Tag: liberty

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

The Case for Voting Todd Minniear to Liberty Township Trustee: Where real leadership has been needed as opposed to rubber stamping comprehensive plans

Todd Minniear for Liberty Township Trustee

The trustee race in Liberty Township, Ohio, is interesting because it allows for an advanced discussion of politics that hasn’t been available to us.  On the one hand, there is an incumbent who is a decent Republican, Tom Farrell. He’s offering the status quo rubber stamp on the comprehensive plan so that investors won’t have to worry about unnecessary changes in government to ruin their forecasts.  I understand those problems and can see why stability there would be much desired by many people.  Then there is Buck Rumpke, a hard-working guy from zoning who wants to work with Farrell to continue implementing the Liberty Township comprehensive plan essentially.  I would argue that such a goal is filled with peril because those comprehensive plans are usually written by liberals hired to write them. They essentially reflect the exact phrasing of what the United Nations 2030 plans sound like and are filled with many green energy code words, which, if you peel that back, lead to global communism.  Tom and Buck certainly aren’t communists, but they aren’t exactly the kind of people who are intellectually curious about significant, international matters either.  They know what they know and stay in their lane, which is excellent if you want followers.  But in providing leadership, not so much. 

Where many communities can’t afford to debate about levels of conservative policymaking, I see in Liberty a unique situation.  I like Tom, I like Buck, but in listening to them talk, I’m always looking for more from a leadership standpoint, especially after what we know now after the 2020 election year.  Priorities certainly shifted, which is a point I will make for what I think is the best consideration for trustee in Liberty Township in Todd Minniear.  I remember well the challenges that Senator George Lang had back when he was a trustee in West Chester when he worked to challenge the comprehensive plan there and the debates about the library that were a big deal then.  George handled things well, there were times when deviating from the plan made sense, and the debates were healthy.  In Liberty Township, the attitude has pretty much been, follow the plan, and that has made the politics of Liberty Township much less attractive. The problems that we are now facing are even more predictable. 

For instance, Todd Minniear talks about it all the time, to encourage more growth in Liberty Township, which is landlocked for the most part, the comprehensive plan advocates for more high-density dwellings, such as apartments like the ones that were approved by zoning to go along with the new Costco development.  Now for the record, I love the idea of the Costco development, and I love Liberty Center.  There is a lot of good that comes from those developments.  Much better than bad.  But Todd is not wrong when he says that apartment dwellings are bad for Liberty Township because it cheapens everything.  They don’t pay for themselves in value and what you end up with is a bunch of voters who have no real ownership in their properties making decisions for the rest of us.  Apartments are a super bad idea in that context.  But, apartments are part of that United Nations comprehensive plan that I mentioned, and that is the problem with following those plans without questioning the reasoning.  The goal of the greenie crowd is to stack people on top of each other and make the world need less cars.  So sidewalks and integrated developments are the wave of the future from the United Nations’ standpoint.  Ownership of private property is something they intend to phase out.  When Todd speaks out against apartment construction, it’s not because he’s anti-development.  But he gets the eventual depletion in value that they create. 

Also, what comes up often in such debates is what to do with the great shopping and living development of Liberty Center. It’s a struggling development that started with high hopes. I’m a huge fan of the development, and yes, they are in need of a tax bailout.  I am usually a person who is against bailouts of any kind. However, much of the cause of Liberty Center’s troubles came from the government, specifically Governor Mike DeWine.  When Liberty Center was built, it was already a challenge for brick and mortar stores to make investments there, given Amazon’s impact and other online stores have provided to the market.  But given the wealth of Liberty Township, the risk was worth it, and it turned out to be a significant development.  It still is in every respect.  However, when Mike DeWine shut down the state’s economy over Covid, it directly hit every kind of brick and mortar store, and Liberty Center was struck at a critical time in its business cycle.  Now, to their credit and the credit of Liberty Township shoppers, many businesses at Liberty Center have managed to stick around.  The movie theater is still open.  The restaurants have survived mainly.  There is a lot of good to talk about.  But to give an example, my wife wanted to take one of our grandchildren to the playground there the other day, and it was still closed due to liability concerns over Covid.  So things have not resumed to normal even after the pandemic, which directly impacts the flow of shoppers to the complex.  When you can’t just go and have fun but still must deal with Covid rules, shoppers are more inclined to stay home and shop online.  Now, was that part of the United Nations comprehensive plan?  Of course not.  The developers of Liberty Township followed all the sustainability rules.  But, the government changed the rules. 

