coming out every weekend, and then when you got back in the car to drive home, there was a new top 40 hit on the radio. We had a thriving culture back then mainly because Ronald Reagan, as an actor, knew how to sell America to America, and people felt good about their country. Hollywood rushed to make movies that appealed to them, which was reflected in the movie-making industry. 

Obviously, I loved the new Top Gun movie, but as I said, I don’t think the film is a technological masterpiece. It will likely win some awards because the kind of people who pursued careers in movie making are happy that finally there is a movie out there that reflects why they got into the business in the first place, the way Hollywood used to make movies before all the woke ESG rules took over and ruined everything for everybody. While Top Gun has been doing well, another film franchise from Disney, Thor: Love and Thunder, came out over a similar summer season release. It died on the vine by the second weekend because it embraced all the woke ESG garbage injected into corporate America, and the voting movie audience decided they didn’t want any of it. For a film with big intentions to gain a billion dollars at the box office from a global audience, Thor: Love and Thunder quickly fell out of favor, while Top Gun: Maverick continued to be in the top 10 even after two months in theaters. Because of this behavior, there is a massive elephant in the room to talk about that I have heard nobody in the commentary business from entertainment or politics nail down, which is worth discussing because of what it means. What we see with movie audiences is a total rejection of the globalist push for ESG values that will undoubtedly be reflected in society in general, and what has been happening in the movie business will ultimately be reflected in society in general, with restaurants, business commerce, and populist politics. The only way the ESG system was ever going to work was to take away all people’s options for what they really wanted. Top Gun: Maverick shows just how successful breaking the ESG formula can be for anybody who dares to, and now that people have seen the benefits, the ESG attempts will fail miserably.

Considering that Top Gun: Maverick was entirely filmed before Covid came along to destroy its original release date for the summer of 2020, the film was not a conscious effort to push back against the globalist trends toward ESG. It was able to get funding because it had been in the works for many years and had Tom Cruise attached to it, so the movie got made. But the global sabotage with Covid, as I said in the beginning, was more of an attack against American culture in every way and the intent was to destroy American capitalism. Small businesses were meant to be destroyed. Amusement parks bankrupted. And the American film industry was targeted to be choked off, even though the political lefties in Hollywood were kissing the ring of the globalists most aggressively. Those market sectors were intended to be destroyed before the year of 2020 ran out, which was the goal of the World Economic Forum members behind the Covid virus, using China to be the face of the disruption. The world was going to have a Great Reset, and America would come out of it under the fold of global socialism run by health agencies controlled by the United Nations, and that was the end of the story. Paramount Pictures was shrewd to wait out the storm and hold Top Gun: Maverick for another two years to hope the American movie industry would survive and that theater owners would not all go bankrupt. Along the way, Paramount listened to its potential audience, and they decided to tweak the film toward a domestic market and ignore China completely, which many considered to be suicidal. But once the movie was released and movie theaters finally opened into something resembling normal, great things happened, and people were hungry for a non-woke movie without ESG goal posts that told a pro-American story that people could feel good about. And the rest is history.

It’s not that Top Gun: Maverick is a great movie. But it offers a non-ESG story that people are starving for, and they have voted with their feet. There are so many other options now with streaming services that people could easily have just stayed home and watched hundreds of other options. So it says something any time people are willing to go to the theater to see a movie of any kind. But what we are seeing happening with this particular movie is that people are voting against the ESG world that is being imposed on them, and the first real offering of American patriotism since President Trump was removed from office through political upheavals is the true sentiment of the voting public. You can’t fake personal choice. Ballot stuffing and other forms of fraud can manipulate results to look like more people than really do support progressive causes. But the tickets bought for a darkened theater in direct competition with other offerings, like Thor: Love and Thunder, show the true sentiment of the public when choice is the deciding factor. With most movies these days being produced for a global audience, especially from Disney, it had been considered suicide to focus on a domestic release, which is what Top Gun: Maverick boldly did. And the result was that the world came to the doorstep of the movie because they wanted to experience American life with their movie purchase. Not to see the same old ESG political nonsense that all the other films were offering, the same homosexual propaganda, the soft stories without defined heroes, and the noticeable lack of patriotism that was clearly part of the plan for a post-Covid world. Top Gun: Maverick broke all the rules and returned to what worked for years. And because of that success, many other industries and political movements will follow. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Trump Can’t Ride Off Into the Sunset: There is a reason for all the political anger, and it must be expressed

