Category: Lockdowns

There is Nothing Worse than Saying Something Cannot be Done: Managing unknowns for victory

Sometimes the Answers are Where Nobody Looks

For perspective, I feel like I say it 1000 times in a week; limits are meant to be overcome, not yielded to.  When I hear someone say, I can’t do this because of this, or I can’t do that, I immediately hear laziness in the terminology. It’s a lazy approach to life because skills are often needed to be developed to achieve a task.  And when people tell you that something can’t be done, it’s because they are too lazy to do it, plain and simple.  I understand limits, but as I talk about constantly in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, perceptions of what is achievable today will be shattered tomorrow with lots of practice.  That is certainly the case with various fast draw competitions that go on all over the country that are less known to most of the world because they exist in pockets of Americana.  We seem to understand these kinds of things in sports, where rookies improve with experience, and that few people expect a newly drafted football player to go straight to the NFL and be a superstar.   It takes time and development to become great.  And that is true too in how we make all our livings.  When I hear someone tell me that it takes this much time to do this kind of thing, that is never a fixed value.  But is only a point of reference that should always be pushed for and achieved.  That is why I suggest that all business people stop thinking in controlled statistical ways and always look for innovation opportunities to explore what can be done, not what lazy people tell you can be.

Bullwhip Speed and Accuracy

Every year that I do the Annie Oakley Wild West Show in Darke County during the last weekend of July each year, I go through this process.  It’s always one of the fun weekends that I give myself to keep the world in focus.  I love Darke County, Ohio.  It reminds me of many towns out west and brings the heart of America close, so it’s easy to see.  And this year was no different.  We have the bullwhip competitions that I always participate in, where many of these ideas about business have matured over the years and eventually evolved into the themes of this book.  Now that I am one of the elderly participants, the competitions have become a period of self-reflection for me rather than a nervous do-or-die thing with legacy performers from years past.  As I also talk about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, young people need more than anything a reputation to launch them into life.  Well, I have my reputation well intact, and nobody can ever take that from me, even if the thing we are doing is relatively tiny in the scheme of things.  The bullwhip competitions of Annie Oakley for me were always a big deal because the people who do them are unique.  The activity is out of the box, and you develop a genuine respect for the people who share that space with you.  And the competition pushes you always to get better.  And once you push yourself to get better and have success, you realize that the same holds with just about everything in life, including decisions that cost millions of dollars either way if success or failure is utilized.  That may be the life I’m in now, but over the years, my grounding in these cowboy arts always kept things authentic to me and gave me perspectives that nobody else was considering, even though they probably should have. 

The two videos I’ve included in this article are from two bullwhip competitions from this latest 2021 Annie Oakley show.  I always do pretty well in those, but the value in winning has diminished a lot over time.  What matters most to me, what has become an obsession of sorts, is managing all the competition variables in these kinds of things.   In both competitions, the goal is to cut as many cups off the target stands at the fastest rate that you can.  One competition, the Speed Switch, requires you to do so with both hands.  The other, Speed and Accuracy, is all one hand and in sequence.  If you miss a cup, it’s a 5-second penalty.  You get two attempts at each cup.  You have to stand six feet from the target and not cross the line with your feet.  The time starts on your first crack.  Those are the rules.  That is the way participants interact with the competition.  Like in all things in life, that is how we plan to achieve success, cutting as many targets as possible in the fastest time you can.  What fascinates me is all the variables that come up in pressured events that can wreck those plans.  The people who usually win at these things, whether they are in bullwhip competitions or big business deals, can manage those variables. 

Bullwhip Speed Switch

Many talented people are good at the exhibitions in the bullwhip world, but not so good at the competitions.  Without the pressure of time, where they can show off the skills that they’ve practiced for hundreds of hours, they are magnificent world record holders, and it looks great for an audience.  But when they apply the same methods to a timed competition, things go bad and don’t look so good.  It has always fascinated me how the difference between the two is so applicable to life in general.  People who study and practice a lot in life can put on a great show.  But when the pressure is on, they usually choke.  That choke is what people tell me thousands of times a week and expect me to accept because that has become fashionable in the world, to accept failure. Instead, my thing is to get comfortable with pressure and danger and learn to manage the variables.  Not to yield to them.

I have done those contests for many decades now every year at the Annie Oakley event, and not a single one has ever been the same.  Sometimes the popper blasts off the end of my whip.  Sometimes the whip gets caught on the target stand, as happened this year.  Sometimes we perform on grass, sometimes on smoothed concrete where the whip slowly slides all over the place. Sometimes the wind kicks up and throws off your aim.  Sometimes, a speedy guy will have luck catching most of the targets on their first run, forcing you to go faster than you are comfortable with.  All those variables are what make the good from the bad.  It’s not the skill; everyone who competes has talent.  But it’s in how you manage the variables that matter most.  

Its all in fun, but is it……………………..?

Ultimately, that is one of the big takeaways from The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I’ve been a professional in the industry for more than three decades, and I work with people who also have a lot of experience.  Everyone has lots of experience; they go to college, get trained and try to do the best they can.  My point is that little things like these extra little competitions I do, such as bullwhip competitions force you to adapt to all the things they don’t teach you in an orthodox society.  How can you use your skills to accommodate all the things that happen that you don’t control?  Can you still win then?  Well, of course, you can.  But what makes me madder than a hornet that some kid has stuck a stick into its nest is when someone tells me something can’t be done because they have not learned themselves how to manage variables in their life.  That they accept that anything outside of their skill level is a mystery that they automatically yield to.  To me, that is just the kind of thing they should all be training for, in having the skill to do the job, but in honing those skills so that they can adapt to the variables that come up along the way.  That they can successfully manage the situation when it’s never optimal and still succeed. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Sometimes Doing the Right Thing is to Break All the Rules: The answer to Mark Levin’s ‘American Marxism’ question

Sometimes Doing the Right Things Means You Have to Break the Rules

One of my favorite lines from my new book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is that it “is the losers of the world who make up the rules of life.” There are many lines like that in what I’m calling a conservative book on strategy, but that one is more relevant to me due to the nature of our current politics and wokeness in our corporate structures. I’ve read many hundreds of books from conservatives and liberals over the years. It’s always been frustrating to see liberals putting out books like Rules for Radicals and The Coming Insurrection while we have failed to answer. In contrast, on the conservative side of things, the books come out as warnings about what’s coming rather than giving people a means of dealing with them.  Liberals have been audacious in assuming they were important enough to steer the entire human race in the direction of their choosing, making up rules that we as conservatives always follow to the letter.  The essence of all our outstanding literary achievements and countless hours of talk radio has been to work within those rules and be good people by pointing out the evils of liberalism.  All the while, the rules were made by radicals and losers from the beginning to doom us all, and we have been following those rules right over a cliff to our peril.   I love books, all books, by all people, even by the other side politically.  If it’s a book with binding on it, I likely love it.  Because even books by those I disagree with teach me something.  And as I said, I have read a lot of them and have been waiting for someone on the conservative side to come up with some book on conservative strategy.  But it never came, and now with things the way they are now, I figured I would just sit down and do it myself, resulting in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.   The publisher sent me a few advanced copies ahead of the August 28th release date, where the book will be available wherever books are sold.  Yet, I did take a moment to enjoy holding the book and going through it due to the long journey it took to produce it.  Finally, a book on conservative strategy was here.  I didn’t care if I wrote it or if somebody else had.  I was just happy to have it in my hands.

