Tag: westerns

‘Horizon: An American Saga,’ a movie that is magnificent for all who want to Make America Great Again

It’s a great movie that deserves to be seen in a movie theater, but most of what you have heard about the new film Horizon: An American Saga is wrong regarding the negative stuff.  It’s a big, bold movie that tries to put its arms around American westward expansion and can almost touch its fingers on the other side.  But it does do what many Westerns since the early days of cinema have done, and that captures the vast expanses of the West and American opportunity along the way that is simply magnificent.  This was a western on the scope of How the West Was Won, made by a guy in Kevin Costner, who loves westerns and has built the best parts of his career by making them.  It reminded me of an Alan Ekert novel from the Frontiersman series.  Now, this will not win the Academy Awards.  They will hate Costner for making this movie, so don’t expect any respect from the Hollywood machine for this Western series, which is the first of a projected four.  They are filming the third installment as of the summer of 2024.  The second part comes out in the middle of August.  And I hope they complete part four.  This is not a traditional way of making movies; you watch the first part in a movie theater for over three hours.  Then, once all the primary characters are introduced, you have to return a few months later to see what happens next.  At the end of Horizon: An American Saga Part One, we are just getting started on an epic story about the creation of America as a country, which is vastly ambitious.  I would say, from Kevin Costner’s point of view, this is a love letter to all the blood it took to make America and to make a point about why it was worth it. 

As a business decision, this is not built on the model Hollywood is built on today.  Not all standard measures can be applied.  This movie is made, I think, to try to save movie theaters from becoming the modern version of drive-ins.  There are economic forces out there that are very consciously trying to destroy various American industries through woke politics, and Hollywood has fallen for the trap in many ways, willingly.  The communist left has an agenda, and they have been attacking American Westerns for decades now.  This movie, Horizon: An American Saga, is a purposeful rebellion against that trend.  It is exceptionally well made by the same guy who directed Dances with Wolves.  It has all that size and scope and then some.  The problem with a movie like this is that the union labor costs are so outrageous now that it’s nearly impossible to make any large production without exceeding a 100 million dollar budget.   As I watched the credits until the end, this is a big Hollywood movie with all the big labor that comes with such a production, so the financing doesn’t add up in a traditional way, as measured by The Hollywood Reporter.  When John Ford made westerns like this, the budgets with unionized labor weren’t nearly so out of control.  So they could afford to tell stories like this without all the fast-paced action of a summer blockbuster.  This movie was designed to be presented significantly and for people to go to the theater to see it as opposed to streaming it at home.  It’s so long that it keeps people in the movie theater for a long time buying snacks.  And it could and should be seen several times.  And that people will keep coming back for future installments to see the next parts.  It’s an almost unheard-of financial model where Costner uses his personal money to help get the films out. 

It doesn’t surprise me that the film only made 10 million dollars in its opening weekend.  I mean, who is going to see it? It’s long, and they talk a lot.  There aren’t many action scenes.  It is filmed with traditional pacing; it reminded me of Little House on the Prairie or Gunsmoke in most of the movie.  The camera angles are broad but set, and the actors do a lot of work talking.  That’s not to say that everything isn’t interesting, but this isn’t a Marvel movie designed to be a billion-dollar box office generator.  They aren’t trying to thrill you with a spectacular action scene every ten minutes.  This is a plodding and deliberate movie made in the classic way to return to theaters after COVID-19, a Hollywood product that puts people back in their seats, not just for one event, but several times.  It was an extraordinarily bold throwback to when Hollywood told these kinds of stories often, and for people looking for their country back after years of political turmoil, this movie is a stake in the ground to inspire people to deal with the enormity of creating the greatest country on the face of the earth, and not to apologize for it.  Given the political situation we are all experiencing now, this is a movie for Trump supporters who want to Make America Great Again.  While Hollywood does love Kevin Costner, they certainly won’t be happy with him making this movie; The industry has attacked him for it in every negative reporting avenue they could.  But this is a project that Kevin Costner loves, and it shows.  And it is worth sharing, for sure.

A lot has been made about how Indians are portrayed in this movie.  Although they were brutal, I didn’t think they were shown in too harsh of a light.  People thought of them as savages.  It is the communist left who has told us that we were supposed to be in love with them and to think of them as indigenous people who were here first and that we took their land from them.  I have a very different view of Indian life, and I do not see them as a superior culture who had a right to be in North America and that we took something from them.  This movie, Horizon: An American Saga, gives the Indians more credit than I think they deserve.  In history, they were migrants just like everyone else, looking for a life for themselves.  But this living with nature crap is very much a globalist communist sentiment meant to control human behavior, not to do what humans were born to do, and that is to create.  Horizon is a movie about the need for American expansion and the collision of those forces on one of the last free places on Earth.  And as violent and challenging as it was, why did people do it?  It’s a movie that explains to us through all the lenses a movie can provide.  The effect is simply magnificent and different from any other movie experience that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.  I hope it works.  It’s a massive gamble by Kevin Costner to put his life’s work into a movie like this and a series meant exclusively to be seen in a movie theater.  Movie theaters need movies like this to stay open, and Costner is trying to start a trend.  But the timing of it couldn’t have come at a better time.  This is a movie for all of us, no matter what your political background.  And America deserves this story to be told for its benefit.  Because ultimately, it’s the main character and the point of the entire enterprise.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Great Westerns of Taylor Sheridan: From a perspective of the world, something very unique is going on in America