This is where a person like Todd Minniear would shine as a trustee because he is an advocate of the great book The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates, which professes that leadership has an obligation to question the authority of any higher authority.  An example would be the Biden executive order on vaccine mandates or Biden’s orders to shut down businesses to Covid rules.  Todd, in fact, during Covid challenged the DeWine administration and won in court, so he is the only candidate who has been successful in challenging higher authorities based on Constitutional law.  And when it came to helping places like Liberty Center during Covid, they sure could have used Todd Miinniear as a trustee during the Covid shutdowns because it might have helped them not take such a hit for which they now need a bailout.  Looking back on how things should have been handled with Governor Mike DeWine, before the legislature eventually took away his authoritarian mandates under emergency protocols, there needed to be many more politicians like Todd Minniear in place to protect businesses and residents from unnecessary pain.   Liberty Center is an obvious example, but the actual costs to Ohio are still incalculable.  To get an opportunity to get a talented person like Todd onto a board of trustees is unique.  It would be a shame to pass it up. 

After a recent debate among the Liberty and West Chester Trustees, I listened to Ann Becker debate The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates with Todd.  Ann Becker is a trustee in West Chester, and I’ve known her for a long time and respect her.  She isn’t a fan of the book, so it was a great talk between her and Todd over the philosophy of a trustee’s role under such conditions.  We may not have had that discussion before Covid because nobody would have ever thought a governor like DeWine would ever try to shut down an economy.  But now that we’ve seen the teeth of government, especially at the state and federal level, such debates have a lot more validity.  I decided Todd Minniear was the absolute best candidate for Liberty Township Trustee after listening to this friendly debate.  Ann is a smart cookie, and Todd could answer all her questions quickly and effectively with the actual state revised code he had on hand. He’s such a great mind; it would be a shame not to use it fully since he’s offering it as a public servant.  And I am very, very excited to vote for him for all these reasons and more.   We live in a time where we need politicians to do more than just rubber stamp pre-written comprehensive plans.  Sometimes we need politicians to challenge those plans, but most of all, we need leadership, even when abuses of authority come from higher offices like presidents and governors.  Todd Minniear is the only candidate I know who has a proven track record of success in doing this, and for the future of Liberty Township, we will need a lot more of that than what we’ve had in the past.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Saving America: We’ve become stupid, its time to change that

We have to become Smarter as a Nation

For my own anger management, the travel I’ve done around America so far in 2021 has been very redeeming; I’d recommend it to anybody who has found themselves stressed out over the election of 2020 to put things in perspective.  My travel certainly did it for me, especially after spending one of my travel days at Mt. Rushmore and Deadwood on the same day.  All of my kids have been significantly harmed by Covid.  I have personally been hurt by it, just as everyone has.  I took Covid very personally.  The government was anti-Constitutional, and I see nothing in life that is worth violating those laws.  Then when you add the election fraud and the reality of having the most progressive administration in the history of America inserted in our government, ruining all our lives even further, I was either ready to blow up and become the character from the movie, Falling Down.  Or I was going to figure out something that has eluded civilization so far and bring back the boons of it for the benefit of all.  So I picked the latter and hit the road with my entire family in our RV, and we had a marvelous time discovering America and seeing many things that I had only read about.  To say that any of the places were my favorite places would be disingenuous.  Everything was wonderful.  But I found at Mt. Rushmore an itch I had been trying to scratch for years, and I can only tell you that it eased my mind considerably.   A combination of that travel day, reading all the books I bought along the way, and reading them nightly at our campsites in my favorite chair set up next to my portable traveling office gave me a fresh perspective that I did not think possible.  But it was possible, and I would like to share the results with others out there, such as you, dear reader who might find comfort in those results. 