Its been the most frustrating thing to watch, liberals creating rules we all live by, then as we were killing ourselves with terrible thinking, such as Critical Race Theory, a lack of defense about capitalism, a lack of defense of our family structures, our religions, our president, our businesses—everything, the liberals who have been writing these books on strategy for years were rolling in the mud like pigs after a feeding frenzy.  How could we help facilitate so much evil in the world just by following the rules?  Well, that has been their trick, the liberals, and they figured that out about us many years ago among the gangsters of Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde.  The gangster era was what was left of the old gunslingers of the Wild West. It was a direct result of progressivism that crept into American society at the end of western expansion.  Instead of facing down our enemies on a dusty street in a duel to the death in the pursuit of justice, our criminals hid in the shadows and functioned outside of our Christian sentiments.  Once Democrats in Chicago observed the Midwest antics of Capone’s mob and the elusiveness of Bonnie and Clyde all up and down the Mississippi River, they had their game plan, which they use aggressively to this day.  The book was Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, and the top people of the Democrat Party used it to create the kind of world we are dealing with now.  They made the rules because they had been losing as a progressive movement that desperately wanted to take over America from Europe. We followed those rules to our present circumstances. 

I read the books, especially Rules for Radicals and The Coming Insurrection, and was thinking, “these aren’t very good books.  Why are they so popular?” They looked to be self-published, poorly written monstrosities that I wouldn’t think would survive the book reviewer critics of liberalism.  Yet they made it through, picked up some big endorsements, such as Hillary Clinton, who was obsessed with Saul Alinsky for many years, those works made it to the top of the Democrat platform at the national and international level.  Meanwhile, as I said in the video above, this isn’t negative toward Mark Levin’s new book selling like hotcakes in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, American Marxism—conservatives read and write books pointing out the problem. Still, we never are pretentious enough to write our strategy guides to answer those problems once we see them.   I think Mark’s new book is excellent.  It points out the history of Marxism as it has infiltrated America for years. I’ve been pointing that out on this blog for decades too, but what are we supposed to do about it?  American Marxism says we need a movement to stand up to Marxism.  But how do we do it?  Well, that’s when I decided to sit down and write a counterpoint to one of my favorite books of all time, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which is 2500 years old.  I thought it was time the human race has an update and one from an American perspective.  Something that would answer the question that Mark Levin and Sean Hannity have framed for us.  But a means to achieve success at all the levels of our lives in a way that hasn’t been done before. 

So if I was you, dear reader, which I have been, the question on your mind is why did I write the book and not some genius war general or former president of the United States?  What makes me qualified?  I tell quite a story of my background, which you can find on the sidebar of this website that will offer insight into that very question.  But honestly, I think many of us could have written The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  Most of us already know the answers, but we are too nice and too good to do often what needs to be done.  We need to understand why breaking many of the conventional rules that have been imprisoning us morally is the correct action.  And of those rules that have been holding us back is this notion of pretention.  That any of us should never assume that we have the answers to save humanity, well, I would say, why not?  Why not you?  Why not me?  Why should we surrender to a hostile political left full of hate and evil?  Because the rules of our life tell us too?  Well, that’s why one of my favorite lines from the book states that the losers often make the rules of our life because they have to find some way to cripple the good and just so that they can have a shot at winning the future.  And we have generally accepted this sabotage gleefully because our value judgments were in being good people who follow the rules.  But when the bad guys made the rules, then what?  Well, that’s what The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is all about, and I’m very proud that it’s coming out to offer options where many of us just haven’t had them before.  Sometimes, to do the right thing, you have to break the rules.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Experts in Plato’s Cave: Fear of learning the truth

Plato’s Cave Wall

When things start getting disjointed and the pressure starts blurring reality, I always turn to books for clarity—the process of reading books levels out the mind in very productive ways.  I don’t care if it’s a comic book; reading anything helps solve many thought problems.  And that is certainly the case in the news these days, where various Covid variants are scaring people into looking at everything but the fundamental issues of politics.  I told everyone what was coming when we started learning about Dr. Fauci and his connection to China, how China has long ago declared war on America. Still, we have not matched that aggression, and then there are election fraud problems from the 2020 elections.  There are some big topics out there that could topple our government in a very negative way.  There is some bad stuff going on that is now well out of control, so the perspective is needed. That’s when I turn to books to solve problems, and it always works.  Doing extensive reading brought my mind back to an old topic, the Cave Analogy from Plato’s Republic, a favorite.   In the video above, I explain it and how it applies to the politics of our times.  The problem we all have is that we know what is making the shadows on the cave wall. Still, we have an expert class that insists on staying in control of what we see and hear, even though their information is entirely irrelevant for 2021 sensibilities.

If you haven’t heard it before, this problem of experts attempting to shape reality based on their limited perspective is not a new problem.  It goes back several thousand years to around 375 BC to the times of the Greeks when they were trying to figure out how to operate a Republic as a form of government.  The assumption is that we are all chained to a pole looking at a cave wall and behind us in a cave is a fire burning.  Behind us are people walking around, for which we have never seen.  All we know of them is the shadows they cast on the cave wall.  Other people chained with us to a pole facing in the same direction have learned to predict the movements of the shadows on the cave wall depending on what time of day it was.  Again, not knowing that the shadows are caused by people moving about out of our sight.  Well, one person eventually manages to get loose and turn around and see for themselves the source of the shadows.  Breaking free, they attempt to tell the others tied to the poles what can be seen, but the experts don’t want people to pay attention.  So, the freed person goes by themselves into the world beyond the fire into the people moving about, talking with them, and learning who they are.  Eventually, the person finds themselves moving out of the cave altogether, and outside they see the sun and the more significant evidence of civilization.    

This evidence of reality provokes excitement, so the freed person returns to their colleagues tied to the pole and tells them what was seen outside the cave.  This causes anger from the experts because the threat to them is genuine.  Their entire value in existence has been to predict when the shadows will appear on the cave wall and determine their movements.  Obtaining a higher knowledge of what makes the shadows destroys everything that gives power to their lives, and they find it threatening.  They would much prefer to keep the public ignorant to be important by predicting the shadows on the cave wall.  Learning what makes the shadows for such people is the worst thing in the world.  Well, that pretty much spells out the problems of our modern times.  We have a lot of people in politics who make good livings predicting what the shadows will do.  But we live in a time where information is abundant, and we don’t need experts to tell us what things mean.  We have decentralization of information, and if one expert class attempts to keep us facing a direction we don’t want to be facing, we have the choice to look somewhere else anyway.  If we’re going to know what causes the shadows, we can look for ourselves.  That is the tension of our current political world.

