Tag: cowboy

The Ruthlessness of Smiling Faces: What people are really up to

First of all, even though I am talking about a recent fast draw competition with the Ohio Fast Draw guys in Ohio, I am not talking about that event, but many other things that are relevant in ways that aren’t always so obvious.  Human nature is what it is, and all things are applicable.  But this particular example is appropriate across the tapestry of competition.  And to that point, I am used to extreme ruthlessness in human nature.  I don’t see the smiles that people provide to disarm your sensibilities as being innocent.  I see the worst in people because that’s my experience based on years of opinion.  So, when I attended a recent Ohio Fast Draw competition in Cleveland, I went out in support for the group because the attendance was dropping, and I wanted to boost the membership with my presence.  But from my point of view, it was hard in the second half of the year to attend the events, starting with the one in August, which I missed.  It was a late night with many good GOP people, including Bernie Moreno, Warren Davidson, George Lang, and many others, and we stayed way too late listening with a VIP perspective to a Jason Aldean concert.  I didn’t get on the road in time to get to Cleveland, which broke my routine for the year.  Up until that point, I had attended all the Ohio Fast Draw competitions.  But August, September, and the rest of the year until Christmas are too busy for me.  My goal for the year was to get to all the Ohio Fast Draw competitions and show my support for them.  But once I missed the one in August, it bothered me to have that intention disrupted.

My gun minutes before a competition

I learned at the next event I did manage to get to that other shooters were not unhappy that I did not show up.  I had been winning many trophies, and people felt that because I wasn’t there, they’d get a better chance to win themselves.  I didn’t let it bother me because I like the people who are typically in Fast Draw.  I understand and respect the ruthlessness of human nature.  So, I put those thoughts into a category of their own to deal with as I saw fit.  Even so, I tried hard to make the next competition to support the organization.  I didn’t have time for it.  I didn’t need any more trophies for the year.  I just wanted to see attendance grow, not recede.  I think Fast Draw should be a sport that more people participate in; it’s better than golf, bowling, or other competitive events.  But a lot of young people these days don’t know much about gun fighting because it’s not part of their cultural experience, as more woke activities have become part of their lives.  So, I am interested in seeing organizations like Ohio Fast Draw survive well into the future, and I would like to see them grow in popularity.  But when I showed up to the most recent Cleveland event, I was already strung well too thin, and didn’t have the time to give.  I attended to support friends.  I was disappointed that I wasn’t very welcome and that many of them hoped I wouldn’t show up.  Now, things get murky because people often don’t say what they really mean.  And they usually hide malicious intent behind appearing helpful.  So people think that what they believe deep within themselves is hidden from the outside world and that nobody really knows what’s going on if they don’t admit to something.  Well, I know everything that goes on.  I understand every aspect of human nature, so nothing stays hidden from me.  I know what is going on with everyone at all times.  And it wasn’t hard for me to figure out what was happening when I arrived at the Cleveland competition. 

In Fast Draw, severe rules for activity on the firing line, safety, and other considerations are rigorous.  Some of the more competitive people in these events go crazy when they hear a cell phone and people whisper in the background while shooting.  They get mad at every little distraction.  So, given that context, I thought it was highly unusual that at my gun check at this event, there was so much concern over my gun having a sticky trigger.  I didn’t ask for any advice; it was the same gun I had used to win several competitions that year, and it worked well for me.  But many Fast Draw shooters perform a lot of work on their guns, hoping to give themselves a slight edge in speed.  So it mystifies them that I use a mostly stock gun and that it has a heavy hammer pull.  Now, given some of the people involved in volunteering to tear my gun apart looking for a problem that wasn’t there, I thought being friendly and respectful was more important than showing anger that I was missing the opportunity to practice before the competition started.  I think they were genuinely trying to be helpful.  But I also felt that something more malicious was going on, and the longer it went on, the more angry I got. 

