Tag: Buffalo Bill

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

What Freedom Means to Me: ‘The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline’

What Freedom Means

Another treasure that has come out of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is yet another wonderful book called The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline. I would say that my visit to that excellent museum in Cody, Wyoming was equivalent to discovering a massive chunk of gold and igniting a gold rush in California or South Dakota. It was a rich experience that has produced treasures that kept on giving. I saw many very wonderful things in America during 2021, but so far, my visit to that Center of the West and the books I found there have been life-changing, given the state of the world we are all experiencing. I went there looking for answers, and I found plenty. And within that book about Ned Buntline, which was an alias for the real person E. Z. C. Judson, was a passage that I thought was particularly potent. You see, Ned Buntline was at his time one of the most prolific writers in America, in the world for that matter. He influenced people like Mark Twain and later would give birth to the Republic serials, the movie career of John Wayne, create Buffalo Bill, and essentially launch modern entertainment as we know it now. But I found a passage particularly relevant to me which said by Judson, “I found that to make a living I must write trash for the masses, for he endeavors to write for the critical few, and do his genius justice, will go hungry if he has no other means of support.” I have never read a more accurate statement. 

Obviously, I write a tremendous amount of material. I always have, and it is the most frequent question I get asked. “Why do you do it,” they say. Well, I would say I do it because I love it. And also cherish my freedom to such an extent that I do not want other people involved in my doing it. When you sell writing, you bring others into the process, and I have found that I hate giving up those freedoms. In my early years, I wrote in newspapers and online periodicals, such as American Thinker and such things. I had frequent contact with Wilshire Blvd. agents in Hollywood as I was in the mode to sell screenplays to get into the movie business. I didn’t think that I was very attached to those bodies of work, but I discovered that I wouldn’t say I liked to work within the confines of editors who all had a liberal slant compared to my positions. I remember sitting in an office with an agent who wanted to represent me and listening to them tell me that I needed to tone down the violence of an award-winning screenplay that I had called The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia because it would turn people off. I thought that was nonsense, and later that year, Kill Bill came out, which was along the same lines as what I was writing, and it was very successful. It wasn’t the violence that the agent had a problem with. Instead, it was just their way of sticking their nose into my work and shaping it into something they could relate to, which happens all the time.

I’ve written books, short stories and been in contact with just about every publishing house that exists, and they all left the same bad taste in my mouth. I learned over time that the only way to write for a living was to do as Ned Buntline did, to listen to the editorial critics and focus on the masses. But to me, that felt cheap, and it made me not love the writing process. So I decided to make a living in different ways; I had many other talents, after all. Did I really need to sell my writing? Of course not, life is what you make it, and if you love what you do and don’t really care who sees it, then there is a certain freedom to it that has much more value. In these modern times where newspapers are irrelevant, there are plenty of options for the self-publisher who can write for themselves, and if a critical few enjoy the work, good for them. So that is how I came to write so much in the way that I do. That is also why there aren’t more writers out there unveiling the truth about things, because they always have editors who reel them in from the touchy stuff, like talking about Covid, election fraud, or whatever company policy the publisher has. To be free in life, you have to function without the restrictions of other people’s opinions.   They may not like what you are doing; you may find that you write for only that critical, vital few. But it’s better work, it’s more important because of its authenticity, and it feels better as a person to produce it. 

I thought this was all particularly important, at least to me, in defining freedom. We talk about it all the time. But when we say it, what do we want freedom from? In a free market system, we should all be free within reason to pursue our own way in life without some centralized government pointing us in the direction of their deficiencies. And just because you are free, there is no promise that people will like what you do. But with Ned Buntline, would he have traded authenticity for all his fame and fortune? In life, he was a crazy person with all kinds of deficiencies, many of which I would attribute to a genius that had to be snuffed out to write material for those masses to make a living. The contrast in that life was too much for him, and he lived a reckless and uninhibited, sometimes lawless life. We often see it in such people who know better than to live the confines of a life controlled by others. They turn to the bottle or reckless relationships with other people and find themselves damaged as people as a result all too often. That is the cost of a lack of freedom in people’s lives. Everyone has to figure out what freedom means to them. For me, it’s being able to do what I love without other people sticking their noses into the process. Writing is not a collaborative process where movie making is. I prefer to write what I want, let people think what they want, and do whatever happens as a result.

