Tag: Gunfighters

Our Flag is Still Here: The key to winning in a hostile world

Our Flag is Still Here

I hear the concern in people’s voices.  But my optimism about the strength of the American idea is not based on fluffy hopes strung together by nonsense.  As I discuss in the video above, America has been attacked in just about every direction that can be imagined, yet we are still here.  We have withstood some vile attempts from a jealous world, and we have stood up far better than anybody expected, and that is something to build on and understand.  My perspective, and the one that fueled the contents of my new book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business so that I could share it with others and give them a blueprint to what America is and all that it should be, is that I work with guns a lot and in so doing, it removes a lot of fear from my life.  And when you are functioning without a lot of anxiety, you tend to see things more clearly.  For instance, as I was filming the video for this article, I was preparing for a long weekend shoot with the Ohio Fast Draw Association International up in Darke County, Ohio.  Let me tell you, that weekend shoot was a little bit of paradise.  There were a lot of really good people there.  Every fast draw match starts with a pledge of allegiance and a prayer.  At one point, the wind had blown off the mount where our American flag was hanging, and the organizers of the event stopped everything and picked it up to fold it neatly to put back in the truck.  There was nothing phony about it; these guys loved the flag and took what it represented very seriously.

Additionally, I go shooting every other Friday at my local range in West Chester. By spending a lot of time with guns, people who shoot guns, I get to see a side of America that is invisible to most people.  And I would say that for those looking around and are scared, there is a lot of evidence that our country is still here and that all these attempts to overthrow it will fail.  But our nation needs a boost now and then, which is the context of this little message.  There is a lot more right than wrong, and the wrongs can be fixed.  All it takes is for us to show a little courage. 

I will always propose that one of the things that make America unique is its gun culture.  That is why I am pretty calm talking about these things, because ultimately, if all things go to hell in a handbasket, I have a way to defend my family and myself, anywhere, at all times.  I don’t get up every day thinking of shooting someone. Still, my perspective on my independence is very traditional, as it has been in America before when the world’s nations looked at America and wanted to tear it down for being too good and too rich.   I explain all that in my book for reference, but in short, that jealousy of the world toward us has fueled much of the evil we are witnessing now.  Only they won’t say it that way.  Instead, they have attempted to get us to undo ourselves through drugs, through bad ideas, through illegal immigration to change voting patterns and every other means of erosion of morality through religion and financial strife.  I understand that it can all look pretty scary for people who don’t have the means to defend themselves.  After all, we all know the victims of this attack against America from every front.  We see the cost to their minds and bodies.  Yet, I find it quite evident that America has endured despite all the attempts to sink it.  People may be debilitated and lost.  But the idea of freedom has withstood the test of time in a very positive way which, believe it or not, has the bad guys on the run.  I can see it clearly, from the Dr. Fauci types to the leaders of all the major countries.  They did not think America would withstand all that it has. 

As I was driving home from the shoot in Greenville, I was catching up on the news.  We had been doing our Fast Draw event out on the border of Indiana at a shooting range isolated well from the outside world.  There wasn’t much of any internet, so I was in a news blackout during the shoot.  But back in the car driving back to Cincinnati, I caught up on all the news stories, and there was a good one about a minor league baseball team where the announcer had told everyone they were going to skip the National Anthem.  That caused an uproar in the audience, so they took over, and all stood and sang the song themselves, which forced the players to join them.  This has been happening in other places too.  People are refusing the Woke culture that is trying to shut down the American idea of greatness.  Instead, they are not looking to the authorities to protect their free speech ability; they are just taking it upon themselves to do so anyway.   That is the America I know, and I see a lot of that wherever I go.  What they are telling us on the news is not representative of how America is.

Additionally, I have traveled all over America this year and can say I’ve seen it up close.  Traveling west, which doesn’t get talked about much because electorally, the votes from those states aren’t very significant to elections. Still, as I described at our Ohio Fast Draw event, you can see a love for the American flag in the people.  I see in people a refusal to allow America to fall.  What is happening is that many of them are just waking up to the danger, but once awake, I see that they will do what they need to do.  I am sure of it, which is the purpose of sharing this view through this article.  A lot of people need to know that America isn’t going away.  Trump will return to the office.  But my warning to everyone is that the fight doesn’t go away.  The lack of conflict is what caused all the attacks in the first place.  We are required as a people to stand up for ourselves.  I recommend getting a gun, practicing with that gun, and spending time around others who do.  That will put your mind in the right place.  But it’s just the start of being engaged in society to the point that it is required to defend freedom and liberty. 