As of recently, in 2024, it’s true. I had never watched Yellowstone or any of the spinoff shows featured on Paramount Plus but has now been moved onto the Peacock streaming services and NBC as a primetime option.  Yellowstone is one of our current time’s most popular television shows, and I was curious about it.  But my wife and I have not had the time to watch it.  From what I saw of Kevin Costner, who is one of the stars, is that he’s too lefty for me.  And with Taylor Sheridan being a Hollywood actor, I wasn’t interested in watching those types of people make a modern western.  So I put it on hold.  After watching it recently and catching up on many of the shows and spinoffs, especially the Western series 1883, 1923, and Bass Reeves, I can say that there are liberalisms in them I don’t like at all, such as language and sex.  The families are too dysfunctional even though they crave not to be, which naturally comes from the messed up minds of Democrats, who then grow up to be actors, writers, and directors.  One thing that turned me off was that during the production of the show a few years ago, while Yellowstone was at its height of power, as everyone knew what kind of show it was at all levels of production, especially from financing, Kevin Costner showed support for Liz Cheney over President Trump.  So I blew off the whole effort as just another work by a bunch of lefty Hollywood types and did other things.  However, so many people have been talking to me about it and wondering if I dressed the way I do because of the show, that I finally decided to catch up to everything. I can say that it is an excellent show.  A lot is going on.  But as a work of art, our culture is screaming out for attention and respect in so many exciting ways that I think Taylor Sheridan has stumbled onto something significant, and he can’t make enough shows fast enough to fill the need out there. 

Uniquely, I travel a lot and often find myself on the other side of the world watching Asian television.  And all through Europe, they love on television American westerns.  It’s only in America these days that Westerners have been looked down on because there is a genuine Marxist push to destroy our culture, starting with the things we enjoy about it.  But I’m not saying what I do about Westerns because it’s only a regional perspective.  I’ve seen what the rest of the world does in art, entertainment, and literature.  For instance, on television in Japan currently, there is a series called The Tale of Genji, a trendy book from Kyoto about a lady waiting during the 11th century.  I watched some of it in my hotel rooms and what I could stream from referrals by friends.  I enjoyed it enough to grab and read the book while traveling through airports on some of those long layovers.  So when I say that Yellowstone is great, it’s within the context of the world, not just from an American perspective.  Some significant themes are being explored in these Taylor Sheridan shows that are important to the perpetuation of the human race, and some real soul-searching is going on in them that can’t be overlooked.  And I think they are just fantastic and reflect something I have considered since Joe Biden was put in office in 2021. 

Westerns can save America, which I discuss in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  Classic American Westerns, whom I had been referring to, would do just fine if America had ever lost its way, which we are in an age where that has actually happened.  I talk about often that after that horrendous election, my wife and I many times, sometimes with our entire family, packed up and traveled all over the Wild West to reacquaint ourselves with America because it was obviously under attack, and I needed to understand what the heck we were fighting for.  I have a few souvenir cups I use around the house, one from Wall Drug out in South Dakota, one of my favorite places on earth, and another from The Big Texan, from Amarillo, Texas, and my grandkids like seeing them and thinking about their travels with us to those places.  And maybe the Yellowstone show means more to us because we have been to the places where the show talks about, from the Yellowstone park itself to the vast areas of West Texas.  I finished writing my book while on the road in Roswell, New Mexico, and we traveled a lot around West Texas while the rest of the country was on lockdown due to COVID-19.  I also gained an appreciation for the backbone of America, especially when compared to my experience around the world.  My opinions about these things didn’t just come out of nowhere but were formed from experience; by the way, Taylor Sheridan moved from Hollywood, bought a ranch in Texas, and started thinking about the contents of these television shows.  His work is uniquely American and timely, and there is a genuine love in his work for the discussion.  I wouldn’t say that these shows are making the MAGA movement for which President Trump is the spokesman.  However, all of them spawn from the same concerns of American citizens, and these shows capture that sentiment perfectly.  Probably unintentionally, but they are all part of a process of Americans working out what has happened to them over the last hundred years. 