Meanwhile, I’m on to the next dozen topics, which is how it is with me. And I love it that way. Freedom for me is not being stuck in the mud of other people’s lives, especially the government. And I love it so much that I prefer not to sell my work to the masses but to produce it for myself and share it with whomever. But never to be stuck or shaped by the opinions of others. And in that way, I am one of the freest people on earth, and I will continue that way. So when we talk about freedom, we have to define what that is for ourselves. When I am asked why I write so much, that passage in The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline says it all. And it says much more about the freedoms we all expect as Americans when we point at a government and call it tyranny. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Pioneers of Promotion: How the press became so liberal and the need to undo it

Pioneers of Promotion and the Modern Media

I’m a little old to be saying things like, “something changed my life.” Instead, it’s more like I’ve been looking for my car keys all my life, and I finally found them in the least expected place.  And you could probably tell after finishing up another great book called Pioneers of Promotion that I really enjoyed reading that fantastic book.  It’s another one that I picked up at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, this past summer, and it turned out to be a real treasure.  When I first found the book, I held it in my hand for a long time, considering whether or not it would be of any use to our modern times or if it would be just a fun history lesson.  As it turned out, it was the skeleton key I had been looking for to many of our modern problems, the evil we were all witnessing turned on its head in such destructive ways.  The book is about press agents Toby Hamilton for Barnum & Baily Circus, Moses P. Handy for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and John Burke for the Buffalo Bill Wild West show essentially all who wrote the rules for modern marketing, which hasn’t changed at all over the last hundred years.  It was strangely relevant to me as the first professional career I wanted to do growing up was as a film director.  So I have some detailed experience with the inner workings of the media, which I have used for the current freedom movement that was a tough decision for me over a decade ago.  I had many connections forming in Hollywood; I knew agents on Wilshire Blvd, but I had to become someone else to play that game, and I grew to resent those forces.  Now I understand how those forces were put in place and what they are protecting to this very day.  To say it was a fabulous book by Joe Dobbow would be a magnificent understatement. 

Even more relevant is that over those years where decisions had to be made, did I want to form my life around the unsaid rules of a career, or did I want to use my natural talents to fight for justice?  My involvement in wild west shows that impersonated micro versions of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West were central to my life.  For a few decades now, I often talk about my reset weekend at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Greenville, Ohio, where I participate in the event directly inspired by Buffalo Bill.  I have a personal friend who looks so much like Buffalo Bill Cody that they hire him each year to be their event mascot.  And I got involved in this group because one of my favorite movies was Bronco Billy by Clint Eastwood growing up.  I have been thinking about these themes for a very long time.  This lost America was at the heart of the themes I was always in love with.  I saw more of it than most because I had traditional farmer grandparents and parents who exposed me to these dying elements as a kid. But it always left me a little bit thirsty and never quite satisfied.  When I became an adult, I latched onto these old western images for clarity into a time when America was great, was the envy of the world, and was growing into an economic threat to the various aristocracies that had been jealously guarding their power in whatever little groups they resided in.  I have always loved the idea of a Buffalo Bill America, but I didn’t understand why or how relevant it could and would be for me later in life.  It’s just something I knew and, to this day, is at the core of everything I do, more than ever. 

Life moves fast, and I had been out to Hollywood pursuing that career when justice called.  I learned the games and how to play them, but ultimately it came down to me something the Ned Buntline used to say about authenticity, which I’ll talk about later.  But I didn’t want to be one more phony out there just creating images for a commercial industry.  I didn’t just want to be in a show.  I wanted to be the real deal, almost in reverse of how Buffalo Bill came to be, or the promotors who brought pulp fiction to the preservation of the Wild West, which has preserved in so many ways our modern understanding of America and prevented its complete destruction from the various elements of the world who absolutely hate it because they didn’t think of it first.  So going down that path didn’t allow me to travel the west as I had wanted and explore the things that interested me most.  It took me many years to block off the kind of time I did in 2021 to discover everything that was always right under my nose.  Looking back on this year, it was just a bit of a miracle that I was able to spend a day at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West for a day with most of my entire family, grandkids included.  We went to that region in our RV to explore Yellowstone, which we did.  But going to the rodeo there in Cody, Wyoming, then the Center of the West turned out to be like finding those car keys that I had always been looking for.  And it wasn’t just the museum, which was fantastic, but it’s the books I bought from there which were so unique and specific to problems I was always wondering about.  Pioneers of Promotion turned out to be everything I was looking for when we set out west to retouch ourselves with America after the 2020 election disappointments and get a firm understanding of what America was.