I generally like Elon Musk, but his comments about Trump and how he should ride off into the sunset were misguided and foolish. I hope Elon Musk accomplishes his goals with Space X. But I think Tesla will be headed for rough waters mainly because of how government has tampered with the electric car market. They are saturating the industry with assets that nobody wants, creating competition where there wasn’t demand, and making buying regular gas cars a taboo that will last for decades. Before the Biden administration stuck its nose into the electric car market, Tesla was a pretty cool option for people looking for a vehicle alternative. Tesla could support its own network infrastructure, complete with charging stations. They didn’t need government. But government has now interrupted that market and made electric cars something people hate. So Elon Musk has some trouble coming because of government tampering. And with that said, without government, Elon Musk would not be so wealthy and gained so much prestige. Elon Musk’s place in the world is very much a creation of government. Like most people who strike it big, Elon Musk made a good bet, and in his case, several, and he became wealthy. He’s not a magnificent genius beyond our comprehension that knows a bunch of things that we don’t as a species. He played with house money and came up big. But in his case, that house money was from the government. Without government subsidies, Elon Musk would be just another computer geek trying to buy expensive coffee at Starbucks. So his comments about Trump have been extremely misplaced. His political advice is worthless because he has too many government tentacles in him and foreign nations to have a proper opinion on the matter. I hope he has continued success. But his political advice is worthless. If anything, we don’t have enough drama from Trump. The world is angry, and for a good reason. The last thing we need is a tool from China telling us what to think, and because Elon Musk needs China so much, we can’t trust a thing that he says about political opinion.

We are living in a world where Hunter Biden has put so much of himself on video with known prostitutes smoking crack that it’s beyond comprehension. This is the President’s son, who is seen by the world committing serious crimes, and nothing is being done about it. Forget for a moment the many other scandals that are out there or what anybody might think about Joe Biden as a person politically. To have a direct member of the President behaving so badly is enough to justify profound anger at the world’s injustice. If there were never a Trump, never a Tea Party, never any opposition from political parties, the behavior of Hunter Biden would be enough to justify a revolt of the American population against the Biden administration for the embarrassment that it has brought to our nation. But then consider all the crimes of Covid by government imposed on the American people. Consider the inflation rate. The war on fossil fuels that have pushed up the cost of gas to unforgivable standards. The impact of the stolen election in 2020 which is now apparent. After the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision on drop boxes, it’s clear that there is a trend in America that is finally figuring out that Joe Biden should have never even been inaugurated. People have a right. Actually, they are obligated to be upset about the crimes committed in 2020 between the government-created Covid pandemic and the election fraud that followed. If people weren’t outraged, it would be weird. It’s perfectly justifiable for people to express themselves with anger at the Biden government, the people who put him in power, and the governments of the world that have imposed themselves on everyone’s lives in such destructive ways. Trump represents that anger in a manageable way, and everyone should be happy that there is a Trump out there to discharge all pent-up anger.