I watched a recent podcast with Joe Rogan and Taylor Sheridan talking about one of the spinoff shows, 1883, and how good it was.  People forget a lot about why the West had to be won, and I think Taylor Sheridan is a lot more sympathetic to the American Indian than I am.  But he tells good, honest stories about the natural history of the American West and how the American government wanted immigrants to populate Western expansion to fulfill the idea of Manifest Destiny.  It’s interesting; most of the world was so oppressed by old-world rules and regulations that they would have done about anything for the prospect of free land in the vast spans of the American West.  They didn’t always know they were going to have to fight Indians for that free land, but it says a lot about human beings that they were willing to fight just for the opportunity to be free of corrupt governments always in their daily lives, the kind of communism we see in Europe and Asia to this day, or the aristocratic kingdoms of that western expansion period.  The story is not about how the Indians were killed for their land as much as it is about why people wanted to flee every corner of the world, and still do to this day, to get away from micromanaging governments and to have a chance to be free.  At the core of the modern Taylor Sheridan westerns is the theme of all his shows, and the conflict that happens along the way is compelling and exciting to all human beings.  But we are waking up to honesty about everything that always needed to happen and wasn’t talked about enough in previous westerns that are unique to these Taylor Sheridan projects, where they are coming from a Democrat perspective and migrating to a classic Republican platform politically.  And I see a lot of hope for the future because of these creative efforts and the way people yearn for them with great fanfare.  And they are certainly worth watching!

Rich Hoffman

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

‘Yellowstone’ Has Been Made By A Bunch of Slack-Jawed Hippies: I’ve never seen a show because they are way too left for me

As of now, I have never seen one episode of the popular television series Yellowstone.  I’ve been to Yellowstone, the actual place, but I have never watched the show.  My wife and I have been looking for an opportunity to take the time to watch it, but as of 2.20.24, have not yet done so.  I’m sure we will at some point.  The main series and offshoots look pretty good.  I think they are great for what America has been going through lately, but honestly, they are too liberal for me, from what I do know of them.  The producers and actors, from my vantage point, are money-hating hippies from Hollywood, where the plot lines are all about the big, powerful money people beating up on the poor ranchers, which are classic Western themes.  A lot of good is talked about in these kinds of shows regarding the value of property ownership and family values, and those are the parts of the show that match the public interest.  But for me, they are all a bunch of Liz Cheney-supporting filmmakers who have built the Republican Party into the lame duck that it has been for far too many years until Trump has come along to bring an expectation of victory to party politics that it didn’t have before.  Classic westerns, and these modern ones, never really developed a proper relationship with money and power that is best reflected in American culture, and that has been frustrating to me, which is why, after all this time, and given the content, I have not yet watched the show.  It comes up a lot because of how I dress, and people think the show inspired me.  In reality, it’s likely the other way around. 

Since I was in the fourth grade, I have dressed the way I do, with a cowboy hat and boots just about everywhere I go.  I’ve always worn a hat of some kind, especially cowboy-style hats.  Many times, I go into public dressed in full gunslinger mode, complete with a poncho.  Especially in my 20s, I dressed ready for a gunfight everywhere because, in a lot of ways, every day was a gunfight.  I walked around the Kenwood Mall in Cincinnati dressed like I was off the set of A Fistful of Dollars, which is the Sergio Leone western with Clint Eastwood that I always loved because those movies embraced capitalism in a positive way, and I always liked them over the American westerns that had lots of socialism sprinkled into them by Hollywood.  And I always wanted to make it clear to those around me that I was not like them.  The cowboy hats were a clear signal that I rejected most of the premises they had built their lives around and that, for me, like a robe in the priesthood, my hat was a sign of an embrace of capitalism and a culture of property ownership and a rejection of European civilization as servitude to kings and aristocrats.  For me, the cowboy hat means freedom from those tyrants and a rejection of their desire to control our every move.  As things started getting more complicated socially in the 4th grade, I started wearing cowboy hats to let everyone know where I stood, which is still my practice.  I seldom ever leave my house without wearing a cowboy hat of some kind.  It’s certainly not something I have done lately because of the success of the show Yellowstone, as many have asked me. 

Several times a week people tell me I would love Yellowstone because of the character of Rip, who they say I remind them of, because of things I do in my community.  I’ve seen a few interviews from the Yellowstone cast that tell me that a train station is involved and that sometimes those kinds of eliminations of the enemy are part of living life.  When people won’t leave you alone or the people you tend to associate with, you can’t play patty cake with them.  Bad people don’t understand anything else.  So I get it.  And because of these constant comparisons, it has generated interest in me to watch it at some point.  But my wife and I don’t have that kind of time to watch television.  I watch a lot of news, and we watch documentaries, but my lifestyle is just too busy to watch a streaming series.  I read around three books a week and we do a lot of family activities.  I have to pick what I do for leisure pretty carefully.  A few years ago, when Kevin Costner, who stars in Yellowstone, came out in support of Liz Cheney over President Trump, and the creators of the show rejected the idea that Yellowstone was “red state” entertainment, I put the show on the back burner.  I’m not particularly keen on the whole Indian subplot.  I see all references to “Native Americans” as a communist attempt to degrade American culture by putting the nature-worshipping heathens of a primitive culture on a pedestal they don’t deserve.  I have studied Indian cultures and am not very keen on them.  They were collectivists and best represented by mass group behavior.  I have never been much of a fan of Kevin Costner movies.  He has made some decent westerns, my favorite with him was Silverado.  My least favorite is Dances with Wolves.  I don’t like movies that put down Western expansion at the expense of the Indians.