After our last trip to Europe, my wife and I decided that we didn’t want to visit overseas anywhere again until we saw almost everything in our own country.  It took us a few years to build up to it, but we bought an RV and committed ourselves to the task.  At the time, we didn’t know the world would be turned upside down, but that it did only elevated the urgency to travel more.  After the massive letdown of our government with Covid and the obvious disappointment on Election Day 2020, where people went to bed thinking Trump won, then waking up seeing that Biden had, we accelerated our plans. We hit the road so I could think things through.  I needed to go out into the deserts of our country away from everyone and think.  To stop by gas stations and not use their dirty bathrooms, but those in our RV.  To get our drinks out of the refrigerator and climb off the grid for a while.  Also, to read lots of books without hotel staff bothering me or even bothering to go out to dinner.  I wanted everything to be with me and to have my home with me at all times, even as the scenery outside that home changed by the hour.  I think a culmination of all those elements made Mt. Rushmore much more potent for me.

As we visited Mt. Rushmore, I was thinking of the British Museum in London, and the Louvre in Paris, even some of the temples and monuments I had visited in Japan and I have to say, it was my favorite place of all, so far in my life.  I’ve been to many exotic locations worldwide, even most exquisitely, the temples and pyramids of the Mayan culture, and Mt. Rushmore was the best.  It far exceeded my expectations.  It was not because of the fine stonework and the viewing platforms they had erected but because the entire place was dedicated to intelligence and philosophy.  It was the perfect place for me at the ideal time for my thoughts, and I came away with some authentically fresh perspective.  It was that itch I had always been trying to scratch, and I felt a tremendous amount of relief after visiting there.  At that same time as I was at that monument, my publisher was putting the final touches of my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business out for my last review, which I had been structuring as a strategy guide for making businesses successful, but countries as well.  So, I was in the perfect place, and this is a feeling that will stay with me for a long time. 

We often take it for granted that our country can handle anything.  We’ve allowed our people to become corrupt, sexually obsessed, drug-influenced, and, through our public education system, turned into absolute idiots.  We weren’t born that way, but we have allowed many jealous outside influences to harm our intellects as a country, and we have now seen the result.  We have seen the attacks on our culture culminate into the mass calamity of our times.  But still, I saw in people during that trip, all day there at Mt. Rushmore, then up in Deadwood, Americans are so resilient.  Even with all the devastation, these were not conquered people.  The system of American freedom had proven that even with all the pitfalls we have experienced, our nation could withstand it all.  But to indeed have a great country, we needed places of intelligence to raise our intellects to where a great country should expect to be.  If we wanted to save America from the attackers worldwide who wanted to bring it down, many of who are now acting as domestic enemies, we would have to get smarter as a culture. 

As usual for me, books and time to read them helped my anxieties tremendously, and they would do the same for you.  For anybody.  And to truly save this country, that is the key to not just saving it but keeping it that way.  Mt. Rushmore was built to remind people, such as in times like these, why we tried to create a country in the first place.  It worked so well, we have taken it for granted, and many people have allowed themselves to be seduced by the antics of the world.  They have been seduced by stupidity and told that it was a virtue.   Well, stupidity is not a virtue.  We were told that we should lower our defenses and allow insurgents to raid us through our schools, through our businesses, and corrupt our politics so that there would be no sign of a republic for which we could hope to stand.   If we want to keep our country great, we must get more intelligent as a culture; we have to return to the times of readers like Lincoln and Roosevelt.  Of Jefferson, who started the Library of Congress with his collection of books.  America was built on philosophy and intelligence.  It was a divorce from the stupidity of the world, not in adoration of it.  And even in our own family, my wife and I have traveled the world only to realize that the best things were always around us.  Yet we did not see those places because the world was saying that everything else was great.  Well, I’ve been to those places, and nothing was better than Mt. Rushmore.  And there has been no more satisfying experience than in reading the books I brought from there.  If I seem content in my thoughts these days, it’s because of this minor boon, which I think has the power to change the world. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business