Literature is such a good method of resolving problems because, as in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato had the same issues then as we do now.  There is nothing new about what we see out of the behavior of humanity.  There might be some modern tapestries to what we see, but the essence is always the same.  But what we should expect is to learn from history so that we don’t keep repeating it.  I think we can feel sympathy for those experts who only see the value of their lives in predicting where the shadows come from.  Or we can hate them for their attempt to control us.  Dr. Fauci comes to mind, a government expert who has spent his whole life predicting shadows and trying to scare us into behavior the government desired.  For him, we long ago untied ourselves and could see what was causing the shadows, even as the government has insisted that we not look behind us to where the fire cast its shadows.  Notice how we are talking about a Covid variant, but we never talk about a natural solution such as hydroxychloroquine. That’s when you know the expert class doesn’t care about you; all they do care about is their retention of power, their ability to scare you into behaving the way they want you to do, and they use the shadows to do it.  Once you know what causes the shadows, the experts lose all their power.

We have the same problem with the election fraud deniers, who want to look at the cave wall and let the experts translate what we see.  The election fraud of 2020 happened in the world beyond the fire, so the shadows of their existence don’t even show up on the cave wall.  Yet it happened all the same.  It just occurred beyond the vision of what we are looking at.  If we get up and away from our pole and look, we’ll see the evidence in the corner of the cave just beyond the firelight.  It’s not that the evidence isn’t there, but the experts expect to hide it from us by keeping our perspective from turning around and seeing it.  Because if we do get up and see for ourselves, the experts lose their power, which is terrifying.  Then what will happen to them once we realize how much we have been lied to.  For all those reasons and more, I love time with my books.  They are not connected to the internet.  Nobody is tracking what I’m reading by keystrokes.  It’s just me and my book in my reading chair.  If all the power in the world went out, I would still be fine and able to read history and reflect upon it.  And that is very empowering, especially in times like this.  But knowing something is only half the battle.  The trick is in making history different based on what we’ve learned.  And that is what our next step will be. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Thomas Jefferson Was No Racist: And if not for America–and Republicans, there would still be slavery

Thomas Jefferson was not a racist, he worked to free the slaves and everyone of color

It was tough to watch over the 4th of July weekend the utterances of the many Marxists who have gathered people of color on a typical Kotter change state strategy to disparage Mt. Rushmore and the Founding Fathers. Knowing what I do about the country’s origin that anyone with just a little reading could discover, they’d be insulted too.  I just returned from Mt. Rushmore a few weeks ago, as of this writing, and I found it profoundly refreshing and intellectual.  There was a lot more to do at Mt. Rushmore than getting out of the car and look at some carvings on the big rock wall.  It was a temple of conceptual understanding into the nature of a functioning republic, something that had been attempted by Roman and Greek societies thousands of years ago.  It has only recently been resurrected from the impact of the Dark Ages, where mysticism and religion had placed over all humankind in the East and West a cloak a stupidity that held down civilization during the entire duration.  Only what the Founding Fathers proposed improved those lessons learned, not a return to the Greek or Roman, but a superior next step.  And if not for the people on that big stone mountain in South Dakota, there would still be slavery in the world.  America freed the slaves.  Republicans were the ones who did it, and Thomas Jefferson, even though he started as a slave owner for lots of social reasons specific at that time, worked behind the scenes to end slavery one way or another from the very beginning.

As I said in the video above, and in other videos, they had a couple of fabulous bookstores at Mt Rushmore.  At the very end of the viewing stand in the basement, one looks out over the statues through a big window.  I had read about 75% of the books in that bookstore before, but there was a treasure trove of about 25% that I hadn’t, and I bought them up.  One of the books was a little thing about Thomas Jefferson in his own words that I found very refreshing. I’ve read many books on Jefferson, all of which were written by the modern progressive biographers who have put work out that we see today on historical figures.  I find what they all have in common, even though I enjoy their work, perhaps none more than Edmund Morris, is a need to always put a progressive slant on their work to appease the market gatekeepers.  The big New York publishers all have the strategy of obtaining a New York Times review for the covers of their products.  To get that review, the author must pour some salt on the subject and show that they were not magnificent characters of history but rather people like you and me.  They are meant to be brought down to the ordinary level of the mud trollers who lean toward socialism out of laziness instead of the ambition of capitalism.  In that case, Jefferson has been attacked for his slave ownership and his alleged sexual relationship with Sally Hemings.  The purpose of all this side story stuff is to demean the great thoughts he evoked in creating a Declaration of Independence and the assistance in shaping a functioning Constitution for our new republic.  Not a “democracy,” a REPUBLIC. 

I left Mt. Rushmore with my new books in hand. I read them whenever I could throughout the rest of the trip, starting with this book on Jefferson because it was so relevant to the news of our day.  Our republic is under attack by race-baiters hiding their Marxism behind the guilt of slavery. They expect to use it to crush the morality of America into a change state of oppression and eventual control by the United Nations—which is already infiltrated by communists, socialists, and outright Marxists.  When these people talk of global unity, they are talking about socialism and communism being the method of government, and for that to happen, they must topple the United States from economic power. They work every day to do it.  Their best method of doing it is to convince the people of our republic to give up on capitalism which they think is quite possible due to the teacher union control of our education system.  The other way they plan to do it is to remove our good history of America’s foundation from our current reality.  That is why Mt. Rushmore is to them a bitter enemy which they hate.  It was also essential to build Mt. Rushmore in the first place, so people would never forget it. 

I also bought several other books across Kansas that talked in detail about the battle between the Jayhawkers and Bushwhackers well before the Civil War took place, the events of Bloody Kansas that led to the war itself.  America was never a racist nation to have those kinds of fights occurring, of which the Jayhawks, the Red Legs, and Union Army eventually won.   Slaves were freed because people used the Constitution that Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers created, and everyone fought it out.  It was England that brought the slaves to America.  Jefferson knew that if he tried to go too deep with the Declaration and eventual Constitutional Convention, the southern states would not stand together as the original 13 colonies. So, Jefferson took what he could and planned later to take another swipe at slavery with amendments, which is what happened.  It took another war to do it, but it happened, and, in that way, Jefferson revealed in his letters to immediates within his circle of friends.  Jefferson always planned for the formation of America to free people of all color, everywhere in the world.  The pressure of the victory of a Revolution would set off the movement all over the world.

