Tag: West

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 Playbook for Defeating Evil: Lessons from the Snake in the Garden of Eden

There is much more to the story of Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden than just the temptation to listen to a snake and eat the wrong fruit that would cast all mankind into everlasting sin. There is a recipe for defeating evil that is quite deliberate. Not to pick on snakes, but they are disembodied creatures strange to the touch, complete with a forked tongue and menacing appearance. In the stories of the Bible, and those like it which describe some version of the Adam and Eve story, the snake would go on to form in Western civilization a definite approach to defeating the nature of evil in human beings. A philosophic divorce from the nature of existence that would form the backdrop of an entirely new way of looking at the world and establishing a moral conduct within it. However, in Eastern cultures, essentially all oriental approaches to matters of good and evil, the serpent, or snake, is an object of reverence, representing rebirth and rejuvenation. Dragons, as they are of the serpent family, are worshipped favorably in oriental cultures, whereas in the West, they are meant to be slain. We have dragon slayers in Western civilization, slayers of evil, destroyers of the serpent. Killers of evil. In the East, we have a religious approach that lives in harmony with evil, a yin and yang approach that strives for balance. But in the West, we traditionally strive to defeat evil wholesale. So, in that regard, in a modern world where China and its supporters, some in our own government, are seeking to embrace evil rather than defeat it, and any defeat of evil is frustrated rather than dealt with in the traditional way that our culture measures it. 

But there is more to the story, literally, than just appearances. Western culture’s representation of evil as a snake has a much more literal meaning. Snakes are cold-blooded animals, whereas humans are warm-blooded. Snakes cannot sustain their energy for very long, so their actions are often swift because they run out of energy quickly. Humans can endure over a long time because we are warm-blooded, and can sustain ourselves no matter the climate conditions. Snakes hide in the ground and can be quite terrifying when they emerge into the light of day to sun themselves on a rock to gather up the warmth of the sun, which is yet another aspect of worshipping the sun as the current earth goddess worship is so concerned. The reverence for Eastern religions of nature worship instead of the conquest of it revolves around this central concept of accepting evil, embracing it, or making a conscious effort to defeat it. The two cultures are incompatible; there is no coexistence where good and evil shake hands and get along. And this is a fight that essentially started literally in the beginning; it is at the core of why all mankind was born into sin and had to make a conscious effort to deal with it. What we are seeing now, as in a modern context regarding the vast amounts of evil being presented to us, in many forms, all at once, is this panic by evil to reveal itself to gather energy. We see them coming out into the light of day to sun themselves on rocks, which is scary to look at. Because we are used to evil hiding away from our eyes, just as in nature. Seeing a snake is a startling experience because they tend to hide under rocks and in the ground and don’t make themselves known easily. 

But their sudden appearance everywhere and often is actually a good thing. It indicates their true condition, the status of global evil as it has existed on earth from the beginning of time. It takes energy to hide, stay malicious, and work in the background. Yet now we have evil out in the open for all to see, and the vast amounts of it are intimidating because we just didn’t know there was that much evil out there, at least those living their normal lives not thinking about fighting good and evil all the time. However, it’s good to see the snakes, to see them out of their hiding places. Because it tells us what their true condition is. Just because we can see something, because we can see the truth, it doesn’t mean that there is more evil in the world making itself known, rather it provides an indication of the truth, and now we are seeing it in abundance, for a vastness that just wasn’t part of our daily dialogue, at least until now. Then our natural reaction as members of Western civilization, that understands the keys to success in life, is not to embrace evil and to make peace with it, but to defeat it. So, it is natural for us to look at all these vast examples of evil and want to strike at it with a vengeance because that attitude is the key to all Western civilization, which is the natural outgrowth of human development.   In the beginning, there were snakes, lots of them. And they ruled the earth. And Western civilization made a conscious effort to grow, evolve, and despise evil. And to defeat it. 

With all that known, the way to beat evil is in how the snake actually behaves. Evil looks scary and can strike fast with its venomous bite. But it runs out of gas quickly, making it easy to outlast and overcome. So to answer the question I get all the time about evil as to why I am so patient in dealing with it, as opposed to some sexy defeat of it spectacularly, like the latest Hollywood movie, which would be far more exciting, is because the best tactical opposition to evil is in self-propelled energy, the warm-blooded nature of the human being, the thinking intellect. Evil gets tired quickly because of its cold-blooded nature. When we say that someone is “cold-blooded,” we are essentially talking about the nature of evil itself and how it can appear menacing, but it loses its energy quickly, making it very vulnerable to those with the intentions of good. Good being a long-term pursuit, a divorce from the animal ways of nature. Evil being short-term, live quickly and die just as such in accordance with nature’s impulses. Can we say that the buzzard eating roadkill is evil on the side of the road due to its parasitic nature, or should we expect a buzzard to develop an intellect to grow its food more humanely even to question the life feeding off of life nature of the universe as humans wonder about such things. And they do because they have developed intellects even to behold the thought; thus, Western civilization was born. And the concept of defeating evil became a priority in our culture. Of course, evil is very aware of this, yet they are powerless to defend themselves from the intentions of good because they run out of energy so fast. Which is what we are seeing happening right now. As scary as evil is, it is losing its effectiveness in the world, and they know it. So, they are panicking to strike while still having the energy to do it. But good is outlasting it and causing desperation, exposing this classic struggle with a truth that we have never had the luxury of dealing with. And the victor is going to the warm-blooded nature of existence over the cold-blooded parasite, which is the true message of the Adam and Eve story. The defeat of the snake is well at hand and within reach. Outlasting evil is the best way to defeat it 100% of the time. Never fight the strength of an enemy if you can avoid it. Always attack the weakness with your own strength, and in this situation, warm-blooded creatures defeat cold-blooded creatures whenever the long game is applied because of the lack of energy that the snake has to sustain itself through an extended conflict.

Rich Hoffman

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