I like Teddy Roosevelt’s opinion on Western expansion and think it was one of the most important things human beings have ever done in the history of the world.  Many of the Hollywood ideas about Western expansion came from European migrants who brought all their socialism with them, and they found in the Indians someone they could identify with.  And at the core of Yellowstone, from what I do know about it, is that kind of reverence.   For me, a good western is where a gunslinging hero makes a lot of money, wins a beautiful wife, and kills all the bad guys.  But these Yellowstone kinds of filmmakers like to cry about victimization and how the all-powerful rich people and their government pawns destroy the little guy, and the little guy has to fight back, always on their heels and looking over their shoulder.   I can’t relate to that mentality.  My favorite westerns were movies like the Dollars trilogy, where Clint Eastwood never worried about being outnumbered or out financed.  He always won his gunfights and nobody was better than him.  And that carried over into other movies he did, like High Plains Drifter, one of my absolute favorites, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Pale Rider.  You can keep The Unforgiven.  It was only good in the last five minutes.  The rest of the movie was a hippie diatribe from a bunch of Hollywood losers.  So, with all that in mind, you can see why Yellowstone still hasn’t been watched in my house.  They may dress the way I do, but that is more of them coming into fashion than me being inspired by it.  They are copying people they have seen in the world, and they put them in a television show.  But there is a lot they don’t understand about American culture, even if what they do get is something that starving Americans wanting to see something good about their country cling to.  I like seeing shows like Yellowstone being successful.  But for me, they are still being made by mind-numbing hippies who have a lot to learn.  Money is not evil; it reveals evil in people who would otherwise conceal their nature from the judgments of the sane.    

Rich Hoffman

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

There is no Right-Wing in America: The various levels of accepting Karl Marx that destroys people from the inside out

For a lot of reasons this 2023 election has been contentious, but we must clear something up.  In America, there is no such thing as “the radical right.”  The political spectrum that so many people report, especially in the media, is all based on Karl Marx.  Karl Marx is the center position, and we measure everything off him.  When we talk about a political centralist, we are talking about Marx and people who have accepted various degrees of Marxism over time.  In America, we created our own definitions for things, most of which center around the Constitution, which was most displayed at the beginning of the country, such as Federalists and Anti-Federalists, which I most identify with.  And our American Constitution represented a right and left position to some extent.  But around the rest of the world, and what has been adopted by the global media, it is Marxism that they build their entire presumption around, and it is all wrong.  Their political spectrum is just another scandalous trick meant to lower people’s aversion to Marxism so that various degrees of acceptance could take place in America.  But at the core of most American politics is this mysticism as to why people seem to behave so much differently than the aristocratic ruling class which wants to separate the ordinary people from those who desire to boss other people around.  Marxism was their little curtain like the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz, where they could hide behind something and rule over others from a powerful central government, and a lot of people who came out of their childhoods with such desires accepted Marxism to various degrees to satisfy those inner insecurities.  But America was designed to get away from Marxism, which is a European creation and an export to other cultures, which it has destroyed many in its wake.  But in America, it just isn’t applicable. 

A lot of people during the 2023 elections have said of me and others in the MAGA movement that we are right-wing, which I find perplexing.  I watched old westerns like Gunsmoke, Little House on the Prairie, Davy Crockett from Disney, and Zorro as a kid.  Those are products from an unusually free country that had expectations of personal identity that is unique in the world and there is a reason we don’t see those kinds of stories being produced by modern-day Hollywood.  Because the Marxists, as I have explained and which is quite well chronicled now, intended to take over Hollywood, destroy those types of stories, and present the public with Marxist propaganda.  A really good example of that is in the movie Kong: Skull Island which just had China buy up Legendary Studios who produced the film.  I’ve talked specifically about this movie on several occasions and there are a lot more, this isn’t an isolated incident.  But it is overtly obvious what is going on, and it is an excellent example of how the movie industry gradually accepted various levels of Marxism, socialism, and communism into their lives.  To the point where in 2023 the political scale is so distorted with tainted perspective that nobody even remembers where the baseline was because it has been removed from social discourse.  But people are still people and they believe what they do, the same as they always have.  This attempt to change them has been a failed experiment and it is starting to frustrate the perpetrators.  Out of frustration because they can’t get people to follow them, they refer to those who reject them as “right winged.”  When really, it was people who were never drug to the left to any degree that they are referring to. 