That’s why it’s such an insult to listen to these modern ignoramuses utter such nonsense about America being anything of a racist country.  There is nowhere else in the world where so many people of different backgrounds have come together and lived so freely.  All we hear from the attackers is jealousy that the rest of the world hasn’t figured out how to do it yet.  Perhaps other places in the world would do better if only they learned from America.  It isn’t the American prerogative to give up what’s good so that everyone in the world can be equally wrong.  It is up to them to learn from us and the hard lessons won in the formation of America, which benefits all people.  And finally, what is even worse about the constant attacks of racism toward America is that the Democrats from the beginning were the Bushwackers, the slave owners, and the resistance to creating an independent republic.  They loved the aristocracy of European life and were not eager to take a break for independence.  Today, they are most anxious to retreat to Europe and adopt their socialism so they can be invited to the next Beltway party and live the life of the aristocracy.   The Founding Fathers started in the elite but decided to break away and create something new that resembled what worked with the old.  And for all they say, the Democrats in the modern era, none of it is good, educated, or relevant to history.  It is all malicious and meant to undo us all.

Rich Hoffman

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The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Big Truth: Uncovering the Democrats Big Lie one voter at a time

Notice How Biden didn’t Want to Talk About Trump’s 4th of July Speech

This is becoming fun, watching the Democrats struggle so intensely to ignore the increasing skepticism of the 2020 election by ignoring almost wholly the Trump rally in Sarasota, Florida.  People stood all day in heavy rain to wait for President Trump to essentially give the same speech he always does, with a few minor changes that ended up being whoppers.  At one point in the address, Trump baited Biden well on the eve of the 4th of July, knowing that Biden would be talking from the White House on the actual holiday.  Trump pointed out Biden’s math problem in proving that he is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.  Trump already has the inside knowledge of what the Arizona audit is showing and the increasing number of states following their audit example.  The cheaters of the election have been caught, as I said from the beginning that they would.  I have also personally verified the country’s nature; I had to, by traveling all over it so far in 2021.  I went to states as far out as Idaho and New Mexico, and lots of places from Cincinnati to there, and let me tell you what I didn’t find—any support for Joe Biden.  But I did see lots of support for Donald Trump.  Now for Biden to win 80 million votes, he would have had to cut into those red states.  Instead, all he has are false votes on paper to show his victory.  But the vote counters can’t attach real people to those votes because they don’t exist.  And the more Trump talks about it, as he did during the 4th of July, the harder it gets for Democrats to pretend like Joe Biden is the president.  Not to mention the media that is in on it now. 

Even better than that, Republicans feel more comfortable talking about the election fraud than in early January where insurgent Republicans wanted things to go back to how they were before 2016.  Over that same period, CNN’s Jim Acosta showed where the cracks were forming when he tried to press Congressman Madison Cawthorn over the election fraud issue.  Acosta representing the media position, stated that the judicial system had tossed out any connection to the possibility of election fraud.  Cawthorn said the right thing, that the judicial system let us down, which it did.  What the cheaters intended from the beginning was to run out the clock by hogging the ball until the buzzer rang in January and Biden was sworn in as the next president.  At that point, Trump had to leave the White House, and Democrats had successfully stolen the election.  Just as Acosta did, the media pressed that there was no evidence of voter fraud, which of course, there is.  But the point and plan from the beginning were to process the Biden cheat faster than the case of fraud could be built in the courts.  Courts purposely don’t move very fast; a case like this election fraud case could take years, even decades, to prosecute.  The cheaters, in this case, are many thousands of people who were in on the action, and tens of thousands of others who wanted to believe it for their climbs to power, crawled out on that limb expecting it not to break.  People would accept the results and not riot on the Capitol as they did, which scared the crap out of those same cheaters because it showed them how vulnerable they are to an angry America. That’s why the Capitol is still closed to the public.  They are scared of the public.

Now you might ask why those influential House members and the Senate would be so scared even though they have all the power.  Well, because they know what I’m telling you now, but they didn’t respect you enough to figure it out.  The people who protested on January 6th were a small portion of the population who knew what was going on and displayed literal intolerance.  When Mike Pence showed little stomach for the fight that had to happen, people were upset about it.  And they haven’t let go.  Traveling all over the United States, I see it.  People are not happy with Biden, they feel cheated, and they are in the extreme majority.  The little Beltway types do not have enough support across the country to control the 80 plus million who are increasingly figuring out that their vote was robbed and the person they voted for was cheated out of an office they picked him for.  It’s not about Trump or Trump’s desire to win. It’s about having choice removed from voters and being given some piece of junk they didn’t want. 

Now the day after Trump’s speech, you can see how guilty the Biden people are because of what they didn’t talk about.  Usually, after Trump gives an address, the media will showcase little bits of it to play the presidents off each other, which is suitable for their network coverage.  Instead, all the guilty parties did everything they could to not talk about Trump’s speech.  Now, if you thought you had won the presidency with 80 million people, you’d say it. You’d push back against what Trump is saying.  Instead, they are again hoping to run out the clock.  They are hoping that people will move on to some other topic, such as race relations.  Nobody dared talk about the coverage of that speech and what the lack of it meant to their ratings.  Well, OANN covered the address, as did Newsmax, and their ratings show it.  They beat everyone during that time slot.  But the deal between the networks is hurting them, and they can’t go back now; they are too far down the rabbit hole on this thing to reveal their part in it now.  Like a bunch of crooks who have been caught but are in separate holding cells while the interrogation continues, they are all hoping to keep their story straight.  That story is, there was no election fraud, there is no proof of it, and that Biden won.  But with each month, people are questioning the election fraud more and more.  Now the evidence is stacking up and quick.  The Jim Acosta position is turning Michael Avenatti fast, faster than anybody anticipated.  Most of them delusional themselves, believing that Americans would have moved on to the next shiny object by now.  But they haven’t, so what are they going to do, ignore the world as it burns around them?

Jim Acosta and those like him are looking to openly destroy the premise of America and turn it into a progressive subservient of the United Nations, calling what happened over the election, The Big Lie. It’s the same tactic used in calling Republicans racist when that political party freed the slaves while it was Democrats who fought to keep slavery intact.  And in this election case, it was Democrats who participated in and created The Big Lie.  Only it doesn’t mean what you think it does, because they are the creators of the term and have sold it as such.  Racism, January 6th, Covid being created in a Wuhan lab with full knowledge of China, are all covers for the vile act of election fraud they committed, the biggest crime ever attempted on earth.  It involved not just the thousands of people who knew about it, but it involved foreign countries as well.  It was an invasion from the outside and the inside, and they have been caught.  And you can see how guilty they are by what they don’t talk about, even though Trump is forcing them to through his influence leadership.  I keep telling you guys, “ghosting it” is one of the most powerful strategic tools humankind has ever unleashed, and Trump is doing it.  And The Big Lie is turning into The Big Truth faster than people like the Biden administration can run for the hills to avoid what happens next.