The modern villains essentially hated the Buffalo Bill Wild West. They turned the tables on what Burke, Hamilton, and Handy had done to launch the contemporary press agent concept to the world, which is at the center of all commercial enterprise to this very day, including website development.  There was a line from Pioneers of Promotion that John Burke said to critics of the Buffalo Bill Wild West show that I found tremendously appealing and relevant to my own view of the world when he lashed out, “Damn it all!  What we are doing is educating you, people!  I am not afraid to say, sir, that the Wild West symposium of equestrian ability has done more for this country than the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the life of General George Washington.  Its mission is to teach manhood and common sense.  We are not traveling to make money, sir, but only to do good.”  Those who wanted to destroy America copied the methods of these pioneers of promotion and sought to do the opposite.  To uneducate America into a conquered condition, and it’s there that we must focus on undoing the mess.  And that started with Trump, a P.T. Barnum type himself who had served as a platform to return to these American ways of thinking.  Burke and his friends from that period of the late 1800s knew what they were doing.  It was attractive to me all my life, and now it’s quite clear what the weapons have been to undo America through the same method.  And the intentions toward our own demise that much clearer.  It’s one thing always to know it, but it’s quite nice to have it all summed up in a moment of revelation that solidifies thought and inspires action in ways that just weren’t possible before knowing something firsthand. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Nature of Corruption: Uncovering history at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West

The Nature of Corruption

I can’t say it enough, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, turned out to be a treasure trove of philosophy that was just what America needed at just the right moment, at least for me, so that I could explain it to other people.  It was interesting; my family was mad at me for the breakneck pace of a big trip we were all on together.  We had just spent the day before seeing all the big sites in Yellowstone.  Every day, we had been getting up early and doing more in a day than most people do in a week of vacation.  Not only were my two daughters with me and their spouses but all my grandchildren as well.  I was on a mission; I was uncovering rocks putting together the essence of what was happening to our country.  The election year of 2020 had presented us all with lots of unusual problems, and I was looking for answers in 2021.  In June of that year, my family was deep in the rugged buttes of Wyoming several miles from the East entrance to the park outside Cody, Wyoming, which convinced me they needed a break from all the adventuring.  So, we agreed on a compromise; we’d take a day off our adventure and go to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in town and take it easy to let everyone catch their breath.  It was their idea, actually, but I didn’t tell them that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was one of the places I had on my list that was always at the top, and I wanted to go there badly.  So quite unexpectedly, I found myself there with my entire immediate family, and it turned out to be one of the great highlights of my life.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of those wonderful days with my family that intersected with questions I had been asking all my life, and suddenly there were answers. 

My concern was in asking the nature of corruption; we had just seen the removal of President Trump by a rigged election and hostile Democrats hell-bent on socialism and communism.  They had seen how well Bernie Sanders, the socialist, polled among young people during the presidential election the year prior, so now they were pulling off the masks and showing themselves to be the socialist they always were.  They were behaving the way I always said were their true intentions, and for many Americans, they were shocked by it.  At that time, I was also working on my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which I had finished on the road that year and was in the editing process.  At the center of that book was an understanding of the nature of corruption.  My point was that some of the best years of American life that was least corrupt were the one where the modern socialists were declaring to be one of the most, the Victorian age, the end of the Gilded era, and the start of the Progressive.  For me, it was the other way around, so I was very interested in why the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was so popular among Americans for the closing decades of the 1800s and how Trump was an interesting call-back to that Make America Great Again sentiment that also was there with the Buffalo Bill Wild West show.

I have an interesting relationship with Buffalo Bill, each year in Ohio; I participate in the Annie Oakley Festival in Darke County during the last weekend of July. I have done that for most of my adult life.  It’s always been a throwback to the Buffalo Bill show which Annie Oakley was the trick shooting act.  When I was a kid, the Clint Eastwood film Bronco Billy touched me deeply, and I wanted to be a part of that life, so the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio, gave me that chance, which I have always seen as the essence of American life.  I used those experiences to paint my book’s unique point of view to what America was, especially from business life.  So a lot was culminating there at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West that the average visitor wouldn’t have experienced.  But the museum didn’t disappoint.  It was top class, one of the best of its kind in the world, and I brought back from there a real treasure of books and art that I would spend the rest of the year studying, which is the usual way I do things.  I visit places; then I learn all I can about those places long after I’ve gone.  In that way, my visits last a long time, but I get to know a place months and years after the initial visit.  And it was in this exploration that I ran across the Edward Bellamy book Looking Backward and discovered precisely what I had been looking for, the link to many of our modern problems.  That book had been trendy during the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and it held the answer to the long question of why that show had been so popular with people, even in this modern day.  It even explained why Trump was such a good president and why so many people on the socialist left wanted to see him utterly destroyed. 

