Tag: Mt. Rushmore

Yes, Trump Has to be on Mt. Rushmore: He will go down in history as the greatest leader of all time

No, it’s not too early to discuss President Trump being put on Mt. Rushmore.  In fact, I think he has to be honored in some similar way as he will be remembered forever as the greatest President America has ever had.  And the world will come to know him as the greatest leader of all time, even considering notable personalities from the past.  But honestly, I don’t think there is engineering room for another face on Mt. Rushmore.  Trump will need his own stone carving, and I suggest that the large rocks on the backside of Mt. Rushmore be turned into a full bust of Trump, complete with his suit and tie, known as the profile view.  The Mt. Rushmore complex has room to grow, and it should.  Trump needs his own carving, but it must be in the same general complex.  When the four faces of Washington, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Jefferson were first put up, the intention was to make Mt. Rushmore much more prominent, showing more of their torsos.  But there wasn’t enough stable rock to pull it off, so we have what we have today.  Lessons learned, we could improve on future monuments.  There are some opportunities on the backside of the current complex to expand and improve how we present these things and remind future generations of significant historical moments.  And once the smoke clears, President Trump will be one of those presidencies that nobody will ever forget and will become the new standard that all presidents will be held to.  It wouldn’t be disrespectful to include Trump in the current Mt. Rushmore complex.  However, Trump needs his deal, specific to what we just went through, and the stone facing on the profile side would allow such a construction to occur without damaging the current monuments. 

How Mt. Rushmore was supposed to look. We need to make Trump’s more like this

I took my family to Mt. Rushmore during the first year of the Biden presidency, and it was quite an experience.  I would call it a religious experience for me.  It was a very dark time.  I am closer to these kinds of things than most people, as I live a very political life.  So having Biden in the White House was very painful for me personally.  As part of my recalibration efforts for my own good, I did a lot of traveling that year.  My wife and I traveled all over the United States to see it and get a sense of what we were fighting for.  You put so much time into some of these things that it makes you wonder if it’s all worth it when you witness the massive election fraud that we saw in 2020.  And the way the public dealt with the Covid rules.  Biden was a disaster, and I couldn’t watch the news with him as the president.  So, I did some major soul-searching and read a lot.  I usually read a few books a week, every week of the year.  But I was reading 3 to 5 books a week during this period.  I couldn’t get enough or read enough as I was thinking about how to get Trump back in the White House, punish all the bad people involved, and set the country right again from my perspective.  Justice had to be done, but what did justice look like?  So, I planned a massive trip with most of my family, kids, and grandkids.  We even traveled on some of these big trips with my wife’s sister, their parents, and all their kids.  It was quite a large traveling party that took on a kind of Cannon Ball Run feel to it as we traveled all over the west, out to Utah and Idaho, and we saw a lot of classic stops over several weeks at a breakneck pace.  But the best place for me was our visit to Mt. Rushmore along the way. 

One of the happiest days of my life

We stayed in Rapid City, South Dakota, for three wonderful days and could see all the sites of that area over that period.  We were traveling by RV trailers, so we had our own community of campers at our campsite that resembled a mini traveling village.  This allowed us to travel nearby Mt. Rushmore freely without pressure and return to talk about all our adventures by nightfall.  After three days in Rapid City, we picked up the entire traveling campsite and migrated to Cody, Wyoming, for another three days at Yellowstone and the surrounding areas.  So it was quite an adventure that involved a chance at a lifetime family event because we all felt the same thing.  The world had been turned upside down by the Biden administration, and we all just wanted to get off the grid for a while and see America, which we thought was worth fighting for.  We had some real life-changing memories around the Mt. Rushmore area; we saw everything, even down into Custer State Park, where we stopped on the road and had a herd of buffalo surround our car and greet us with a lot of affection.  My grandkids will never forget that experience, and looming in the distance, all the while, were the faces of Mt. Rushmore.  It was pretty spectacular.  If you have never been, I would highly suggest going.