Rich Hoffman

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The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How to Fund Science: Get government out of the process so they can’t corrupt it

We need to get government out of funding science

If we have learned anything from the embarrassing Covid experience worldwide, it’s the validation that you do not want government funding to be the lifeline to the sciences.  Because when it is, such as what we saw with the NIH under Dr. Fauci, we have the all too tempting scenario where scientists will say anything to get that funding, including whatever governments want them to do.  For instance, to control elections, like made-up death totals, false models, bloviated cable news statements about the danger of a virus, the origin of a virus, and the long-term consequences of a virus to secure that funding.  What we have in modern times is not the best science that a rich country can buy; what we have is essentially the Institute of Science that they had in the famous book Atlas Shrugged.  A superficial branch of the government which attempts to quell people’s concerns as the government seeks to dominate every aspect of our lives.  And that is partly why it took me so long to write my latest book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business; it’s not because it takes a long time to write a book. Still, instead, it took a long time to look at our world and ask and answer the hard questions about existence, how money is made, and what kind of world we should build for this next century.  To do that, we have to surgically take out a cancer called progressivism that started to seep into America during the end of the 19th century and advanced to critical mass before the roaring 20s.  Most of us wouldn’t know any better because it happened slowly over time before many of us were even born.  So nobody even thinks to ask the question as we build our assumptions on failure after failure disguised as success.  Yet, I had the fortune recently to travel most of the United States, particularly in the Old West, and dig into our history and consider what a healthy government should look like instead of what we have.  Two fine examples of why the government should not be funding science emerged, but that private industry should, became evident. 

When Andrew Carnegie told the famous paleontologist Earl Douglas that he wanted something big to fill the great museum that the steel tycoon was building in Pittsburg, it set Douglas west into the Morrison Formation site to achieve that goal.  Carnegie didn’t know what Douglas would find.  He just knew what he needed and discovered the fabulous quarry that is still there to this day and continues to tell the world much of what we know about dinosaurs.  If it hadn’t been for Andrew Carnegie’s money, the giant apatosaurus that Douglas brought back to fill that museum would have never been found if the government had been funding that endeavor; likely, the giant sauropod would still be lost out there in that Utah mountaintop.  It took a prominent thinking capitalist like we used to make in America to give science a platform, which was the case for most of the early development of the science fields from archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, even astronomy.  Remember when the Obama administration told NASA that they should be studying Islamic contributions to science in the past instead of thinking of going to the stars yet again?  NASA listened and did what they were told because they wanted continued government funding.  See the problem? 

Teton National Park at Jenny Lake

Another example is the long story of making Teton National Park possible because essentially John D. Rockefeller started buying up land in Jackson Hole to make it possible for the government to set that area apart for a national park eventually.  He wanted that site to stay pristine and undeveloped.  In a video I show here from Instagram, you can see just how beautiful the Teton’s are.  The amenities at Jenny Lake, for instance, are incredible.  Now I could make a lot of arguments that Jackson Hole would have been better off developed and that I might want to enjoy Jenny Lake from a condo porch rather than a National Park.  But the concept of our National Parks is a good one.  It is good to see these places as they have always been, undeveloped.  It’s suitable for scientific study to discuss the socialism of these National Parks managed by the government another time.  After seeing the Tetons up close, it was good that Horace Albright was able to convince Rockefeller to spend a small fortune to buy the land then donate it to the government to create Teton National Park as a separate park from Yellowstone.  It was then signed into being by the great president Calvin Cooledge because it gave us what we see today.  But it took a personality like John D. Rockefeller to do it.  Without big-time capitalists operating with such large amounts of capital, places like the Teton National Park would have never happened. 

This idea that rich people are evil, or that they should “pay their fair share,” as determined by some socialist government viewpoint or the lazy and wretched in society who are naturally below-the-line thinkers, is the sure way to secure failure in all aspects of life.  In July of 2021, it is not an accident that three private industry tycoons of significant capital are going to space.  Richard Branson is about to personally fly to space himself to demonstrate the safety of his Virgin Galactic company.  Right after him, Jeff Bezos is flying into space with his Blue Origin rockets.  And Elon Musk is planning to get his Starship into an orbital test flight on a fast track to get back to the moon.  The government is not doing these things at NASA.  Government funding shapes what they do, which is why they have been stuck in a holding pattern of innovation for such a long time.  Private industry driven by great capital enterprises is how science is best developed.  It’s also how you get the best answers to complicated problems. We see the failures with Covid and how big pharma tied directly to FDA approvals have to play the government game if they want to exist, so they will do so whatever the government wants.  The key is to separate these problems, not to join them together as one entity.

That is the offerings in my book to identify these problems and separate them as they have before for a better approach for the future.  I could speak all day about the need for more understanding in science.  We are learning a great deal about our past that makes our assumptions here and now seem silly.  Which needs attention in just about all the sciences.  Truthfully, where we are today is embarrassing when comparing the rate of discovery to what it was when private funding drove most of the results, such as in the examples provided here.  But that is the case with all scientific fields.  Instead of intelligent scientists finding the freedom to discover, they are more like prostitutes catering to the desires of perverts in government. If the government had discovered flight and stuck its fat socialist ass in the development of it, we would never have gone from flying a kite to landing on the moon in just 70 years; we’d still be looking for the string for the kite in the garage of the Wright Brothers.  Government is slow, unmotivated, and essentially corrupt no matter where it is formed in the world.  They are needed to some extent for a free society to function well, but they must be as small as possible to stay out of the way of actual progress.  And we’ve done it well before.  Our task for the future is to look at those times where we did get it right and learn to remove the cancer of progressivism that is now threatening to kill us as patients.  That’s essentially the problem of our times.

Rich Hoffman

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The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What I Learned from Cookie, The Rodeo Clown: Liberals don’t have a chance

I have to thank Cookie, the rodeo clown, for a great night at the rodeo in Cody, Wyoming.  One of my sons-in-law suggested we go to the rodeo as a family while doing some extensive travel out west.  On our way to where we were staying for the night, he pointed out the big arena dedicated to nightly rodeos during the summer months, complete with mountains and vast desert in the background. I’ve been to rodeos in the past, the kind that comes to towns like Butler County, Ohio in a fairground setting, or some of the big ones that come to the arena in downtown Cincinnati. Still, I can say that I had never had the opportunity to see one in the west, where they usually do them in town.  There, they are the centerpieces of social activity, and this open-air arena in Cody was meant to hold thousands of people, of which it was filled when we arrived.  The sun was setting, the air was chilling, and it was just about a perfect day.  The crowd was filled with real Americans, and we were about as far away from Washington D.C. politics as we could get, and it was refreshing.  Many F-Biden flags were blowing from the tailgates in the parking lot, which was an otherwise reminder of what was happening in the world outside of Cody.  Nowhere did we see a corrosive liberal, which made the hotdogs and concession Cokes taste so much better. 