I understand what happens to people throughout their lives; they might experiment with drugs, and they might even delve into a homosexual experience.  At some point in the many temptations of youth, they step away into the darkness of Marxism and start accepting various degrees of leftist ideology, which compromises their integrity, and they end up becoming some degree of a lefty.  Maybe they like the Beatles, who were overt communists in their artistic offerings, or they fear standing alone in the free market and find some powerful government that can distribute fairness attractive, so they start adopting little bits of Marx into their lives to hide from the reality of a competitive existence.  Most of the RINOs I have known over the years fall into one of these categories.  At some point, they did drugs, drank too much, cheated on their spouses, and lost their ability to be “holier than thou,” so they accept little bits of lefty politics to hide their shame.  Over time, their political view moved far to the left, and they wanted to believe that they were centralists, when in fact, they were all the dangers of what the Federalists represented, those who love big government to hide their many mistakes in life and still be celebrated in social circles as respectable.  After all, don’t all people have those problems?  Well, I don’t; I have never liked socialist classic rock songs, done drugs, or enjoyed a promiscuous lifestyle.  I’m essentially someone who could have walked out of any movie from Hollywood’s Golden Age and am proudly untainted by the corrosive effects of Marxism.  And that makes it easy for me to see various levels of Marxism in other people because their behavior is so overtly leftist, as the Europeans classify it. 

I am sympathetic to people who have lost their way, and I’m happy to help them through the dark caves of life with a flashlight that will show them the path to righteousness.  And when you further peel back the intentions of Marxism, which was wonderfully captured in the book We the Living, our society was designed to desecrate individuals so that they would seek to hide their shame behind Marxism for relief.  I have known this for a long time, especially in my own college days.  I would look at women passed out in the halls of dorms and the apartments of strange young men, equally compromised and disgraced with vomit all over their faces after a night of partying, and I would wonder how they would explain all this to their kids someday.  That kind of personal conduct is an element of Marxism and it was introduced into American culture early as the intrusions of Marxism and his soft socialism were being sold to America during the Industrial Revolution.  When we talk about people being “right-wing” we are essentially talking about people who refuse to accept failure in human conduct as a default mode for living life.  Marxism gives weak people the illusion that they can misbehave, drink too much, cheat too often, and hide their aversion to personal risk with the skirt of the mother government to protect them from too much competition in the world, to shelter their fragile egos from the realities of a hostile world.  Marxism let them believe that they could rule without risk, and be aristocrats without having actually to become a capitalist.  They could appease a docile public with charity and sacrifice just like the ancient Palestinians did when God told Abraham to take the nation of Israel and make it the “Promised Land.”  America is a promised land, and it has been invaded by left-leaning European imports, which Marxism defines.  And some people have accepted it, and from my perspective, they are some degree of a Marxist, depending on how much they use powerful centralized governments to shield them from their many mistakes in life.  There is no right-wing party that validates people who are encumbered with a mistake-riddled existence.  There are only failures and Americans.  Our classic Westerns used to distinguish to a hungry public the difference and show why any form of leftist political ideology is not only dangerous but destroyed people from the inside out.  And I consider anything to the political left of me as devastating to the individuals involved. 

Rich Hoffman

My Thoughts on Afghanistan: Facing down evil once more

Its Time to Face Down Evil

I love Jags in West Chester, Ohio, and some of my friends who love to chew on cigar smoke while contemplating the complexities of life.  I found myself at the bar enjoying the atmosphere after one of those nights dressed the way I always am in my videos, like the one shown above, enjoying a Guinness.  A receptionist had come for me to take me to my table, so we walked through the posh interior headed for that destiny when an older, very affluent couple stopped me to compliment me on my hat.  At first, I thought they were poking fun at it a bit, but I realized they were quite sincere in their compliments after a few moments.  I don’t talk about it much, but I started dressing this way for one primary reason.  Our country is under attack and has been for a while.  Now is not the time to pretend like everything is fine and dandy.  I wear the outfits I do because it helps other people feel better about what’s going on, that there is still strength and courage out in the world, which is precisely what that couple was referencing without being able to put the words to the moment.  They just knew they liked it. We’ve allowed our culture to slip away from us by playing too friendly with the world.  And in doing business all over the world, I knew something that the rest of us have forgotten because our media culture makes sure we ignore it.