Bellemy’s biggest mistake in his book Looking Backward was that he assumed that an administrative state of the central government could regulate corruption out of existence.  This idea of a socialist utopia was very attractive to some people, and they became progressives that would shape the Democrat party we see today early in the 1900s. Ironically, many Americans, without realizing it, understood that the life of Buffalo Bill and his show had touched on the essence of America, and they wanted to see more of it before it vanished as progressives had been promising.  There was honor and invention in the Wild West that Buffalo Bill showed in his displays.  America was remarkably uncorrupted for a few years of western expansion until corruption took over on the heels of Progressives and the work of Karl Marx sought to sabotage it right out of the gate, which is a battle that is still being waged to this day.  As it turned out, and it’s evident at the Buffalo Bill gun museum on the Center of the West campus, gun ownership in America had punched a window into the long history of corruption in the world. Buffalo Bill represented the best to have come from that philosophic period.  This bit of history was so remarkable that Plato and Aristotle would have never conceived of such a thing. Still, there it was in the American west, the defeat of corruption before the world’s governments could taint it with their looting presence.  And the left never figured it out. It’s an easy answer “Looking Backward” at how childlike Bellamy was in his assumptions within his book.  The socialist utopia that Karl Marx wanted and the Bellamyites who followed him for years after that book instead made corruption worse through the administrative state.  We were all a lot better off when the world was, as Buffalo Bill showed it.  And people understood that when they went to see his show. 

The nature of corruption comes from any organization of people who are put in power over other people. The other people have no means to check the power inflicted upon them.  The magic of America that no other society in the world had figured out is that with Americans having gun ownership, they could control the influence of corruption as it grows within any centralized authority. That centralized authority might be our corporations or our local, state, and federal governments.  Corruption was always going to happen, but the ownership of guns kept it checked in healthy ways that worked best before the works of Karl Marx infected American academic circles with a completely foreign concept from Europe that fed corruption rather than controlling it.  And that was something new for me to think about.  I think it’s normal to have thoughts about something where you know it’s right or wrong, but we often don’t understand why.  Well, at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, they had recorded “why,” and it was just the right thing I had been looking for.  It’s not enough to say that something doesn’t work for emotional reasons.  But in the context of history, we have preserved facts that we can study and apply to our modern-day.  And within that study, we have our answer on the nature of corruption and what we can do to control it.  It’s in the minds of all societies to have corruption.  For the liberal, they think they can educate it out of people.  But in the process, they make much more of it.  Yet, in the proven history of western expansion, we did control corruption for a healthy period, and the world was much better for it.  History proves it so.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Anna Perez Understands: Overcoming America’s inferiority complex and becoming your own shepherd

Overcoming America’s Inferiority Complex

As I was promoting my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business,I discovered the show on Real America’s Voice, The Water Cooler, with David Brody.  I contacted the producer Anna Perez about coming on and talking about the book’s contents because it seemed that they would be interested.  This is the same network that produces The Warroom and Dr. Gina, so they have some good things going on there that people are just discovering.  I certainly fit in that category.  Here I was promoting a book, but my personal feelings limited my reach to an audience with clear parameters regarding the massive amounts of injustice that we see play out politically.  So Fox News was out.  Newsmax was too wishy-washy.  They wanted to be a Fox replacement, but they were shying away from the real sources of the problem.  One American News was stuck in what we’ll talk about here, a kind of inferiority complex common among conservatives for all the reasons we’ll discuss.  So what I found in Real America’s Voice was something different.  They were confident, hungry, and asking all the hard questions.  I had a person the other day asking me on Gettr what a replacement for Fox was during a discussion and when I said Real America’s Voice, they shunned it away as if it was a radical right-winged network of religious freaks.  To that, I could only say, the crazy lunatics who are the current problem in the United States would say that anything to the right of Vladimir Lenin is a “radical right-winger.” The entire political scale has been moved and measured so that I would reject the whole premise.  Real America’s Voice represents most American beliefs, and I have found I enjoy them very much.  And I have become quite a fan of Anna Perez’s produced show The Water Cooler.  It’s more fun than The O’Reilly Factor, which made Fox News what it became, and it indeed points to the future of what our country will become once we sort out all this current mess and get Trump, DeSantis, or Kristi Noem in the White House again. 