The Rodeo in Cody, Wyoming

When you hear stories like the one from this week of New York prosecutors harassing Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg over accusations of tax dealings, we all know it’s purely political; how the political left weaponizes law enforcement to impose social will on all participants in society.  That was one reason I was on a trip out west with my family, which consisted of over 5000 miles by the time we were back home.  I wanted to see lots of open places where there were few people so that I could get right in my mind the fight that we had before us.  I don’t live in a big city like New York.  Cincinnati has all the good things of a big city and all the good things of a rural community, so I’m pleased with it as a place to be.  But it is on the front line of the greater global battle that is going on between global progressives and traditional conservatives.  And when I need a vacation, I more need to be away from the people causing all the trouble than really embarking on a regional endeavor.  I knew where we were going, but I was a little surprised by the height of the mountains crossing Wyoming going to Cody, next to Yellowstone, followed by a vast desert between the mountains and our destination for the night. 

Arriving in Cody, Wyoming, founded by Buffalo Bill, a person who has had a significant impact on my life over the years, it was like a mirage that just arose out of the harsh countryside.  I know of Buffalo Bill because of my exposure to the western arts over the years, specifically the Annie Oakley Festival in Darke County, Ohio, every year.  Annie Oakley worked in Buffalo Bill’s show, and that was what that celebration honored, was a tribute which I often participated in those Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows.  So, for me going to a town founded based on Buffalo Bill was quite a pleasant pilgrimage.  Just visiting a place like that was enough for me.  When we decided actually to participate in the culture of that town and go to a rodeo at the capital of rodeos in the world, well, that made a special night spectacular for me.  While driving through the desert to get there, I was thinking about the problems back home, in the political world.  I was wondering how anybody ever thought they were going to get away with election fraud, and how they were going to try to divert everyone’s attention from the crimes of the century with Covid, and mass voter fraud, the phony prosecution of the Trump Organization, Rudy Giuliani himself, Sydney Powell and many others.  Justice had to be enacted toward the vile despots who had to take over our government, and I was thinking about how to do that as we arrived.  For me, Cody, Wyoming, was like a nice drink of cold water when I needed it most. 

Enjoying the atmosphere

A rodeo is often made or broken based on the rodeo clowns who work the night entertaining the audience while corralling the animals after the sets are completed safely behind the scenes.  They have rodeos like this every night all over the west; I saw advertisements for them in Deadwood, Cheyenne, even down in Vernal, Utah.  Conservatives were entirely in their element; there was likely no Democrat who voted for Joe Biden anywhere close.  Probably the government workers at the National Parks and down in Jackson, Wyoming, but all other places were strong Republicans who were still very supportive of President Trump.  Cookie, the rodeo clown, knew that as he told jokes during the show.  I have included an example here for review.  Most of the audience members were not from back east; this was an everyday ritual for them.  But for me, it was much needed after a rough year of politics.  Where I live, the Biden presidency is like a cloud over everything in life, primarily because I am politically active.  Not everyone pays as close attention to these kinds of things as I do.  But for the people of Cody, Wyoming, all they knew of Joe Biden was indicated on those flags flying from those truck beds.  They had no tolerance for liberals, and I had an answer to a question I never really thought of asking until I went to that rodeo.  There would never be a political insurgency in America.  There was no threat of these coastal liberals taking over the country.  I had at that point seen enough of the country to know that these were not a conquered people.  The only reason there wasn’t an all-out war between conservatives and liberals was that the distances of land kept them far enough apart to prevent the conflict.  But there was no risk of liberals taking away nights at the rodeo like I was watching.  Most of what we saw of that fight was just a Truman Show-like setting that existed entirely in media.  It had no grip on reality.

Cookie, the Rodeo Clown, wasn’t trying to change the world; he and his partners were doing their good and honest thing.  They were undoubtedly Christian soldiers who were deeply committed to a conservative lifestyle reflected in their jokes of the evening.  After the show, I talked to the rodeo clowns. I noticed that they had crosses on their facepaint indicating a religious foundation for the performance of each of them, including Cookie.  I appreciated that because it let me know that these were not people who would be pushed around, the way progressives on both coasts thought they could get away with doing.  Where the rubber hit the road out in places like Cody, Wyoming, there was no yielding to evil.  They were more than ready to go to war with it, and on that night, I saw just how hard of a line of defense we had in America.  America was far from broken.  Liberals had no idea what kind of fight they had picked and how far toward a loss completely they were already on.

Rich Hoffman

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The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Vote of RV Culture: What it means to future elections

A year ago, my wife and I were at the pool store getting items to open our pool when she convinced me to stop by an RV store to look at RVs, which she secretly hoped to persuade me to buy.  I reported on how many Trump supporters I met at the RV store both in front and behind the sales counter and I learned really quick that due to Covid, election fraud, and a general hatred of liberalism, the RV market was my kind of place.  The people buying them, the campgrounds all over the country, and even the roadside pull-offs where RVs parked together to catch a break were like Trump political rallies everywhere there were RVs.  Now, 10,000 miles later, I can report that I understand the RV culture well, really well.  I have since been to most states in the country and have learned a lot about the Trump voter and the anger behind the movement that transcends President Trump himself.  On one of our very first trips just before the election of 2020 in Ashville, North Carolina, I was a little shocked to see Trump flags on many of the RVs parked at the KOA there and wondered if they might offend others at the campground.  The answer was that very few RVers supported anybody but President Trump.  If there were Biden supporters, they were a very quiet bunch because I would see the same behavior over the next year in nearly every state.  If there were 80 million people who voted for Joe Biden as they say he had in the last election, those votes did not come from Americans.  They came from made-up cheated ballots of dead people, Chinese infiltration, and scandalous schemes of passing out the free crack to voters down and out who didn’t even know there was an election going on. 

Yet I just returned from a massive multistate trip out west from Deadwood to Vernal, Utah, and all kinds of places in between before cutting back across Denver, Kansas City, then back to Cincinnati.  Gas prices were escalating by the day due to Joe Biden’s incompetency or deliberate malice.  And I have seen more RVs on the road than I ever have in my life.  Reporting from the road, I have yet to see a single supporter of Joe Biden anywhere, yet along the nation’s highways, there are many Trump signs, including one just outside of St. Louis saying in big letters, TRUMP WON.  At the start of 2020, after the depressing election theft we saw, after the January 6th debacle where Mike Pence failed to kick the election back to the states and the trouble that ensued due to hurt feelings, and the constant reminder that a Civil War could break out at any moment, my wife and I took to the road to sort things out. I can say after all those mentioned miles; I get what’s going on.  All too well.  I see it clearly, and it all started when we bought our RV with many thousands of other Trump supporters who were preparing for a cold winter in America that would last an entire election cycle.  And this war wasn’t with guns or even protests.  It was with people taking to the road to get away from government in their own little hotel rooms that were out of touch from the infrastructure of the travel industry which government so greatly influenced intrusively. 