At the end of a lot of work, several shooters offered to loan me a gun to shoot with that day, which, on the surface, appeared helpful.  But they all know what distractions and changing anything on the firing line do to the process.  So, I found it disrespectful to see that they had made a point to look like helpful behavior to sabotage my approach to shooting in that competition.  I didn’t ask for help.  I didn’t want any help.  And I would have rather been left alone because there was more going on than trying to appear helpful.  The combined efforts were an attempt at sabotage because as the day progressed, it became pronounced that I was the center of many of their thoughts, and they had prepared for that event with an intention against me personally.  Here’s the deal: I won a lot at these competitions because of my shooting method, not because of the tricks of the gun or luck.  My times are consistently good because I shoot close to the hip in a fashion that looks slower to go fast.  And the frustration against me has been that I look like I’m not trying to go fast all the time and shoot in the .300s and even .200s.  I could, but in Ohio Fast Draw, missing the target would become more common, and you would get penalized for missing.  You are judged on speed and accuracy.  I ended up doing OK for the day.  The worries about my gun and the overall process of the day did have an impact, but I worked through it.  Part of the benefit of competitions like that is that learning to manage stress under tremendous pressure is the real takeaway.  So I thought it was a positive experience.  But I was very disappointed to see that so many of those other shooters were happy to see me having a bad day.  They wanted it, which was a good lesson that applies to most things.  It’s the way people are.  You hope that people will overcome that natural tendency.  But Fast Draw is meant to be ruthless, and people being friendly to each other is only a cosmetic ruse for their true intentions.  While I wanted to think more about people, it wasn’t enjoyable to see where their minds were.  The main rule in gun fighting competitions is that you don’t point out every little rule that might distract a shooter on the line, then break all those rules to gain personal advantage.  That behavior might help a person win a few times here and there.  However, it will destroy the initiative of any future shooters who want to take up the sport and grow in a positive direction.  This is precisely why attendance this year has been light and is only getting worse.  When it comes to human behavior, I don’t miss anything, and the moral to the story in this case is that a short-sighted win only hurts the future, which is becoming obvious to everyone.

I expect ruthlessness out of people.  And again, I’m talking about more than my experiences with the Ohio Fast Draw Association.  I would like to relax and spend time with people of common interest in shooting sports.  But often as it is in most things in life, you don’t get what you want.  You get what you get, and you either deal with it, or you are crushed by it.  So with that in mind, don’t try to hide ruthless behavior through a thin veil of helpfulness.  I see it all for what it is, at every level that it’s presented.  There is nothing about human nature, or action, that I do not see. And I see it in ways that most people even hide from themselves. There’s a reason I don’t say much to anybody, it’s because I am perpetually let down by other people all the time and I don’t expect much out of them.  And I don’t ask much of anybody because I don’t want them to have to lie to me when they have no intention to live up to my expectations. I have to manage my disappointment in people by limiting how much I interact with them.  But never think I’m not going to see the truth that is really there looming in the background.  Even if it’s just a shooting sport in recreation, or if it’s millions of dollars at stake.  It’s all the same game played by all the same kind of people for all the same reasons.  People in life want the least path to success with the least effort.  And they hate people who work hard and develop themselves skillfully.  As I have said many times, which is a big feature of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, “Rules are made by the losers of the world to give them an advantage over the competent.”  And as much as I know that rule to be the fact of life, it does bother me each time it is confirmed true by reality. 

Rich Hoffman

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When You Build Something, There Are Always Lazy Losers Who Want to Take It: Lessons from Yellowstone and What it Means for America

I haven’t changed my mind on Yellowstone being run by a bunch of liberal Democrats.  But as I have said, until a few weeks ago, I had never seen a single episode.  However, everywhere I go, including in the park, everyone asks me if I dress as I do as part of the “Yellowstone” look inspired by the show.  Of course, the answer is no.  I have dressed the way I do my entire life, well before Yellowstone came along.  But as I said, I always hear references to that popular Paramount Network show thrown in my direction, so I thought I’d finally check it out with my wife.  We enjoy watching shows on various streaming services, but usually, there isn’t much time for that kind of thing.  We travel a lot, and I’m involved with a lot, so there hasn’t been a window to sit down and watch a show like Yellowstone, which is now in its fifth season.  But now we’re all caught up over the last three weeks, and I can say it’s a good show.  I get what they are trying to say, and a couple of themes crucial to the consciousness of America are emerging here that are certainly worth discussing.  The show itself, as written and produced by the actor, Taylor Sheridan is quite a commentary on the role and value of American life.  One of my big hang-ups was Kevin Costner, who starred in the show.  He has been in many good westerns, but he also supported Liz Chenay over Trump, so he kept my interest away from the show until I knew more about how his role would play out.  But Yellowstone, in every way, is good stuff, excellent entertainment.  And I’m not surprised that America has fallen in love with the show as the best entertainment that is currently available, anywhere. 