The big rock above is where I think a full torso statue of Trump should go. With a full observation park of his own. We need a modern version of Gutzon Borglum to take lead on this

My oldest daughter and I had a particularly special moment at the park bookstore at Mt. Rushmore.  While the rest of our family went to get some snacks and see some of the museum pieces, we bought books.  Lots and lots of books.  I loaded up for road reading at the subsequent campsites I knew we would visit, especially in the desert.  And as I was buying those books, there was a big window that looked out and onto the statues of the presidents, and it was just incredible.  But as I was standing there buying nearly 50 books from the bookstore, so many of them they had to give me boxes to put in so I could get them back to my car, I kept thinking Trump needed to be on that stone mountain.  And it could happen if the complex migrated around to the backside of that current face to make it part of an expansion project.  But without a doubt, Trump would have to be on Mt. Rushmore.  If I were you, I would plan to visit it at your next opportunity.  They will do the fireworks again in 2025, and Trump is all about it.  And just in the first few months of his second term, he has done enough to justify his own monument.  But he deserved that after the first term.  And after all he’s been through, he’s not just one of the greatest presidents ever.  He is the greatest president and deserves his display in that same region so that people of all time can go there as I did and see what America truly is, which is unmistakable once you visit the area.  More people should go there to see the monuments.  If they did, they would understand what we are working to do now and why America must be defended and sold to the rest of the world for their next best option.  It did give me what I needed at a time when the world was a very dark place.  And to see what is happening now with Trump’s second term is a dream come true.  But the question is an unmistakable yes, Trump needs to be on Mt. Rushmore in his own unique way.  It just has to happen.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Downfall of the Credentialed Class: When people can’t purchase their value to society, and have to earn it

While it’s true, this is a fight that has just begun to be fought, and things are far from over. The truth is, something very specific died on election night in 2024.  It is a problem that goes back to the first human civilizations on earth, to Mesopotamia, and their social structure, which has rebelled for over 5000 years.  It is the long fight between personal initiative and sacrifice to great universal forces.  Along the way, many power brokers have sought self-importance by being the broker between life and eternity.  There was always a class of people who stood between daily life and a relationship with the eternal and claimed to interpret what reality was based on by their power-acquiring perspective.  Trump’s first term was a threat demanded by free people, even to conceive the concept of abandoning those power brokers because the American Constitution dared to give a country of people that kind of power.  Or rather, to not give the government the assumption of that power.  But we have never really understood the Constitution.  I tasted this valiant effort a few years into Biden’s time in the White House when I took my family to visit Mt. Rushmore.  I had wanted to do it for a very long time, and we just decided to get away from Biden’s world and get out into the deserts and mountains of the Wild West.  And we made a family pilgrimage to Mt. Rushmore, which is something I will never forget; I’m glad we did it.  It was hard to do with so many people from my family.  I had read the Constitution many times and been a part of Tea Party groups for over a decade, but it was really at Mt. Rushmore where it all came together for me. 

The difference between the right and left and who should rule society in general.

What died on Election Night 2024 was the credentialed class, those people who believe in life that performance is not as important as purchased merit.  The kind of people who think they can buy their way to success in life, whether buying a college education at a particular school and that alone would give value to the person attending.  Or even buying a new set of golf clubs, where purchasing the items would be enough to be accepted into peer groups without being good at the game.  The Kamala Harris campaign team started their run for the presidency in the summer of 2024, and over four months, they wasted over a billion dollars of campaign donations believing that the merits of running for President of the United States could be purchased, not earned which ended up being the ultimate failure of their campaign.  And buzzing in the background, the anxiety for the government efficiency group being headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy is the shattering of the belief that a credentialed class of people would continue to rule over humanity.  Those who bought a college degree and used it to buy their way into a government job that paid well, had lots of time off, and didn’t require anybody to do anything productive were going to be the continued way that humans did business, have had their realities shattered.  But if they had been paying attention, they would have known what I did and what was displayed at Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.  I consider it one of the best holy pilgrimages I’ve ever taken, and it was a clear hint into the results of the 2024 election. 

Trump ran a campaign for a fraction of the cost that the Kamala team spent, and that goes along the line of credentialed belief that the political left has built their entire party around, which is the essential debate between the Hebrew people and the people of Canaan.  Did the Canaanites have a right to exist as indigenous people of that land or be driven away by the chosen people, the Hebrews, just because God freed them from slavery in Egypt and decided to give them the land that is still under dispute by all the same kinds of people?  How could people earn land and be given it, as the credentialed types ask, because to earn something, you have to have an asserted value that is not shared by some communist view of the world, where everyone owns everything and to gain power in a culture like that you have to be given by that society a credential?  And the way things have been, if you bought a credential and threw money at the system, whether it be a college education or the political gatekeepers in the media, you would be given power.  You didn’t have to earn it.  But that was always wrong; America was designed to free people of a credentialed class, even though, at the time, Founding Fathers like George Washington were creations of a credentialed class.  They could at least conceive what abandoning that long-held belief would look like and fought it out into a Constitution and Bill of Rights, which was quite an extraordinary document.  And yes, it has taken everyone another 250 years to figure it out, and the presidency of Barack Obama shook everyone to their foundations enough to put Trump in office as a direct response. 