The efforts at toxic masculinity and other progressive pushes were meant to unarm us physically and intellectually.  My approach is to make sure that all those enemies know that, at least with me, that classical American values are at the core of my personality.  I’m happy to project that to anybody who wants to listen, like that couple at Jags.  And they appreciated it for lots of unsaid reasons.  What they could say was that they loved my hat and my leather vest.  Of course, I said thank you.  As another perk, I never have enough pockets for all my things, so the vests serve a practice role, most of which is to conceal my carry, which I never leave home without.  But more than anything, in these times, it did help to project to others that it was alright to let the progressive insurgents know that pushback on their Woke policies was a reality that they would have to deal with.

I’ve been asked hundreds of times over the last few days what I think of the Afghanistan situation and when I explain it, I think of that couple who loved my hat and western attire at Jags.  They didn’t know why they liked my outfit so much; they just knew they did.  Enough to make a big deal about it.  But I understand why they liked it so much; they were older, maybe a little older than me, so they had at some point in their past access to the western, which were the foundations of Hollywood for most of its life.  Westerns were also the first thing that progressives have attacked in our culture, which loves them still.  Only westerns have been satirized relentlessly for the last 30 years because they project what communists call “Toxic Masculinity.” Well, what happened in Afghanistan was that the good guys went there to bring western civilization to the world’s villains, and we helped many Afghan people do just that.  Women were freed for the first time in their aggressive Muslim culture.  America was that needed sheriff that came to town and brought justice to the dens of evil who wanted to continue to function as a backwater crime pit, and we staved it back for 20 years and allowed people to evolve without those fears.  Westerns from American culture have told this story repeatedly, from just about every John Wayne movie to Clint Eastwood’s Fistfull of Dollars.  To The Magnificent Seven, and many more.  The good sheriff coming to town to instill justice and natural law were what most westerns were about. They were specific creations of American ideas and western civilization in general.  And when people see the way I dress, it’s reassuring to them.  Not so much to the youth, although they do respond positively.  They are craving protection and order in their lives.  But we have these needs deep within our culture, and we have over a hundred years of stories about these themes that we’ve created and broadcast around the world.  The bad guys know it and want it undone, which is what Afghanistan was and why it’s such a tragedy.

The mistake purposeful or by sheer accident is irrelevant.  The political left ran by a Marxist ideology, even in radical Islam, expects the bold sheriff’s merits to be replaced by consensus building through the “international community.” The Biden administration has made mention of that strategy over and over as Afghanistan fell apart.  It was a plan built into the political left through echo chambers within academia, and they have made it their hill to die on.  That all countries are equal.  America should not be that white-hatted sheriff for the rest of the world. Instead, all nations would be managed through peer pressure of being out of alignment within the international community.  In other words, the cool kids would not let Afghanistan play in the reindeer games if they fell out of line.  Well, that’s their ideology, and it sounds good in the backyards of Georgetown while grilling hot dogs and sipping on red wine, but it doesn’t work in real life.  All it has done is give the biggest aggressor a chance to pick on all the peace lovers trying to kill the world with kindness.  China has been stoking these fires in the background for their ambitions of world domination, and their next target is Taiwan.  It’s easy for Americans to see all this, at least subconsciously, because of our long history of westerns in cinema.  We were raised to see good and evil in these ways even though our academic educations have put the blinders on us to make us blind to the intentions.  But deep down inside, we know what’s going on.  The minute the good Sherrif leaves the town, the villains come out and pillage the innocent. That reality was put into sharp focus as we watched Afghans pile onto C-17s in a desperate attempt to flee Afghanistan and the Christian-hating Taliban before they were all butchered, raped, and killed by the latest villains on earth. 

Without China, there would be no Taliban; they are the unsaid provocateurs here who planned to use this defeat to shame Americans into staying out of their business when it came to Taiwan and Japan.  And while America was killing itself worrying about whether or not we were using the proper pronouns when referencing ourselves, or in feeling guilt over racism, for which America is the most diverse nation in the world, China could make their move to run the world with communism.  So as sad as Afghanistan is, even that is part of the Chinese plan, to shame America so severely with a 20-year war that sent us packing with nothing to show for it and let Afghanistan destroy itself through its civil war without American involvement.  Then China could quickly kill off the winner to take over and have the mineral rights to the north and stimulate the opium production from the region to further poison the world into compliance with everything communists desire.  That is why I love moments like what I mentioned at Jags in my town of West Chester, Ohio.  It reminds me of times past when good sheriffs had to run the bad guys out of a city like Deadwood, Dodge City, or Tombstone.  We are there again, and over a beer, cigar smoke, and the banter of bold camaraderie, we are prepping ourselves for another fight in the streets.  Afghanistan isn’t the end of the fight, but the cue to strap on the guns and face down the evil villains.  And most people, even if they aren’t gunfighters themselves, know and understand the need because at least recognizing that need runs deep in American culture.  But now, instead of watching it on TV, we will have to do it in real life.  And that is the hope that the world is desperate for.  Afghanistan is just the latest proof to what degree only America can save that world from itself.