This anger in the world, in general, didn’t just happen during the Trump administration. The Trump administration was a creation of that anger. The lead-up to it occurred for many decades. Most noticeably during the 90s, when the political left tried to cram down America’s throats a liberal view of the world that was revenge for the eight good years of Ronald Reagan. Reaganomics was revenge for what America saw during the Carter administration. Ford was destroyed because of his association with Richard Nixon. Nixon was destroyed because he was a threat to the administrative state. Kennedy was killed because he was a threat to that same administrative state. Bobby Kennedy was killed because he was a disruption to that partnership with the administrative state and the façade of organized crime that ultimately could be traced back to government. This has been a political fight that has gone on for a long time, and it was evident to conservatives that after 2003 the media would not give George Bush a fair shake. Bush was hated, and the political left pushed that anger to launch Barack Obama, a terrorist candidate from Bill Ayers launched in the living room of a Weather Underground radical. They lied about it to our face even though we had the evidence. They lied about his birth certificate. They lied about Benghazi. They lied about everything, and those stories mounted to the point where people lost trust in everything. Mitt Romney in 2012 was another loss for conservatives who had been burnt by losers like John McCain over the years, moderates who wanted to play by the rules while the political left broke the law and rubbed our faces in it. By the time Trump offered himself in 2015, people were ready to fight back, and they elected him despite the administrative state’s goals to stop it. 

Things were good under Trump; the country worked. We discovered that a lot could be fixed in the world if only we had someone in the White House who wanted to solve problems. The administrative state wants perpetual problems because that’s how their funding works. They never wanted to fix anything, and Trump showed what a scam everything they said really was. Then they took Trump away and expected people to just put up with it. No, that’s not how it works. All that has happened was that the political left represented in America by the Democrats stole away the natural sentiments of what America wanted and imposed on them the desires of an administrative state they didn’t want or support. In more polite times, they might have held their nose and put up with it, but after all the years of disrespect by the left toward the right, things finally broke. Trump was the discharge of that anger, but now that anger is far greater than it was just a few years ago. America is not a centrist nation. The media has all the wrong terms for left and right. When they talk about the political left, they are talking about communists and socialists.

Nazis were socialists; they were not the “far right.” America has its own definitions for conservative thought, and most of the nation is conservative. They are not “centralists” as the Beltway defines them. The way America is was always determined by the flyover states, not the crazy lunatics who live on the coasts. So the more crimes the left commits, the more lies they impose on America, and the more bad behavior disrespecting America will only lead to more anger. That anger isn’t going to go away. It’s only growing; until it is dealt with, there will be lots of “drama” in politics. And that drama will continue until respect is given to those who actually run the country, Trump supporters, and the person they picked for President, President Trump.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Evil Brujos Threatened to Kill Pablo Amaringo: The vast, diabolical menace behind the cult of Climate Change religion

Defining evil in the world can be tricky business. Evil might be good depending on the relative position of the participants; what might be bad for one person may be great for another, depending on whether they are on the losing or winning team. So, I am always looking for good definitions of evil because if you can’t define it, you can end up feeding it in the world and not even realizing it. And to stand for what’s good and to live a life of justice, a society must understand what evil is. Understanding all that, I have turned my gaze, relative to the problems of the day, toward the beliefs of globalism and the specific religion of climate change to understand how evil works in our world today and how it shapes current events. At face value, it may seem like an easy problem. Climate activists will say mankind is bad for planet earth, so if we want to preserve the earth, we must change our ways. Mankind will say, of course, but constraining the human imagination and the nature of invention is bad for developing human consciousness, which is a natural process of the laws of the universe. And from that point of view, they would also be right. So how can anybody know what to do about anything in the realm between fighting for what’s right and how to avoid perpetuating evil in the world or in the universe? For those answers, I turned to the very interesting work of Pablo Amaringo, a little Peruvian shaman from a little village outside of Lima, Peru. Pablo is a hero of the left, a symbol of the United Nations. He is at the core of much belief that points humanity toward the climate change religion, getting back to nature, calling materialism evil, and thus, the United States. So it is with Pablo that I delved into the craze of taking Ayahuasca to see the spirit world and to get advice from them the way shamans like Pablo have for thousands of years. And ultimately came to understand that the political left of the world has everything all wrong and has interpreted a reverence toward nature for all the wrong and truly evil reasons that nobody has yet figured out, until now.

Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic drink that combines two different Amazonian plants into a brew that many call the Vine of the Dead because they believe it literally puts the user into communication with the disembodied souls of existence. Rock bands, anthropologists, academics of all kinds, and eclectic artists have discovered Ayahuasca and other hallucinogenic enterprises and assumed that by taking the drugs, they were getting back to nature and the real state of the world. Their assumption and promotion of people like Pablo were that the masters of nature had it right all along and that all the inventions of mankind were secondary to the magical abundance of the spirit world that was all around us, and that our goal in life was to get back to it. Not to grow away from it and develop individual lives and, thus, developed souls. In this way, the climate change lunatics have been able to attach the eternal aspect of a soul to the soup of a cosmic spirit world that is all around us all the time, giving us no real privacy. They are always with us, and by taking Ayahuasca, we could interact with them as they exist in a kind of hyper-reality beyond the known matter of our observable universe. Ayahuasca looks to rip away the filters that life puts on our brains at the level of the pinery gland and or the pituitary gland to make living normal life even possible. Powerful hallucinogens allow the brain to see what is always there and give us a glimpse into the spirit world that all religions refer to, but eliminate the normal role of a priest or government official as the mediator and take the user straight there. 

I am not and never will be a drug user. But if the answers to life’s questions go in that direction, I’m not going to ignore it either. In that case, many good books have been written about Pablo Amaringo that talk about his life, how he became famous, and what his art means with vivid displays, and I have read them. I don’t need to take Ayahuasca to get the gist of the experience. Pablo is the expert in the field, so by researching him, it’s been enough for me to become convinced that his well-intentioned actions as a village shaman have been abducted by evil in the world and used for the climate change movement to sucker in many weak-minded people to the alters of soul sacrifice. Sacrifice not just physically but at the fundamental essence of life. It was sold to them as moral conduct. I don’t need to talk to dead people to figure it out. I don’t ask for directions to the nearest gas station; I certainly don’t ask for advice on how to live life. So, from that perspective, it’s clear to me what has been happening with the United Nations’ push toward nature and the overall strategies against materialism and reverence toward climate change as a radical and diabolical religion. Something that I didn’t know, and apparently few do acknowledge even though they know, is that Pablo Amaringo was pushed out of the profession of shamanism by rival brujos (witchcraft practitioners) who act as hechiceros for their own personal needs or on behalf of paid clients. They told Pablo to get out of the shaman business, which he did. That’s how Pablo Amaringo came to paint his visions from his Ayahuasca sessions instead of continuing to do them as a shaman. Ironically, the world learned about Pablo because of this. But the evil brujos wanted to continue to operate in the world by manipulating the world of the dead behind the scenes without people like Pablo cutting in on their turf. Among these shamans in the Amazon rainforest, it was just another mob-like activity where they wouldn’t allow rivals to cut in on their racket. 

Yet, that racket was a very real thing; the hechiceros (sorcerers) promised Pablo they’d kill him either in the physical world or in the spirit world if he did not surrender to them, and being the nice guy that he was, he did. He took up painting and became pretty good at it. Now, if this were a western culture, I would say there would have been a fight to the death, like a gunfight in the street. Such threats are unacceptable, and resisting them is the fundamental belief system behind materialism and protecting the possessions acquired in life. But on a broader scale, what we see here is evil working its way under the radar, luring people to its cause where many hechiceros work behind the haze of Ayahuasca and other experiences to fill the empty minds of collectivism with the strategies of evil known only to demonic forces of ill intent. That makes the ritual practices we see today coming from the World Economic Forum types, the sex rituals, abortion sacrifices, drug abuse, vile violent music industry, family destruction, and homosexual agendas much more comprehensive.   Behind the veil of nature worship and protecting earth, evil uses this as a gateway into a realm they control. And once defenseless and vulnerable under the influence of drugs, they can have their way with you. Pablo Amaringo, with all his powerful skills as a shaman, shows the lost skills of previous cultures that have been lost to us over time through organized religion; we have seen a glimpse into this hidden world of evil and its strategies against all humanity. We are shown people like Pablo as the reason to journey into the grip of Ayahuasca and open ourselves to the wisdom of the hidden world. But when you get there, you find what Pablo found, a world filled with evil spirits who want to consume the souls of all humankind through mass sacrifice, and their intentions are barely hidden, especially when you pull away the veil of reality just a little bit. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Mitt Romney is Wrong, Joe Biden is Not a Good Man: The collapse of the Liberal World Order as shown on the Family Guy