As we took these big trips across the nation, gas prices have steadily increased as the Biden administration did its intentional damage.  Those who don’t know RVs get about 6 miles per gallon, where a super-efficient SUV like what we drive gets about 11 miles per gallon.  I had a guy in Texas nearly faint as he pulled up next to me at the gas pump to report he was getting 5 miles per gallon.  I told him that I had the wind to our back at that moment, and I was being pushed along a bit at 70 miles per hour, and we were getting 15 MPG.  With gas prices out West in Utah and Idaho currently at $3.35 and traveling 5,400 miles on just this last trip, you can do the math.  It’s expensive to travel by RV.  Add to that the campgrounds cost about a third of what a local hotel room would cost and the cost between flying and using lodging with rental cars is about the same as driving an RV everywhere.  However, with the RV, you can get to specific places that you can’t get to with airplanes, like the National Parks, and you can take your room with you.  We had the same bedroom in Idaho as we do in our driveway, and there is the sense of always having your home with you that you get with a profoundly satisfying RV.  

Now for our clan, the cost of a trip like that was about $500 per day.  It was worth every penny because the experiences were so unusual.  But what did shock me is that we were nowhere near alone.  I had thought that with the gas prices, fewer people would be with us on the road.  Instead, there were crowds of people in RVs everywhere we went.  Whether it was the World’s Largest Truck Stop in Iowa or Wall Drug in South Dakota, there were RVs around and people willing to spend the high costs of driving them despite the gas prices.  I thought of government manipulators like Cass Sunstein. They have shown that the government says it can change behavior among human beings in the same way that mice are led through a maze in pursuit of cheese, with financial incentives that steered the mind where the government wanted people to go through rules, regulations, and cost.  But after what I saw, I don’t think people would stop using RVs even with gas prices up over $5 per gallon.  The experience of taking an RV on a trip wasn’t about the cost for most people; it was purely about freedom, which is why we had bought ours last year with the Covid lockdowns at the height of their power.   The government had let down so many people that the trust was gone forever, and gone too was the travel infrastructure which had changed politically over the last few years into something nobody seems to have foreseen.

Personally, buying an RV was one of the smartest things my wife and I have ever done.  We didn’t plan when we bought it to take it all over the United States within a year of the purchase—but having it has inspired us to take those long, less apparent trips to places that aren’t so easy to get to by air travel.  The independence from the grid of travel that RVs provide is more than worth the cost.  But more than anything is the sense that we can function away from government regulation as much as possible. In contrast, a hotel room and air travel are just too heavily regulated.  If costs are similar, and by the time you go through the TSA lines, you could drive to most places in America, then the independence of the RV makes them very attractive to the type of people who voted for Trump.  People who value free will and a lack of government oversight.  This, to me, says a lot about what Americans are about, which is not picked up in any poll or survey.  The political left doesn’t understand what is about to happen to them.  That much is clear. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Yes, the National Parks are Full: That’s what happens when government tampers with the economy

One unmistakable thing is that if you get a chance to travel this summer as I have been doing, the National Parks are packed.  They were filled way over capacity, everywhere.  Park Rangers are perplexed with the number of people they are suddenly dealing with and are complaining that there needs to be a reservation system at the National Parks to help them manage the capacity.  Now that is a very “government” thing to do; rather than embrace the surge in National Park interest, they are looking for ways to turn them into a BMV where visitors need to take a number before visiting to see their favorite tree.  In the video above, I talk about the several parks my family visited recently and the news report about Zion in Utah.  The story was from Idaho, which I saw on a television screen while staying there; the capacity problem was a direct byproduct of the government screw-up on Covid, where people were confined in their homes for a year. Now that they are free, they are doing all the things they wanted to do over that period, and the surge is the reaction, which government doesn’t know how to handle. 

I tend to have a soft spot for park rangers and anybody who works in the park systems.  We have an America the Beautiful pass, which I am very proud of.  This year, we have used it a lot, which essentially waives the 35 dollar fee that it takes to get into all the parks.  As this story about National Park capacity was breaking, we visited Yellowstone, one of the biggest ones.  We were in the Tetons.  We even went down into Dinosaur National Monument, and there are fees to get into all those parks covered by America The Beautiful passes.  I am typically in a pretty good mood when I’m visiting a National Park, so I overlook more than often the apparent liberalism of the government employees, including park rangers.  But I heard more bitching from them than I cared to.  Even over at the Yellowstone lodges at Old Faithful, workers complained about the number of people at the park because I was there in a midweek setting, and the employees expected an easy day.  Instead, at 9 AM, they had rushes of people that resembled 2 PM on a Saturday, and they were not happy about it. 

I deal with these kinds of things by getting up at 6 AM and getting everywhere before everyone else does.  The crowds didn’t bother me much until we were leaving.  The crowds can be managed if you think out of the box.  But if you think you’re going to wake up at noon and hit the parks, you can forget it, which is why Zion has already implemented an appointment system.  They had an appointment system at Dinosaur National Monument as well, which irritated me.  We were so early in the morning that it didn’t matter, but in the middle of Utah, they were seeing surges that the park rangers were having a hard time dealing with.  It was both fun to watch and grossly sick because they were essentially upset that they had to work, which they aren’t used to.  Other parks are feeling the pressure.  Thankfully when we were there, Yellowstone hadn’t yet done such a thing as a reservation system.  It defies the purpose of spontaneous adventure when you must check in with a park ranger to see a geyser.  But these are new problems caused by the government that government is not prepared to deal with.

What I find interesting is the human reaction to the problem.  The Covid lockdowns were pretty scary stuff.  The idea that a government that didn’t want to control the virus that came from China could destroy the economy, lock people in their homes and expect some tame result at the end of it is unfathomably ignorant.  There were solutions that were ignored, such as hydroxychloroquine and zinc.  Covid-19 was a self-imposed stupidity because there were ways to solve the problem.  The government ignored them, hoping to control people until this July 4th Holiday under the Biden administration.  But the dam broke this spring as people pushed their governors to ignore the CDC rules and reopen their economies, and thus, out came this rush of interest in the National Parks.  It looked for a time that the new standard would remain and that we would never return to a time in America without masks and social distancing.  But much to our credit, people got sick of being lied to, and they just started to ignore the government, and now there is this massive surge in National Park attendance.  People spent their time in isolation thinking about the things they’d like to do, like going to Yellowstone, and the moment they could, they did. 