A few years ago, as the Biden administration was put in place by corrupt globalists intent on the destruction of America, I went out west with my entire family to get away from it for a while.  We traveled to Yellowstone specifically in our convoy of RVs, which was the trip of a lifetime.  Along those lines, we found ourselves in Cody, Wyoming, on a hot night in the summer of rodeo season.  So we all went out to dinner from our very excellent campsite and went into town to experience an authentic rodeo, and it was one of the best nights I had ever had.  My whole family was there with me to experience it, kids, grandkids, and others and I hated Joe Biden and his kind of people so much that a night in Cody, Wyoming, was just the right thing for me, which was a very American flag waving sort of MAGA patriotism.  Leading up to that rodeo, we had all traveled through South Dakota, to Mt. Rushmore and Deadwood, around the areas where the Sturgis Bike Rally always occurs, so we were having a wonderful time rooted deep in the heart of America and the kind of people who most make sense to me.  Additionally, we spent a few days in Yellowstone Park, seeing all the famous sites worldwide.  We were in the exact areas where the show Yellowstone took place.  So much so that everywhere I went, people asked me if I liked the show because it reminded them of John Dutton, the way I dressed and walked.  I didn’t know who that was.  It turned out to be the Kevin Costner character, which wasn’t something I took as a compliment.  I’ve also had many local people refer to me as Rip because of my role in the community.  I didn’t know what that meant.  But I do now, and I get it.  I understand all the references.  But the whole time we were at Yellowstone, the actual place, and people were deep in the show then; I hadn’t yet watched a single episode.  But now that I have, and having been there for an extended period, I think I have had a unique perspective on the whole movement in America that is going on behind the scenes, starting with that region of the world and this television show that has managed to capture that spirit in a bottle for all to enjoy.

There are a couple of significant takeaways from the Yellowstone shows that are specific to our times as America struggles to define itself in the wake of an apparent communist invasion that has taken over our government and financial system.  The first is that hard work is the way to bring morality to any good culture.  That is the constant theme of the show, where characters faltering on their moral compass find redemption through challenging work, which always tends to fix anything.  That is very much a message I support, and I am dazzled to see that a television show meant for mass audiences has been willing to tackle this critical issue.  They used to make television shows like this; Little House on the Prairie comes to mind.  And that this show is being made now says more than what might be assumed from a popular entertainment option.  It has the same values as that night at the rodeo I talked about in Cody, Wyoming.  Good stuff!

But the second thing, which is the whole background of the entire show, is the nature of human beings themselves.  It also centers around the premise of evil and what causes it, which is that when you work hard to build something, there is always some lazy loser nearby who wants to take it from you.  When you work hard, parasites always want to steal your hard work so they can have the benefits of what you have built, because they are too lazy to obtain it for themselves.  That something could be land, a woman, a new cowboy hat.  It could be anything.  But the core of the discussion is that there will always be those who want to take value from those who do create it.  And that if you really want to have a civil society, you must protect those with government who produce value.  Not to use government to protect and empower the parasites, and that is the essence of everything the Yellowstone show is all about.  If I hadn’t been there myself and thought hard about these things, I don’t know if it would be so clear.  I don’t know that the creators of Yellowstone were conscious of those traits.  I think Taylor Sheridon left Hollywood to learn ranching out in the flyover states and fell in love with the lifestyle I talked about in places like Cody, Wyoming, during rodeo season, which goes on every night during the summer.  He and the cast and crew were talented enough to capture some of that magic into a magnificent show.  But more than that, likely not to their liking, it is the essential political platform for the MAGA movement with Trump at its head.  The anti-communist political party doesn’t want takers with government alliances to steal what we worked hard to build: our families, homes, and lives in every way.  Because that is the essence of life in the West, what made Western expansion necessary and even justified?  And why do the progressives of our day, the renamed communists from the global Marxist movement, want so badly to destroy our view of Western life?  I dress the way I do to spit in the face of those Marxist ideas.  And seeing the rest of the world catching up is enjoyable, which I’m very happy to see. 