Trump won the election for many reasons, most of which was the freedom to vote by a people who wanted to self-govern and not support a credentialed class of people who would otherwise rule over them as overlords.  The Kamala Harris people altogether and arrogantly ignored any notion of winning elections other than control by a credentialed class being given power rather than earning it.  Trump provided a brand from his Trump Organization that professed personal value and effort and to enjoy the finer things in life by working personally hard and smart individually.  When Trump sells luxury, it’s an individual experience, not a collective one.  And anybody who worked hard would have a shot at the good things in life, rather than a society of overseers who come into power through credentials they purchased but didn’t earn through merit.  And the Kamala people never planned to earn anything.  They spent money like a drunken sailor on everything to buy the presidency and never thought for a second that they had to earn that right.  And now that it has blown up in their face, they fear the same rules will apply everywhere, in every job, in every layer of society for which they have built their lives.  And my answer to them is that it was always a house of cards, even though humans have been doing it for a very long time.  It took America to come up with the idea of running their society without credentials but by merit.  And it took even longer to recognize what a merit-based society looked like, which was captured artistically at Mt. Rushmore by not only the sculpted faces but the location and story of their creation, from Washington to Jefferson, Lincoln to Roosevelt, these were presidents representing an extended period, and each specifically worked to free people from the chains of a credentialed class, and to set America loose based on personal merit and the treasures that come from such a pursuit.  And Trump was able to free people most of all by taking on the credentialled class and beating them after they threw everything they had at him, yet still lost.  Because ultimately, in America, people pick their government and their representatives.  They don’t rule them.  People select them, a concept that the credentialled class never understood, nor that they could do anything to stop people from wanting a divorce from those personal limitations.  They thought they could hide their lazy natures and their lack of developed skills from the public with the mask of credentialed value and that they wouldn’t be made into fools by people better than them, who outperformed them at every juncture.  But America was designed to create competition and to allow the best person to win, and to reject credentials and fuel innovation with personal input, removing those barriers for personal growth in order to perpetuate the human race in ways not yet realized but perpetually yearned for since the first person ever born took their very first breath.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Control the Narrative, Control the World: Trump’s Speech in South Dakota

I have been traveling and talking to people who live outside the United States a lot, and many of these conversations have been carrying over to many political insiders who think they have their finger on the pulse of the political sentiment coming up in 2024.  And I’m telling everyone the same thing; they find it hard to believe.  It’s all about Trump in 2024.  And I have assured some very good friends in Japan who care that Trump would be back in the White House, as many Japanese are very concerned with.  The strength of the American dollar is significant to them, and they are looking for financial stability coming out of the leading economy in the world.  It wasn’t hard for me to see, but it was tough to understand for everyone else.  Perhaps I could see why.  As I travel and watch different behavior from so many other people, they are very plugged into various visual media, and much of that media has been hijacked by anti-Trump forces.  So, no wonder they don’t see the truth as it is.  When you turn on the TV or watch streaming video on phones at airports, and the media presented is all Trump-hating because that is the political establishment trying to protect itself from reality, the consumers of that media would have no other way of knowing.  So, to bring everyone up to speed, I keep telling people to go back and watch from mid-September 2024, the Trump speech in Rapid City, South Dakota, and the truth will begin to be very clear to everyone.  Trump is the leading Republican to recapture the White House, and all the insiders know it, even if the public has been slow to understand it, and that speech where Kristi Noam endorsed Trump is an excellent measure of American political reality.

My wife and I are at a place where we can do anything for Friday night entertainment; we could go out to a movie, a fancy dinner, or both.  We could travel anywhere, watching anything on our 10,000 different television stations and streaming services.  Every entertainment option in the world is available to us, but you know what we were most excited about recently: President Trump’s speech from one of our favorite destinations in the entire world, Rapid City, South Dakota which is just a few miles from Mt. Rushmore. Trump was planning to speak that night, so my wife and I ordered in Chinese and looked forward to watching him talk all day leading up to his prime-time delivery.  And it was worth it.  It was the best thing on television, and it was obvious that we weren’t the only people feeling that way.  As usual, Trump had a large crowd, and many people were watching as we were, from one of the many streaming services.  It was well attended, and evident that people love to hear President Trump’s talk.  And with Mt. Rushmore right down the road from the speaking location it was very easy for my wife and I to put ourselves in the heart of the action with our memories of traveling to the region.  When you visit the towns surrounding this part of the world, Rushmore, Deadwood, Sturgis, Wall Drug, just an hour to the east, you see America for what it is, which the rest of the world doesn’t get to unless they know where to look.  If you want to see the pulse of America, just like a patient in a hospital, you don’t check their heartbeat by taking their temperature.  You have to feel the blood moving through the body and for America, that is Rapid City, South Dakota.  Not the den of thieves, Washington D.C. and the New York media market, or Los Angeles.  All that has changed recently. 