We have to take a moral stand on the kinds of things that make a good American.  Even though we have shown that we can withstand the many attacks, in the future, we will need to be more resolute and not so apologetic about our success.  Rather, let all the jealous countries see that pride and mimic it for themselves.  Who cares if they are jealous?  Force them to get better through competition with us.  That ultimately will save them.  But as Americans, don’t fall for their poisons.  It is their poison of thoughts and action that has led to so much debilitating condition.  Give yourself options of purity and justice for all so that you can then share that with others.  And in that way, we can Save America and do what needs to be done politically, economically, and morally.

Rich Hoffman

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

America Was Meant to Divorce the Class System: Answering a good question

America was Never Meant to have a Class System

When I posted the video for this article, I received an excellent comment asking a great question.  When talking about a class system in America and recognizing it, this person wanted to know what to do about it.  Here is the comment:

“All well and good, but how do we the people reign in corruption in our government from our meager station? When my best year is working in a machine shop, I made $63,000; someone like Hank Johnson makes $174,000 plus perks.  Look up Hank Johnson’s quote about Guam.”

My first instinct was to reply to this guy and say, “well, this is why I wrote my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, to undo this very notion of a class structure in our political world.” That is, after all, how you fight it.  The thing to do is to understand what is happening then divorce yourself from that class system. Don’t let them call you Middle Class or anything as such.  Ignore their class system, function without it.  Of course, his question is that we’re all in it whether or not he likes it.  And to that, I would say, read my new book; it tells you exactly how to function without a class system, but one of earned merit.  But that is kind of cheap to say, “go read my book.” That’s why I wrote it and why it’s separate from something like an article on this blog.  It’s an actual strategy guide for undoing many of the corrosive forces holding back our current society, whether raw progressivism or malicious communism using a class system to enforce their control over the masses.  Or the cost structure of your company and its success or failure and the ultimate connection it has to your ability to make a living.  An answer to a question like his deserves at least some perspective.  Yes, my book would help him, but some context to the problem is well worth answering.

In the video above, I talk about one of the most important things to both males and females that there is in the world, the pecking order of our species and where we reside on it.  I attended a lecture on Joseph Campbell many years ago in Washington D.C., where this topic was covered, and it has always stuck with me.  Not because I agree with it as an accepted reality, but because it truly is one of the most significant elements of human society anywhere in the world.  Our entire public school system is built around this premise, so the people that want to control us, like the guy mentioned in that question, use the pecking order system as a way to preserve their reality.  Once we become adults and accept our pecking order station in life, whether it’s at the top or the bottom or somewhere in between, we typically stay there the rest of our lives.  The guy who accepts that he’s not very smart marries the safe girl who balloons up into a big hipped pillow of flesh in her middle years has kids that don’t like him, and who stays in middle management his whole life was put there through the pressure cooker of adolescence by society, and he never questioned it.  He accepted it and moved on to living life.  That way, when a government tells him to wear a mask or pay huge taxes, he pays the money without question and does what he can to avoid conflict and work from week to week to catch the next Sunday NFL games, which he genuinely enjoys.  If he’s daring, he may put $5 into the office pool and play the brackets of NFL teams who pick the most winners from week to week.  He might treat himself to BW3s and a cold beer that his wife won’t know about if he wins. 

That previous paragraph might sound like a sad case, but it’s a situation to some degree or another what a majority of people believe about themselves.  I used the example of a guy because it’s genuinely understood.  Women have the same problems but with a different focus.  Did I marry the right guy for my children?  Is this the best house I could get as a nest for my family?  Did I get the best DNA for my children using all my female charms to do so?  Again, these aren’t things we talk about, but they are the things that concern us most.  The higher up the pecking order, the better spouse you get, the more resources you have access to.  How much do you fight to rise to the top, or is it better to keep your head down and accept where they put you in life?  These are the things that keep all of us up at night.  The pecking order mentality is a carryover from years of evolution in our species.  But intellectually, as I argue in my book, America came along to shatter that reality.  And for a period, we did just that.  Over time and with the introduction of progressivism from Europe, masking outright Marxism, the class system has crept back into American vocabulary to present us with today’s problems.  The solution to those problems is to cast off the class system. 