Mitt Romney’s article in The Atlantic was remarkable in many regards. It reflects the view of The Liberal World Order, as they call it now, and their perplexed quandaries into the nature of political existence. It sums up their coastal assumption that peer pressure was always going to be able to pull everyday Americans over to their view of things and that they would end up as the masters of that liberal society as the borders of American thought came down and the rise of international globalism would replace old ideas of nationalism. Their entire premise was like asking fans of the NFL to cheer for the football organization instead of any particular team within it. Instead of having a favorite team to go to a stadium to advocate for, the Liberal World Order believed that people would cheer on the NFL itself.   They believed that after all their liberal educations, top-down management style, and tampering with markets with their slow and cumbersome ideas, people would cheer on this Liberal World Order and would like it. So they are bewildered as to why President Trump is so loved and why there are still investigations into election fraud from the 2020 election, even two years later. It was just announced that Maricopa County in Arizona rejected the election results of that 2020 election, which is taking us historically into new territory; more will follow. And on that same day, Wisconsin declared that drop boxes were illegal that were used during Covid to steal votes for Joe Biden. And that those drop boxes were illegal during 2020, so all votes counted by that method must be rejected, which would give the state to Trump naturally. The Liberal World Order is watching all their schemes fall apart and see how much they are hated, and it’s shocking to them. However, they only have themselves to blame. 

Over the 4th of July, I was looking for some kind of White House celebration, which I couldn’t find. Biden did give a speech, obviously to his progressive base urging people to hang tight, that things would get better. But the contents of the speech really weren’t aired until the next day. Not even ABC News, owned by Disney, showed it. Yet what I did find on television was a 2019 episode of Family Guy that featured Peter Griffin working at the Trump White House. I like Family Guy, and even though they are typically a very liberal group of creative Hollywood types, their humor is usually funny. But this particular episode was obviously filled with frustration and hate toward the Trump family and a direct shot at the people who elected him. It was so filled with hate that I wondered who at Fox, who aired the program, did they think made up their audience. Satire is one thing in comedy, and usually, with a show like the Family Guy, that is where the laughs come from. But this was an episode I had not seen before, and they were showing it as a repeat on the 4th of July, which seemed like a pie to the face of America. It was interesting to watch, especially in the context of Mitt Romney raving in The Atlantic about how a return to Trump’s America would essentially be the end of their dreams of the Liberal World Order. After all, that was the view of that Family Guy episode. They didn’t make it for the general public but for their progressive viewers, whom they think are the majority. But only now do they see that they don’t have a majority, and they never did. They are being rejected wholesale and aren’t sure what to do or think about it.

What’s different now as opposed to times in the past is that they have let us know during the Trump years what they really think of us. And now that the information is out there, they’ve created this awkward society where the truth about how we feel about each other is known.   For many years, just like the Family Guy show, we put up with their liberal viewpoints because we wanted some entertainment. So we gave them the benefit of the doubt so long as everyone was generally polite with each other.   But after we elected Trump, and they failed to secure the election for their pick, Hillary Clinton, they felt entitled to make fun of us and use all methods of peer pressure to drive us toward their Liberal World Order, which was never going to be an option. Yet they thought it was.   That much was evident in art like what the Family Guy broadcast. Before we knew just how much they hated us, we could join together mutually over popular entertainment or good food. But once they revealed how much they hated Trump and his voters, there was no way to put those sentiments back into confinement. The problem was always their intention to take America someplace it didn’t want to go. The frustration from Mitt Romney and his good friend Joe Biden is reflected in that mentioned Family Guy episode. It was a joke to their kind of people, the Liberal World Order. It’s an inside joke only they understand because it’s their view of the world. To us, it seems like some foreign sentiment that is not American. And now that those battle lines are clear, we do have a different kind of society, and they realize just how much in the minority they have always been.