Anna Perez has done several shows over the last several weeks when she has hosted The Water Cooler as David Brody has been out, that deals with the lack of masculinity in our culture.  Of course, we all know why, especially now.  Our society was primed for a global takeover, and the attackers wanted an easy way. So they watered down the necessity of men with all kinds of sexual viewpoints that would underline toxic masculinity in our culture and replace it with this kind of “beta” male that most women don’t want.  The rest of the world doesn’t identify with masculinity these days, and they certainly understood that to conquer the United States, men needed to be neutralized.  So of all the news reporting going on, Anna has been contemplating why we have allowed ourselves to fall for this concept of toxic masculinity in a busy news cycle.  It’s at the source of everything bad that has been happening to us as a country.  When attacked, the men are running away; they are not standing and fighting.  This goes back to every time society told us that it was OK to cry; we should all hug and express our feelings.  When public schools started promoting this kind of behavior twenty years ago, more people should have seen the intent.  But here we are, and Anna Perez is one of the only ones out there these days asking the question correctly and often.

I essentially wrote my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as an answer to this problem.  It is a guidebook to solving many of these contemporary issues.  But to sum it up concisely to answer the question, I discovered the answer at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, as my book was going through the last parts of the editing process with the publisher.  I had long been thinking the same things as Anna has been, where are the men, why are they so ashamed, and how could we wake them up?  Well, oddly, the answer is one that essentially answers the old Saul Alinsky question about Christians and how the left can permanently paralyze conservatives into defensive positions when attacked.  The leftist attackers exploit a part of the conservative brain that puts them perpetually on the defensive, and now with the lack of manhood to defend such actions, there was no defense mechanism.  This was further obvious to me while at a funeral recently where the church was decorated with images of the shepherd guarding the flock of sheep, meaning Jesus playing the role of shepherd and the congregation being the sheep. That’s an excellent idea in church, but when some crazy leftists step in and take out the shepherd, they gain control of the sheep, and that’s what we find has happened to us.  The sheep might be upset about it, but they still follow whoever the shepherd is.  So for the world’s malcontents and evildoers, they understand that the way to beat conservative America is to fight to become their shepherd.  Replace their god with government, and most of the battle is already over.

I propose in my book for the reader to become their own shepherd and look back to the great gunfighters of American culture as the reference.  Take away the willingness to cooperate as a group of sheep and be your own shepherd.  It will help your business, your community, but most of all, your family.  But there is an additional problem that must be solved, which I discovered at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. It’s the inferiority complex that most Americans have about how young our country is and how we assume that Europe and other places are wiser than we are because of the depth of their history in arts and sciences.  While Buffalo Bill was touring his Wild West show around Europe, even he became enchanted with the Europeans honoring him as a great representative of American culture. That endorsement filled a need that he and most Americans had to be respected by the mother country.  Even now, most Americans still view Europe as the big brother or parent to impress.  There are many great things about America, but our weakness is that we don’t have a vast history of showing that our culture works instead of the other cultures around the world who do have deep histories.  That inferiority complex has prevented us from fully embracing an America First platform.  Sure, there are 30% of all people who get it.  But there is still another 20% who are too insecure about assuming that they are equal or even better off than European or Asian culture.  Then there are the below-the-line thinkers beaten in life who become liberals and want to be sheep all their lives. 

I talk about all this in the clip above; it’s a topic that could use much discussion.  But Anna Perez is tapping into the issue by identifying the toxic masculinity problem.  We can see the shadows of the conspiracy, which is undoubtedly a global trend.  I remember reading the Fifty Shades books a few years ago to understand why women were so hungry for those books, which were essentially about sadomasochism.  I found the lead character repulsive and excessively weak.  From a female perspective, there were all kinds of things going on. The politics of our times have sought to remove men from society to expose that need in women.  The goal has been to replace men as the family’s shepherd and replace them with the government.  It was essentially a coup of every American home.  I wrote my book as a guide to get out of that cycle and to think not just like a man again, but as a culture of shepherds, not sheep.  And what makes us that way, and why are Americans different than other places in the world?  Well, it starts with the invention and cultivation of the gun in our culture.  Not as a weapon of death and destruction.  But in becoming shepherds of our destiny and leaders of business, industry, and family.

Rich Hoffman

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