We saw the same thing at Jenny Lake in the Tetons.  It was early in the morning when we arrived, and cars had already filled the parking lot and were piled up down the road toward Jackson for miles.  Now Jenny Lake is very nice; they have great accommodations.  Once we finally arrived in the little village, they have there like restrooms, a visitor center, and a gift shop at the foot of the magnificent mountains; it looked like Disney World with people occupying almost every bit of the available sidewalk.  It was packed.  The employees at those places had a kind of blasted look on their faces.  I was glad to see it.  I think it was good for people to get out and see such magnificent places.  I think it’s also good for the employees to be challenged a bit.  Maybe they got jobs with the National Park Service because they were liberal and didn’t want to work very hard, but this was a good reality check.  Whatever the viewpoint, the only reason can come from people leaving their homes and seeing their national parks, even if they were crowded.  I didn’t mind the crowds at all, but there were significant crowds that would have just been worse if there was a reservation system. 

The lesson is that this is what happens when government tampers with the will of the people.  Unforeseen circumstances are bound to arise.  This built-up serge of interest in National Parks was not planned. The reaction by the public has taken the government quite by shock; they were very flat-footed in dealing with the market needs.  And since the government does not make decisions based on market forces but bureaucratic sentiment, they were clueless about the outcome.  But that problem isn’t for us, the visitors. They’re going to have to figure it all out, the government. They’ll have to complain to someone else because we don’t want to hear it.  In the future, when they think of shutting down society and the economy that fuels it, they need to think of these mistakes.  These surges may last for years.  Things may never get back to normal for the National Parks as the lockdowns look to have triggered people’s desire to do something in their life they used to put off.  I suspect that the new normal that everyone has been talking about isn’t accepting lockdowns and more government regulations on personal behavior. Instead, an increase in people not putting off what they could do today might have otherwise been inclined to wait until tomorrow.  Because with government, they may screw up everything tomorrow, leaving today as the only choice to do something.

Rich Hoffman

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Mt Rushmore: God spoke to me there

God spoke to me at Mt. Rushmore

I was deeply touched by the Mt. Rushmore firework display that President Trump and Kristi Noem did during the 4th of July Celebrations of 2020.  I was riveted by the entire ceremony and still remember watching the complete coverage on television.  With Air Force One flying in front of Mt. Rushmore while landing at Rapid City for the eventual arrival of Trump to give his holiday speech, the whole event was a reminder to me that all was right with the world.  After all, it was a hostile election year, the world was looking to destroy us all who voted and supported President Trump, and we were deep in the lockdowns at that time for Covid.  We had no idea if we were even going to have an NFL season at that point.  The world was a mess, and this firework display in the Black Hills was the first time a large group of anybody had gathered without social distancing and the stupid Covid masks to do anything.  It took a lot of guts for South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to allow the event, let alone for Trump, to attend personally in a campaign-style get-together.  It was a fantastic event to see, and I savored every moment of it.  It impacted me so much that within a year, I would visit there myself with my family to stand in the same spot that Trump had given that magnificent speech. 

A Holy Place

As I said, I have been traveling a lot so far in 2021, so far 10,000 miles in my RV visiting the lesser-known parts of the United States that don’t get talked about on cable news.  If you watch the mainstream news, which is inspired these days heavily by global expansion interests with a very un-American slant, you’d think that everything was going to Hell in a handbasket.  But truthfully, things are much better than they appear, and I had that experience while visiting Mt. Rushmore myself over the last few weeks.  I was not disappointed.  I spent some good time there with my family, bought a lot of books in the gift shops, and felt compelled to stand in all the places that Trump had stepped.  To see how things on that fateful firework day looked to him and get a temperature of what America was thinking despite what we hear on the nightly news.  Mt. Rushmore is the kind of place everyone should visit; it is in many ways more critical and honest than Washington, D.C. is. I’ve been to D.C. several times, but not Mt. Rushmore.  Rushmore is one of those places that isn’t near anything in my life patterns.  So I had to go out of my way to get there.  Washington comes up much more often since many things happen around the Capital.  Perhaps that’s why Rushmore has managed to preserve much better what the essence of America truly is and has become a palace of intellectualism that has deep meaning and is highly substantive. 

I had a moment at Rushmore; the rest of my family was getting ice cream at the fine establishment that was there on-site; it was very crowded, so the line was long.  That left one of my daughters and I to go to the nearest book store that they have at the monument.  I was looking for treasures I hadn’t read before in books, which I had already read 75% of what they had there.  But there was 25% I hadn’t, which led me to a nice stack of books I bought, which I discussed in the video above.  As I was buying them, I could look out the window at the bottom of the observation station and see the sculpture.  My daughter was looking at the giant mural of Gutzon Borglum and his sculpture rappelling all over the making of Mt. Rushmore, and she noticed that all those hard workers were wearing hats honest to the period.  She said, “Dad, you were born a century too late.” Because I have always worn hats, I love hats, especially big-brimmed expensive hats made of leather and felt.  I thought about what she said as I looked at my stack of books and replied, “maybe I was born when I was to keep the memory of that time alive and to explain it in these crazy times to people confused and less fortunate to arrive at such a place when maybe it could be the most important thing in their lives.” It’s true; I do love places like that; it is composed of my two favorite things in life, great literature, and studious influence while displaying the far-flung ambitions of people like Borglum.  To build Mt. Rushmore there in those Black Hills in the way he did was extraordinary, perhaps for just the purpose of these times, when people needed to remember most why their country was so important and unique. 

I was always sure I would go to Mt. Rushmore one day, but my accelerated urgency was because of what Trump had done last year.  I had to make my pilgrimage.  It seemed to me and still feels that way, as the most important thing I could have done, and somehow I managed to have most of my immediate family there to do it, my two kids, their husbands, and all my grandkids, even the family dog.  It was a glorious day, and I spent a bit of particular time with both of my daughters that only they understood.  And I stood at that spot where Trump gave his speech and just let the events of the last year wash over me.  I wanted to see Rushmore not just for what Gutzon Borglum wanted us to see of his grand sculpture, but for how Trump and Noem had seen the world on that courageous day when Covid ruled the world. They defied it to host a firework display to celebrate our freedom in the way only America celebrates. Yes, I was having a supercharged moment, and I feel thus inspired currently and very fulfilled.  Whatever we think of as God spoke to me there, I know what needs to be done.  It was a magical place, and since leaving there, I have taken much of it with me with my books purchased at that moment mentioned.  I may be out of step with the current, because yes, we should remember what we did well in the past.  And Mt. Rushmore was created to have these moments, and there were thousands and thousands of people there for the same reasons as me.  They wanted to touch the meaning of America even if all they saw were faces carved in stone and experienced the patriotism of the Black Hills by the tourist traps, which I love, especially in Keystone.  I left there knowing I’ll come back often.  I recommend to everyone that if you haven’t been, make plans to do so.  Go and see what Gutzon Borglum intended to share with all of us, his intense love of America, captured there in an epic format for the future to learn from.  And in his small way, and with us to gain from that knowledge, the preservation of America is important and worth fighting for, which is precisely what I intend to do.

Rich Hoffman

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