When Mitt Romney said in his article that Joe Biden was a good man, he clearly was out of step with the rest of the world. According to Joe Biden’s daughter, the two showered together. That isn’t a “good man,” that’s a pervert, a scum bag by every measure. There is nothing good about it. And knowing that, it’s no wonder that Joe Biden and his wife raised a bunch of screwed-up kids, especially regarding Hunter, a known drug addict and sexual deviant at best. The Biden family was selling out the highest office in the land for years and got rich off it. They are what the Liberal World Order intends for a specific class of elite rulers Mitt Romney wants to be a part of. But Joe Biden is not a good man, by any measure. Yet that is what that side tells us, and when we refuse to see things their way, they feel entitled to attack us, just as a group of Antifa thugs harassed Bret Kavanaugh at a local restaurant upset about Supreme Court rulings. These same Liberal World Order people who run The Washington Post, The Atlantic and make cartoons for the Family Guy will deny that Antifa even exists, as they have burned down cities. But they seem upset when they see the wrath of MAGA as they steal elections because it’s the only way they can attempt to prop up their world order that nobody but them wants. And they are in the gross minority, yet they appear to have just discovered it. I would say to them, they would have seen this reality earlier if they didn’t steal elections to maintain power. Because the people are not with them. They have never been. Any assumptions they have made about the nature of American life were made in a bubble of their own creation. That is a fault of their own; their failure to acknowledge reality and assuming progressive peer pressure games would shock and awe ordinary people into following them. They never liked us; we used to work to get along with them. In entertainment programming, we have put up with their jokes against us until we realized they were serious. And now they have to deal with our anger, which they made. That means for the Mitt Romney types out there that Liberal World Order is collapsing under the many mistakes of the left, and it’s not coming back. That fault is their own, and certainly not from MAGA and the Trump voters who were always in the majority no matter how much smoke and mirrors, with the help of media, attempted to hide it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Atlantis Discovered in America: The History the Younger Dryas impact destroyed, and revealed

It’s a subject I care about a great deal, the idea that there was an advanced civilization in North America going back to much longer times than has been attributed to the Bering Strait migration of people from Asia into what has been called the New World. I have done many articles on the giants of Ohio and on the probability that there was an ancient empire of very tall people all through the Ohio River Valley predating all known records based on the mound-building culture that is so abundant in the region. It really came alive for me when I made a trip to Stonehenge and saw not just the celestial alignments that were popularly captured by the large megalithic stones there, very similar to Serpent Mound in my home area of the world, but the many, many mounds that were surrounding the area. The history books seem to forget about those and concentrate just on the stonework that is so popularly recorded. That’s when I knew for sure that there had been travel between North America and the British Isles predating Christ. And during the Ice Age, this might have been possible since the ocean levels were 400 feet lower at that time. Land bridges like the Bering Strait would have allowed for travel all over the world to be much easier. But even that didn’t tell the story the way I knew it needed to be told and that occurred to me in an argument with a British Museum employee when I was looking for the famous Crystal Skull that is on display there. The employee explained to me as if he were trying to convince himself that the skull had to be a fake because when it was dated, nobody on earth had found a way to polish quartz in such a seamless manner. That technology wouldn’t be invented until fairly recent times. So the true answer was concealed in a kind of European, institutional arrogance that seems to put a wet blanket over all the sciences institutionally funded and so limited in scope to their specific fields. 