I pay attention to all news, even those that I disagree with.  So, I’m not in an isolated bubble.  But these days my favorite news media comes from Gettr streaming services.  It was very recently when I told everyone that the most significant attribute of the 2024 election was that Trump started his own social media organization, Truth Social.  And Gettr, which Trump people created, is also taking off as a significant contributor to the media landscape.  Then of course Elon Musk has realized that he’ll never get to space, or put people on Mars with the kind of Marxist governments that the world has been seduced by, including the Biden administration.  So, he has bought Twitter, turned it into “X,” and is distributing free speech in ways that have never been done before.  The traditional forces are not controlling the media narrative, and people, perhaps for the first time in all human history, have a choice in their media consumption.  Control the narrative, control the world and the old forces just don’t control it any longer.  So, the coverage of this Trump rally in a relatively forgotten part of the world, as South Dakota is, was enthusiastic, to say the least.  But if you weren’t looking for it and were waiting for traditional media to carry it, you wouldn’t know otherwise.  No matter where I am in the world, I stream news off Gettr so I’m seeing what many aren’t yet, so the political trends are emerging quite clearly. 

Many who control those Beltway cultures hope that all this MAGA media is just a fad and that it represents a small part of the political world. Instead, I would say that the key to it is further engagement, the kind of people that traditional media has always overlooked, and never reached in the first place.  To think of someplace like South Dakota as the center of all political discourse is not the popular sentiment.  Yet that is the truth of it. Trump had previously, in 2020, done a spectacular speech there at Mt. Rushmore with Kristi Noam that I thought was one of the most significant political speeches I had ever seen. Ignored mainly by the mainstream outlets, it was fresh on the minds of this most recent one, a return of Trump and Noam on stage together that represented well the way most Americans want to see themselves, as morality-loving capitalists and not the godless heathens of a globalists Marxist movement.  And the entertainment options are so bad these days that even with thousands of other options, the best place to go was on Gettr streaming to watch six hours of Right Side Broadcasting of the Trump event in Rapid City.  Modern media, controlled mainly by Marxist sympathizers have ignored the desires of the media consumers and given them garbage that nobody wanted.  And that is mostly what the world saw who were looking for the headlines.  They don’t understand why the headlines are what they are; they are just passively looking at the contents without understanding how they are formed.  But for those so doing, they naturally are going to be surprised that they are missing the critical stuff altogether so they wouldn’t know how hungry most people are for Trump, a return to patriotism in America, a robust American economy, and an optimistic look at the future instead of some dark hole of globalism rooted in Marxism that doesn’t do any good for people, but is the dream of all the central planners and their utopia of the Administrative State.  People, in general, everywhere in the world, want the MAGA message.  And they are learning to get it with all these new media options, which makes it quite clear.  Trump is poised to win in 2024, even against all the opposition trying to stop him.  Because people finally have a voice, and they are using it. 

Rich Hoffman

Mt. Rushmore is Much More American than Washington D.C.: Yes, Progressives are trying to erase your country away completely

I hear a lot of people saying things like, “is all this on purpose?” People who don’t usually think too deeply about politics and just want to live their lives are starting to ask questions about what they see going on in politics. Most people trust that the government is doing their business with good intentions, so with the gas prices being so high, the continued worry that some pandemic virus will be unleashed by Bill Gates and the people at the World Economic Forum and that inflation will make buying an apple a situation of bankruptcy, people are starting to wonder if all these bad things are on purpose. That is when I reminded them that the Biden administration canceled in May of 2021 Trump’s executive order to construct The National Garden of American Heroes, which would be a fine addition to patriotic sites like Mt. Rushmore. Why would Biden and his team cancel such a patriotic project even as they sent billions of dollars to Ukraine and their war with Russia, which has stalled out and become a real line in the sand in the global war between a One World Order and sentiments of nationalism?   Biden and Democrats, in general, are progressives, which means they wish to “progress” beyond the idea of America. The downfall of America is actually one of the eight goals of the Desecrators of Davos in the World Economic Forum, so when Biden canceled that Trump project of patriotism, he was saying a lot, especially since it was done so soon in his acquired presidency. Progressives didn’t want Americans to think about their country in favorable ways. They don’t like the 4th of July and places like Mt. Rushmore. They want America to get rid of its constitution and to become a member of a global society where everyone is equal; even all the crappy little countries run by socialist tyrants. 