Rich Hoffman

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The Poker in Red Dead Redemption 2 Online is Great!

I had a nice talk with a friend recently while we were reflecting on the Tea Party days and the direction of today’s youth. By normal visual standards, the socialized instruction in public schools, and PC counterculture has everyone strapped to the body of Moby Dick at the end of that old story. And the drug use that has permeated everything that young people do, by conventional measure things look pretty hopeless. But two things happened over the weekend that I continue to be impressed with and they will certainly have an impact on how our culture is measured.

The first was a visit to Kings Island where the Festhaus was hosting a professional video game tournament. The place was packed to the brim and young people were everywhere and were quite happy competing on stage against each other with popular titles like Fortnite, and other video games that are part of a culture a lot of people over 30 don’t even understand. As I watched the activity I was thinking of a report that friend had said to me about Mason schools going even further into removing competitive events and statues from their public school—the everyone gets a trophy or none of them do type of thinking—and it was obvious that the politics might be moving in that direction. But the video game culture gets it. There are more opportunities for competition there than when I was a kid. Traditional sports are not the only ways to compete in life, or to learn to. Video games are all about capitalism and they are the preferred medium of young people’s entertainment experiences.

For instance, one of my favorite video games not just of last year, but ever is Red Dead Redemption 2. When that game first came out I was so excited about it that I took a week off work to play it, and for me it was a kind of vacation. It’s a western by Rockstar Games and for me it was like going to the West World of the popular HBO series. These video games are so immersive that they begin to simulate reality. They are different than the passive experience of movies so their impact on culture is something we just aren’t measuring yet. But in the case of Red Dead Redemption 2, it sold 24 million copies in just three days which amassed $725 million, and is still climbing. The earnings report for these video game companies are actually higher than many movie and television studios. Take-Two which is involved in Red Dead Redemption reported a Fiscal Year 2019 earnings report confirming so far $2.66 billion. Those are Disney type of numbers so this is not a market of entertainment that is obscure by any measure.

Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in October of 2018 and I played it several times a week through the turn of the year. I spent about a hundred hours playing it on story mode then I played the Beta development mode for the Online portion of the game. I had to capitalize that because their online concept for the game is a thing of itself. It’s quite an extraordinary attempt at hosting a very brutal and capitalist natured arena. In that meeting with the same friend we reflected on the near elimination of dodgeball from our society deeming it politically toxic. Dodgeball for us when we were kids was something that happened every day. Well for the kids of today, its these online arenas. A great video game must at least have online content where players can compete against each other in player versus player situations which are much more intense than dodgeball. The biggest difference is that one is virtual while the other was physical. But the mentality is the same.

I played the Beta for a while but I couldn’t give the game the kind of time it demanded to be good in that mode so I backed off and moved on to other things. Well, this past weekend Rockstar Games finally finished with their Online offering for Red Dead 2 and put it up on their latest update, which meant the official game went live, around six months or so after the original release, which of course keeps people buying copies of the game and keeping it going which is something to say about how video games tell their stories, over much longer periods of time than movies or other forms of entertainment. So I played the game again to see how things were going and was very happy and surprised to learn that the many bars of gold that I had during the Beta phase and all the money I earned carried over into the official release. And also I was very happy to learn that they had opened up the ability to play poker with other live players which is really the purpose of me writing this article. I was immensely pleased with the way the game was set up and I spent most of the weekend playing just that game mode.

I would not call myself a gambler or even a card player the way that people think of such things. I’m not a drinker, a womanizer or any of the things that are associated with the game of playing poker, which in my understanding of history has been advanced by socialists to attempt to demean the games of the Western frontier so that culturally people would be inspired to move away from those activities, so not to celebrate them. But I do love poker. I love watching it. I love playing it. And I love its history as an American game developed in the frontier days of New Orleans and spreading westward with the gunfighter culture. The game and the mind of gunfighting in the American West are synonymous and I love it for that attribute. Playing poker is a fun game that is uniquely very American, and I love it and including it so prominently in the online version of Red Dead Redemption was a technical feat that really impressed me.

Playing poker was part of the original game, the story mode as they call it these days. And I enjoyed it immensely. I am not the kind of guy who likes to gamble money so I’m not a guy who enjoys hanging out in casinos at all. But I do enjoy the function of the game and the way its played so just gambling the chips is enough for me. I like the way poker chips feel in my hands and how they are used strategically to win or lose the game. It’s a very fascinating game and I spent many, many hours playing it against NPCs in the story mode. But having an online poker game is a whole separate situation. You have random players always coming and going and everyone has to play their hand and getting all that rolled into a fluid video game experience is difficult. The way that Rockstar set up their poker games in actual saloons in their various towns and cities was visually stunning and functionally very satisfying. I played a lot of poker over the weekend and I didn’t even have to leave my home.