One of my daughters is a professional photographer, and she was with me when I bought a new hat at Jackson Hole.  And I was doing a bit of a photoshoot at the west end of the square, a spot sacred to me because it’s where Clint Eastwood finished the fight in one of his movies, Any Which Way You Can.  People watching assumed I was part of some entertainment company the way people were gathered around me, and people kept asking me if I was a stunt double for Kevin Costner’s character in Yellowstone, which, of course, I said no.  I had never seen the show.  However, for the people in Jackson that day, it was more about the spirit of the show they were thinking about, what it meant to America, and why they were even in Jackson Hole.  They saw me with my big cowboy hat purchased right there on the square with its giant 4” brim, and they wanted to meet the characters they saw on that show in real life.  Because they wanted to see an America that wasn’t fiction but something they could believe in.  Based on my experiences in that actual region, and now watching that show with an eye toward its cultural significance, I think we are in for a promising future in America, where the communists are going to be beaten back from their European roots in ways they can’t even imagine, currently.  And Yellowstone, the show, is part of that process by way of art and entertainment, followed by actual social expectations.

Rich Hoffman

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The War on the Mexican Border: Ukraine is a fake diversion to bring America down from within with 5 million invaders

Another scam we have been dealing with in the United States is the war with Ukraine. Thanks to the Trump Administration, it is now fair game to look back on all these foreign wars, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, and many others, and understand that America has become the police force for the Desecrators of Davos ideas for collapsing borders and giving the United Nations world domination from the perspective of a centralized, administrative state. If you understand history and politics, it’s as obvious as a blue sky on a sunny, cloudless day. China was propped up and built by these same forces, and it is that model that the World Economic Forum proposes to utilize to gain control of every person on planet earth. The tools have been put in place, and they are making their move. And as they always have, a diversion is created while the real effort goes on somewhere else. This is clearly the case with the fake war in Ukraine, where globalist forces provoked Vladimir Putin’s sense of nationalism with threats of NATO membership with Ukraine to attack and defend his perception of border security.   And the United States suddenly is sending over 54 billion dollars to Ukraine to protect its border, while in the United States, the border to the south is wide open, and an open war is occurring as we speak. It’s a bloody and terrible war meant to topple America from within. The assumption is that defending that border is racist while defending the Ukraine border with infinite amounts of money is morally justified. Yet it’s all the same characters provoking both circumstances. 

Margorie Taylor Green was correct when she brought up this discrepancy in the middle of November 2022. I’ve been covering events on the American border with Mexico for many years, and I remember seeing lots of bloody pictures of severed heads that often happen in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from drug cartels sending messages to homeowners there to keep their mouths shut otherwise the same will happen to them. The violence on the border between America and Mexico is a tragedy of violence, rape, and murder, which is going largely unreported. It’s a purposeful attack on America by hostile forces, and the Biden administration knows full well what they are doing there. Since Biden took office, over 5 million illegal aliens have crossed over into America. That’s a lot of people. For perspective, there have only been 82,000 people from Russia who have attacked Ukraine. Yet we are sending billions of dollars to Ukraine to defend their border, but the Biden administration is operating with an open border policy with Mexico. Can you smell what’s cooking? We are being lied to and purposely invaded for our own destruction. 

And if we point it out, the political left will call us names like “racist.” Hey, I was at Costco the other day looking at books. It was a busy day, and I was at their book display with about 30 other people. My wife and I were the only “white” people at that table. There were lots of people from India, China, and of course, Mexico there bargain hunting. But there were no other white people. Now in my life, I am far from a racist; few people deal with people from all over the world more than I do. I greatly respect the work people from other countries do because they often outwork traditional Americans.   I find that their countries of origin still have a good work ethic.

In contrast, in the United States, through labor unions and other liberal activities, Americans expect too much money for doing too little work. I greatly admire the work ethic of people from other countries and have a long history of supporting them. So for me to say that I was the only white guy at the Costco book table isn’t racist. It’s a statement of fact. The Americans were probably too lazy to read a book, which would explain why they weren’t there as much as anything. But that so many people of different backgrounds could assimilate into the United States under a common flag is nothing short of a miracle. From the way I see things, the invasion wasn’t working because many of the people were fleeing other countries to come to the United States to get away from the kind of garbage that the Biden administration and his partners at the World Economic Forum wanted to bring to America. So when it came to voting, they were more likely to vote for Trump than any Democrat, which wasn’t the plan. The belief in the attack was that all the illegal immigrants would vote for Democrats and that the nation would be changed into some third-world country through the Cloward-Piven collapses of our population and financial system. 