My book demonstrates that the American Gunfighter was romanticized the way they were because it showed that people of all stations in life could throw off the class system.  Gunfighters like Wild Bill and wild west performers like Buffalo Bill Cody demonstrated that through western expansion, not old money from Europe, people could become wealthy and independent through panning for gold, winning at gambling, or gunfighting bad guys in dusty streets.   I would point to the magical Second Amendment and say to anybody that the key to casting off the class system in America is in the Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment.  The right to own and carry a gun for your self-defense means that you cannot be forced into a pecking order position where the strongest and fastest can step ahead of you in life and take the best spouse and the most money.  If you can shoot, you can have the world at your feet.  You can be small, fat, tall, and ugly, but you can also be rich just like anybody else in aristocracy, and you can have a clean and independent life if you dare to.  That is the short answer to that original question.  For the long answer, I’d say read the book.  But to get to the gist of it, pecking orders are a shackle on our minds that we need to be free of.  Gun ownership is the first step to taking those shackles off not so that you can shoot people who are in front of you.  But so that you can know that they can’t force themselves on you and push you into a position on that pecking order where you don’t want to be.  And it is in that mindset that freedom is born. 

Only when you stop acknowledging the class system can you bring down the aristocrats of old who want Marxism to put them in the upper class to have the best of what the world offers without actually being the best at anything.  To the point that Hank Johnson rules over the hard-working machine shop worker because he makes more money, well, the assumption is that money indicates where we all are on the pecking order of life.  If an ugly guy tries to pick up a nice-looking woman in a bar, she won’t pay him any mind and will blow him off quickly.  At first glance, fair or not, she doesn’t want his DNA to make a bunch of ugly kids.  But, if that ugly guy has a lot of money, well then, she will likely talk to him. She’ll put up with the ugly kids for the nice house and not worry about money for the rest of her life. That’s the effect of the pecking order. We’ve allowed those rules to shape our culture in such away.  But when someone like Hank Johnson makes more money than us, we accept that he is higher up the pecking order than we are, so we naturally obey him, even when we know better.  The key is to stop thinking like that and to start thinking like a gunfighter.  You don’t have to shoot anybody to make your point.  All you need to do is stop playing their game and know that you can be anything you want; you can make all the money you wish to, if only you dare to in America. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Gunfighters, Poker Players, and the Great American Constitution

I personally use the western expansion period of American history as a reference to something of a miracle. While the enemy in America, those trying to change the very nature of the Constitution seek to re-write history with progressive sentiments, I see the situation of the great journey into the West by Americans after the Civil War as something of a miracle and I carry around symbols of that age with me every day everywhere I go. The more I have practiced Cowboy Fast Draw with my Ruger Vaquero the more obvious the miracles of America’s west have become to me. Recently a good friend of mine who returned from Vegas brought with him some literal Trump playing cards that he found in his hotel gift shop. Even though they are only playing cards I thought they were some of the most beautiful items I have seen in a while. They are gold covered of course and have Trump’s face on a $100-dollar bill on the back. I think they are fabulous as I do love the game of poker because it is a game structured under the premise of American capitalism. I can’t carry my guns around with me everywhere, even though I think I should. I do wear a cowboy hat often and usually have playing cards and poker chips in my pocket at all times to remind me of just how special the American West was and what role it still plays to this day in the political landscape. Poker was the game of gunfighters and it was the American gunfighters who broke the back of the Vico Cycle in the context of world history and presented us with options today that I would argue are the first in human history.