I have known about Graham Hancock for a long time; he has written several spectacular books that consolidate in a way that is appropriate all the countless hours from various scientific fields to tell a unified story based on a few centuries of discovery. And the stories coming from him are vastly different from the textbooks. Science cannot be analyzed in a vacuum, and determinations made based on the desires of whoever funds the activity. So to correct that problem, Graham Hancock has come on the scene and started to put the puzzle pieces together about a significant number of previously unchallenged assumptions. That makes his book, America Before into, what, I think, is one of the most important books ever written because it tells the story of a number of issues that places North America at the front of the train of human consciousness development and advanced nation-building in ways that have been building for a long time. But science and politics did not want to admit to it. It was clear to me at Stonehenge that a massive global culture had existed in the past; they had boats that could visit each other. To me, the only question was whether those migrations moved from Europe to America or America to Europe, and thus, the rest of the world. The resistance, just as was the case with my experience with the Crystal Skull in the British Museum, was that institutionalized mainstreamers did not believe that any oceanic vessels could make such a journey until Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America. As it turns out, Columbus knew about the New World from old maps that predate the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, prior to the Dark Ages, which sought to cleanse the world of all pagan references, maps included. An ancient civilization made those maps, perhaps more advanced than our present society, and the timing of that society places it at its most prosperous period during the Ice Age some 15,000 years ago.

That civilization, as proposed by a lot of evidence provided in America Before, shows that a giant comet struck the earth in Michigan when the ice sheets were still there and created the Saginaw Bay in Michigan, which is essentially an impact crater. The results of the impact and trajectory of debris can be found all over North America, specifically in mysterious craters in Nebraska and the Carolinas. This is what is being called the Younger Dryas cataclysm, and it was a world killer in that it wiped out life on earth in most of the civilized areas. What was left as a result was those lives untouched by a civilization that remembered elements of the previous culture, and those elements showed themselves in various religions all around the world. Sumer, Egypt, Indus Valley, and the mound builders of the Mississippi Valley are all aspects of culture that reemerged thousands of years after the cataclysm that destroyed civilization and much of the life on earth at the end of the Ice Age. And this catastrophe has been hiding in plain sight for all this time because our focus has been on the Ice Age, not a cataclysm that occurred during it. While these pieces are still being put together in puzzle pieces mixed in different boxes, the picture is becoming much more precise, and the work that Graham Hancock did in America Before will prove to be the standard for all the future. He suggests that in North America, we are seeing the Lost Continent of Atlantis, perhaps a parent culture to that mythology. It was completely wiped out by the comet impact and the massive flooding that occurred in the wake. The ocean’s sea level rose suddenly by 6 feet during this time, which would only happen if vast amounts of ice from the Ice Age suddenly melted. 

For proof that mainstream scientists would seek to conceal evidence, we learned through Covid to what extent politics plays a part in science. So given the nature of the political world, and much to Graham’s frustration, his thoughts are being rejected just as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were rejected as treatments for Covid. Or the political establishment soundly dismissed the premise of election fraud because they wanted to get rid of Donald Trump from the White House at all costs. We see the same conspiracies here, with this idea that a very advanced civilization with intensely accurate understandings of the cosmos thrived in North America, climaxing over 100,000 years of evolution that science missed entirely because they were looking at the ice, not the societies. And they didn’t want anybody to figure out that their diffusion theories about the Bering Strait were no longer valid. Mankind rose and fell many times following the Vico Cycle, and the culture that was thriving around the world during the Ice Age was just one of them. But that it rose and fell away so completely reveals in us all the terminal process of civilization itself. We’d like to believe that what we do is permanent, and such a concept reveals how thin everything really is. And that is a frightening prospect to institutionalists who put everything into the process but not so much emphasis on the substance. And what America Before is all about is substance. The rest of the world will catch up eventually, and when they do, they’ll find that everything started in America, and at a fundamental level, we still know it. America is that shining city on the hill, not because it was taken from Native Americans. But because we knew it was once before, this current rendition of America is just a repeat of the past, without the destruction of a comet to wipe it all out.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business