The media was apocalyptic when Margorie Taylor Green even questioned Ukraine instead of the Mexican border. The television pundits on MSNBC were appalled that anybody who had seen the dead bodies in the streets in Ukraine could not be moved to send endless amounts of money to the corrupt country run by a comedian who was best known for playing a piano with his penis before becoming president of the United Nation’s next conquest. And yes, the pictures are terrible of the dead bodies in the city streets of Kyiv and other places. But they are mainly staged; what about a society that purposely kills people so that they can send the media in to take pictures and exploit those pictures so that billions of dollars of foreign aid would be sent to Ukraine? The intentional murder of people is even worse. It’s not like Putin has been acting alone; the war between Russia and Ukraine is more about destroying Russian sovereignty and questions of nationalism than it is about sentiments of post-Cold War strategy. If the media showed the violence on the American border with Mexico, the violence would be far worse; it’s even worse than in the days of ISIS cutting off people’s heads on television. The drug cartels run Mexico and are a military threat to the people of America who live along the border. And the Biden administration knowingly allows violence to advance a globalist political agenda, and many innocent people are being harmed along the way. Yet nobody is talking about spending money on the American border to defend it from an obvious foreign invasion. The situation is so bad that the Biden administration will be viewed as an impeachable offense. That is another reason that Democrats are so prone to cheating in elections to hold senate seats because they must maintain the votes to prevent the Republican-controlled house from impeaching Biden over his handling of the border war that is far more dangerous than anything happening in Ukraine. There are far more examples of violence, beheadings, rapes, and terror along the Mexican border than anything the media could show us from Ukraine. But they won’t show that violence in the media which tells you who is advocating for that American invasion and who is against it. That is the real fight, and the guilty parties are the ones who don’t want to look at it but instead want us to look to Ukraine. The war isn’t there, it’s here, in America, and the intent is our complete destruction and nothing less. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

My Vacation from Slow People: The need for speed is a very real thing, and is uniquely American

For purely selfish reasons, I have spent much more time shooting in Fast Draw competitions during the summer of 2022. I’ve always done competitions like this, but this year I went to all the Ohio Fast Draw events and traveled a lot more than usual to competitive events giving myself a much-needed vacation. The question that has come at me is why I was running myself ragged with all the events. There are a lot of easier things to do in life than competing with guns in stressful and very fast matches where things are measured in such small increments. Shooting and hitting a target in under half a second, or at nearly a quarter of a second as I typically do, isn’t what many people consider relaxing. But believe me, in my life, it is. That kind of speed and free flow of pure energy is a real benefit in ways that are hard to explain, which I’ve tried when people have asked, scratching their heads. But after a weekend shoot over Labor Day where I could shoot competitively with some really great shooters and the event was fast and very competent, I found myself grateful for the experience and the summation of all the other summer shoots. I was taking some of my own advice from my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and I’m very glad I did. Fast Draw is the fastest sport in the world, and when you have to deal with many hundreds of people per week, sometimes thousands, the chance to stand in front of a target and just let everything rip forth is wonderful.

The truth is that people are slow; they spend much of their lives looking for reasons not to do things, so when you find yourself dealing with many people, all who are doing their best to do very little, it can be very frustrating. And the world, after Covid, as a result of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset and the intrusive actions of Bill Gates, making the governments of the world dance by the strings they control like wood-carved marionettes, has only become slower. Bureaucrats have one purpose in life: to make things go slower. Everyone in the world these days seems fully committed to going as slow as they can and to lobby for things to be slower and slower. You can see the difference in a typical drive-thru window; things have slowed down at McDonald’s and Wendy’s fast food restaurants due to a post-Covid world. The government has told employees they can take off all they want and still get paid. Doctors have become everyone’s parents and intercede when those mean old employers expect work performance for the pay they issue. It has become a real mess of incompetence that is the net result of the Biden administration’s attitude toward work, labor, and globalism, which has sucked the air out of the ambition of American effort in truly disgusting ways. And I have been getting angrier and angrier the more I deal with people causing me several times during the year of 2022 to consider just packing everything up, telling everyone to go to hell, and going to a mountaintop with all my books and saying, “peace out.” 