History and its understanding is more than a hobby for me. I know quite a lot about it, and I would say that up until the Renaissance Period mankind likely for tens of thousands of years if not hundreds of thousands of years rose and fell along the lines of what is known as the Vico Cycle which essentially means all societies rise along a known trajectory of habit, starting with theocracy, then aristocracy, then democracy, anarchy, only to start again. When archaeologists really get into the weeds of why societies fail and great cities suddenly empty and their inhabitants disappear, it is due to this condition everywhere in the world for all recorded history and likely into history we are not even aware of because the rate of decay and erosion prevent our study that far back. During the Dark Ages of Europe, just another period of time when theocracy ruled the minds of mankind, the Renaissance was born and enlightened minds started asking hard questions that took a few centuries to work out, but eventually the Scottish Rites started contemplating what would eventually become the United States. They’d have to leave Europe to try the experiment of self-ruled people but once they did, there was a revolution and born from that the American Constitution. In the context of historical documents, starting with the Magna Carta in England and merging into what we now call the American Constitution I think are some of the greatest concepts of philosophy so far created as a species of thinking creatures.

The Constitution made many freedoms possible for minorities, for women and for all the immigrants migrating into the New World. It produced great wealth which changed the nature of global politics within a hundred years and I would argue broke the Vico Cycle of world history. There was always some Hitler type that came along and cast the world back into theocracy after anarchy but this time it was the West that saved the world from a tyrant and history was changed. Of course, the enemies of the American Constitution recognize that and have learned not to try to fight free people directly. So they are seeking to undermine the power of America by eroding away at the philosophy which created it which describes accurately our present circumstances. However, it was the American cowboy, gunslinger, card player and gold digger who effectively destroyed the Vico Cycle and put us on the precipice of leaving earth to colonize other planets, such as Mars in such a short period of time because due to the Constitution, the autonomous actions of mankind were unleashed and thus a new age was born.

I would contend that the American Indian was not “native” or “indigenous” but were in fact migrants from previous failed societies, some from the Maya, some from the Aztec, some from cultures that came and went which have never been recorded before, but all had a try at the Vico Cycle and failed reverting back to tribal theocracies dancing like idiots just to make it rain under storm clouds dressed as birds and other animals. They were not functioning under the premise of an American Constitution representing free people so the Indians were run over by a conflict of clashing philosophies, one successful and one not. One culture had science, one culture had superstitions and theocratic limitations similar to the Dark Ages of Europe. As the Indians were pushed off their lands and towns were built on the emerging American frontier brothels, casinos and criminal elements emerged and were only regulated by the gun which to an outsider looked like chaos and the worst of mankind. Modern day Las Vegas is very much the same representation, the best and worst that mankind has to offer is on full display. But the judgment of scum and villainy is only a transitory one, it is the unleashed human mind that benefited most, the opportunity to make money free of aristocracy and to personal profit from the work one applied, even if it was a diseased whore working in a gold rush town’s saloon. Or the gambler working a poker table trying to get rich off the ignorance of his associates, a new way of thinking emerged and the perils of the Vico Cycle were effectively ended on the Western frontier backed by a philosophic experiment of the American Constitution.

So yeah, the gold cards with President Trump on them from Vegas were special to me because they represent a change in thought that was new to mankind. When we talk about the age of MAGA, (Make America Great Again) this is what we are talking about, a Constitution that created great autonomy among people who unleashed thriving new opportunities which quickly became huge cities, railroads that crawled across the nation and an unrivaled international economy all within a few hundred years. The enemy of the Constitution of course are jealous and they want to erode away all the value that this fine history has produced, and they want to focus on the slavery, the conflict with the Indians, the conflict with the Spanish who had conquered Mexico and even the fights with Europe to forge the new Constitution. Of course they’d love to erase all the great gains made and get back to the Vico Cycle because it’s all they know and they lack the courage to be free themselves so they look to the Indian and the Eastern mystic for guidance, to surrender thought to the gods of superstition, which likely ruled the minds of the weak for hundreds of thousands of years. But in America things changed, the Constitution brought forth the beginnings of an autonomous culture which didn’t look pretty at first, but through the gun smoke and the haze of bar room poker games came something new, and the greatest country on the face and history of planet earth emerged and it was a miracle worth fighting for. And that’s what I think of when I see a cool gold playing card from Vegas, the hopes and dreams of a civilization that just wanted to be free of the Vico Cycle, and for once it actually happened after a lot of work and thought.

Rich Hoffman

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