I spent the most recent weekend at a Fast Draw shoot where one of my friends had just returned from a big Fast Draw shoot that occurred in Sturgis, South Dakota, and it brought to my mind good memories of my time there a year ago when I had my entire family at Mt. Rushmore. It was a day I still think of at least once a day and was a very special occasion. Mt. Rushmore is one of those extraordinary places many intend to visit, but some never find the time. But I would say that if you can at all, or are planning a vacation to go somewhere anyway, to forget about the condo in Florida or some other trip. In these times, go to Mt. Rushmore and let it do what it was designed to do, reminding the people of America why America is worth fighting for. It’s one of those places that once you park in the garage and step up onto the terrace that aligns with the carvings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln on the big rock wall high above, that the anger of the world toward America comes into sharp focus. Trump, during his administration, wanted to expand on the Mt. Rushmore experience to solidify more the patriotism Americans feel at places like Mt. Rushmore. I bought several books there that have turned out to be real treasures that I have read throughout the year, and it has given me a fresh perspective into all the bad things that we see happening on the nightly news. Enough of a perspective that I say to all those people asking if all this is on purpose with an affirmative, yes. Yes, they intend to destroy America. That’s what progressives want. That’s what the Democrat Party wants, as does the Desecrators of Davos. They want an end to America and its constitution, which is why Biden canceled Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes. They didn’t just steal an election when they took it from Trump; they intend to steal America as a whole and all of us with it. 

I’ve been to Washington D.C. and never find it very American. Sure, it’s the capital of our country, named after the first president. But it feels like a mess of memory and silly reverence to Masonic symbolism. It’s a city built out of superstition with all the streets and monuments tying America to some Egyptian sentiment with alignments to Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and many others, complete with zodiacs all over the place that reflect a reverence of a new country without much history of its own trying to tie itself to the depth and lore of the ancients. That lack of character is why many who work in the D.C. swamp don’t fight for America but for the European ideas that founded the Masonic order and the kind of fraternities that spawn from their organizations. It’s also why so many political people and financial supporters turn toward pagan memories for supernatural aid for guidance in how to run a country, which obviously they all miss the mark. I say to anybody who wants to know, if you want to understand America, don’t go to Washington D.C.  America is not there. That is not the best of what America offers. But Mt. Rushmore is a monument to America that has captured the essence of what America is, majestic yet remote. Hospitable yet accessible and grand, all in the same sweep of sentiment. Mt. Rushmore is a much better representation of America than its own capital city of Washington D.C. The city’s main feature is a giant Egyptian obelisk, the tallest testament in that part of the world, and it has nothing to do with American pride and spirit. It’s a reverence to Egyptian beliefs as the Masons who built the city and started the country thought of them in star alignments and the power of ancient pagan gods. It’s not there to revere the work of Jesus Christ or the 5000 Year Leap of Christian faith that essentially made America unique. 

On the way to Mt. Rushmore is a little watering hole of a place just on the edge of the Badlands called Wall Drug. It’s a fantastic tourist trap that embodies all the great things about America in one specific place, and it’s one of those places that remind you of the tenacious spirit of the American mind. Built to satisfy the tourist traffic of people who make the pilgrimage to Mt. Rushmore, about an hour to the west, you get the feeling when you go there that no matter what happens in the outside world, America will always remain so long as you are at Wall Drug and the nearby Blackhills of South Dakota where Mt. Rushmore was carved. It’s a culture all of its own. It is one of the primary reasons that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is such a popular yearly journey that is made so that the participants can touch the ideas of America far removed from the noise of the big cities and Masonic-created capitals. New York doesn’t get it, and Washington D.C. certainly doesn’t. Miami, Florida, doesn’t get it at all. But Wall Drug in South Dakota does, Mt. Rushmore, Sturgis, Deadwood, Keystone, Rapid City, they all get it, and if there were one place on earth where people could go to charge their batteries in these challenging times with the American spirit they crave, then I would recommend a trip to Mt. Rushmore and the surrounding areas for a week or so. I’ve done it recently, and it carried me well through the last year. And when my friend just returned from a shoot out there, it reminded me that my experience was not specific to me but is common to all people who travel there. So if you are looking for your country and don’t see it on the nightly news, even with gas prices being as high as they are, I recommend a trip to Mt. Rushmore. You certainly won’t regret it. 

Rich Hoffman

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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

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Mt Rushmore: God spoke to me there

God spoke to me at Mt. Rushmore

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

A Holy Place

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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