I live a very fast life; I always have. I love speed because the quicker you can do things, the more you get to do in life. So it is hard for me to slow down long enough to go to see medical people because time is always scheduled to their convenience, not yours. I hate going to the BMV for that very reason. It’s such a slow process. I have even been very frustrated with one of my favorite things, going to Kings Island on Friday nights after a busy professional week, because things have really slowed down there as well. My wife and I like to ride roller coasters to blow off steam. I get time to think about things while we wait in line, and of course, roller coasters are nice and fast. But the employees have been horrible this year, worse than at any other time in my life; they are slow, dim-witted, almost representatives of a zombie apocalypse. I don’t think that the people changed, but we lost IQ points during Covid, and the government has crippled young people into thinking in a lazy fashion that makes them barely functional. So even going to Kings Island to relax on roller coasters has not been as fulfilling as it normally is. I’ve never liked the European attitude toward work, which you can clearly see anytime you go to London, Paris, or the Netherlands; they don’t like the American expectation to have everything fast; they like to take their time and smell the roses as they say. But I find all that slowness disgusting. And with Covid and the Biden administration, those types of slow people have been empowered, and the more you deal with people, the more of that attitude you tend to interact with. And for me, it has been real torture. 

So that brings us back to Cowboy Fast Draw and competitive events. All the people in that sport get it. They understand the need for speed and the beauty of unleashing energy and flowing toward an objective as quickly as possible. And spending more time with those kinds of people has been truly wonderful. I can’t say that I will always be able to shoot in those competitive events as much as I did this year. What I did was probably excessive, but it benefited me wonderfully. But, I have been gone a lot. I am one who does not do well in traffic jams. I don’t like to get stuck under any conditions waiting for much of anything. When I get out of a traffic jam and back into the country where roads are wide open, I like to drive as fast as I can without people in my way to slow me down. And that’s how I am with most people. I like to pack a lifetime into a typical day, so when you end up dealing with people who would rather be asleep and multiply that by 100 or 200 people, it can be very frustrating. But I healed much of that this summer and accomplished many of my personal goals for shooting. I won a lot of events which made me happy. It was consistent even under great duress at times, so I learned a lot of good things in doing these events. But the ability to remove all the noise from my life and just let loose all the speed I can muster on something with intense focus has been wonderful. It has restored me some patience in dealing with a much slower world that needs motivation to go faster and be more competent. That is, after all, one of my core values to others, and when I get to the point where I don’t want to do it anymore, a lot of people end up suffering. So the Fast Draw events have been significant; I have been doing them almost every weekend and traveled to many places to participate in them with many like-minded people. And I can’t recommend Fast Draw as a sport enough, for all the reasons stated and more. Speed is great. Slowness is for the lazy. 

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

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Defending John Wayne: Western Civilization is wonderful, stand by it, don’t run away

One of my favorite quotes from John Wayne, the great American actor is that “a man deserves a second chance, but keep an eye on him.” I’ve been thinking a lot about John Wayne lately as the Black Lives Matters protestors have been trying to re-ignite the debate about changing the name of John Wayne Airport in California to something else because as they were trying to say, America is a racist country and John Wayne made movies that embodied the American spirit, and that both he and the country itself should be re-imagined with new names of below the line people. It struck me because many likely don’t know, but Joseph Stalin and Chinese communist leader Chairman Mao actually placed a bounty on John Wayne’s head because he was such a symbol of American patriotism. I saw a lot about how the modern political left are committed to actual communism and that they want to destroy America from a capitalist country and turn it into a communist one, but the similarity of the attacks against Wayne is something I have taken personal.

With all the Covid countermeasures these days, it wasn’t by design, but by default, I have been getting a lot of comments that the way I dress reminds me of their memory of The Duke. As I’ve explained I now wear leather vests everywhere I go so that I can properly conceal carry some of my bigger guns given the way rioters have been attacking our public areas. In such a volatile world, they really leave us with no choice, so my dress has changed a bit to accommodate that necessity. Then with the mask mandates I have turned to cowboy rags to wear like a bandit because that’s what the stupid governments of our modern world want to fight coronavirus. So given that I have to go out into public with these things in mind, that’s how I have been dressing and by default looks a lot like the way John Wayne dressed in many of his later movies, which I don’t mind at all. In many ways Western civilization has been attacked by foreign ideas, even from America’s own media so I feel it is my duty to the American spirit to embrace and protect Western ideas from those attacking them. After all, the political left gives us people covered in tattoos and body piercings, they give us people walking around with their pants half down all the time and using terrible language in public and even among the Muslim populations we are told we are supposed to accept people walking around with towels on their heads and that we will like it. So just to cap off my outfit that sticks up for Western civilization since I’m already most of the way there anyway, I have been wearing my leather cowboy hat everywhere as well which gets a lot of looks.

This isn’t the first time. When I was 7-10 years old I didn’t have the patience for John Wayne movies, they were way too slow for me. I appreciate them more now because I see them as obvious love letters to the American spirit, but back then, if someone didn’t die every five minutes in a movie, I wasn’t very interested. But all my life really, especially during that period mentioned, I had a big leather cowboy hat that I wore everywhere. It was so big that it pretty much swallowed my head but I loved it and wore it everywhere to the point that it looked very wore out. My parents thought I was weird but it really came to pass during a pontoon boating trip on Brookeville Lake in Indiana where my very young profile caused my mom to refer to me as the Duke which I have never forgotten. At that time, I didn’t take it as a compliment. I knew who John Wayne was, but I thought his movies were too slow as I have said, so he wasn’t an influence in my life. But my behavior reminded my mom of him so that was what she referred to me as.

I spent a lot of time at my mom’s parents’ house growing up and my grandpa did love westerns and always had them on the television. Of course, back then, they were the Hollywood culture, it was normal. And he and my grandmother had done a little bit of traveling and had keepsakes of Wild West tourism all over their house. They even had a big wall sized mural of a Rocky Mountains photograph set in an appetizing valley that was so realistic that through the corner of your eye you could easily mistake it for being a view of the real world outside. It’s likely the combination of those elements that inspired me to dress the way I did then and still do, although other people who shared that experience with me didn’t have the same reaction. For whatever reason I was always drawn to patriotic enterprises and dressed the way people who were American patriots did and I never felt I should apologize for it. In fact, my attitude was that people who didn’t dress that way should apologize to me. And watching all those westerns all the time, and being at their house so much, I had a policy to not curse, not to smoke, drink and treat everyone like I’d want to be treated. But more to the point, to not to look for a fight, but if a fight found me, to never back down. So that last bit caused me a lot of trouble because it seemed that public school was about nothing but breaking down kids with the fear of fighting whatever bullies were there. I spent most of my grade school years living by that Cowboy code, and it was pretty violent. I never did drugs, even to this very day. I would drink a beer or two. Curse when absolutely necessary, because I learned that sometimes it is necessary, and I have never ever backed down from a fight. I also can’t say that I’ve ever lost a fight. There might have been a few draws here and there, but my approach to fighting and sticking up for myself and others has brought me to a place in life unbroken, which is what my mom was referring to when she called me The Duke on that pontoon boat. At that time I was much more confident as a person than other people, and it reminded her of the movie star John Wayne as her point of reference to such people.

With that, I take the references lately as a compliment. I don’t see enough people sticking up for people like John Wayne or for Western civilization, and they should. The reason that the Left attacks them is because they want submission. I probably would have enjoyed being born at a time well before John Wayne was even born, when the times he reflected were a reality. I would have gotten along better with people than I do now, because I have never accepted the political left’s world view. Not as a young kid and certainly not now as a grandpa of my own. To my point of view, the world has gone mad and I’m not going to accept it. I can’t say that John Wayne influenced me to look the way I do or act in a certain manner. But I understand him and respect him even more now as an older person myself than I did even as a kid reminding my mom of her version of an alpha male. From what I see, the world needs more John Wayne types and given the way they have shoved their vision down our throats and asked for a fight, I think its time we give it to them, and defend America and the patriotism that comes with it. And if that comes across as over-the-top, then so be it.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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