As I played and saw how many people were playing the Online Red Dead Redemption 2 game, from poker to all the PVP combat that is involved it was obvious to me that this is where the world is at. Many kids wouldn’t even learn how to play poker if not for a game like this, or would they learn anything about westerns since they’ve been nearly eradicated from American culture. But in the world of video games, the western is alive and well and millions of young people are participating in that world and enjoying it. And with billions of dollars at stake in this growing industry, I don’t think anything that is politically underway to dismantle the American way of life is going to stick. Capitalism is alive and well, especially in the saloons and towns of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Rich Hoffman
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The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs: A review and an observation on the nature of existance

I have always loved westerns, they are uniquely American inventions born of our culture and the world watches them with great curiosity. If you are in a hotel in London or even Paris and Madrid, and flipping through the channels in the middle of the night, you will see lots of old westerns playing because to them there is great optimism in old American westerns. Westerns specifically show values easily in a stripped away fashion of what American values truly are, what a capitalist society truly thinks about itself and others. Hollywood essentially built itself on the strength of the western but leftist radicals’ intent on destroying America have launched a not so secret crusade against all westerns essentially, most obvious in big Disney productions like The Lone Ranger and the Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story. Even in the disguise of science fiction such as Solo was, modern critics and the entertainment press in general want nothing to do with them, and they make it known as they try to torpedo those films at the box office leaving a clear message to filmmakers to stay away from the genre or else. Those who do so dare usually end up turning the American western into a Shakespearian tragedy which is certainly the case of the new one from the Coen Brothers called The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs, just released to Netflix and the video game by Rockstar Games called Red Dead Redemption 2. However, in the case of both references, Red Dead and Buster Sgruggs the old traditions of the American western are there and represented strongly and in the age of the Trump presidency, are quite necessary.

It wasn’t planned this way because Rockstar Games has been making Red Dead Redemption 2 for the last eight years, and the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan have been writing The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs for the last 15 years so neither could have known what would happened in 2016 when Donald Trump would be elected president and the world would be shifting toward nationalism as opposed to a one world government. But with those events westerns such as these suddenly have much more appeal to the longing individualists struggling to make sense of our modern times. And let me tell you something dear reader, it is a real treat to get something as good as The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs delivered to the comfort of your own living room through Netflix as opposed to having to go to the theater to watch it. The film was released to limited theatrical presentations, but on a project like this very inventive western, it is a must watch for those with Netflix accounts.

However, I would not call The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs a traditional western such as Bonanza or Gunsmoke where the protagonists defeat the antagonists with great moral clarity by the end of the story set to uplifting music. Buster Sgruggs is a tragedy, but in all other aspects, it is a very epic achievement of art set against the canvas of America and is very much worth watching. The movie is divided up into six primary stories and is presented in a format much like the great film by Akira Kurosawa called Dreams. The six stories are very compelling but one in particular I felt a great affinity with, it was the story of an old gold digger panning for gold in some unlisted wilderness environment. I think that story said so much about the pros and cons of capitalism in a very simple setting that it was brilliant in its execution. That portion of the story was well worth watching all by itself.

I have a real love of old western towns and Buster Sgruggs had plenty of well-designed sets that were wonderfully built of old frontier towns. The reason I love those towns so much is that they say a lot about us as human beings, suddenly free from the aristocrats of politics and provided with great resources, what is it that humans desire to build. Modern cities have lots of added levels to them and the benefit of modern construction methods, but when you look at an old frontier town and consider the amount of human capital it took to build them, everything from downing the trees, to plaining the wood for construction to building every last thing by hand, to see a town build in a remote corner of the world for the purpose of a new economy freshly discovered in just a few years is quite a remarkable undertaking. And in a lot of ways The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs captured that dim hope that the human race placed in such projects without being overly preachy about it. Everything was wonderfully shot and was generally ambitious in the way that those old towns were constructed. The filmmakers seemed to have understood that yearning and applied the same effort to their craft to obvious effect.

Another particularly sad but very effective story was the segment involving Liam Neeson as he traveled the country with a quadriplegic orator. Not to give anything away, but it was quite a commentary on the human condition and why people do things that they do. The results were ultimately very depressing, but all too honest and I thought it was a wonderful display of high art. Way too sad, but honest and it really is a good format to tell a story like that in the context of a western where people for the first time in their lives were free to roam about on their own, without the protections of group affiliations or government reach.

Another such tragedy that I didn’t see the end coming was the segment about the Oregon Trail, wonderfully photographed in Nebraska with a real caravan of covered wagons. You can’t help but love the characters, they are very likable and you want to cheer them on to success. The love story that evolves is one that anybody would want to see flourish, but how it all ends was just sobering. Often human beings cut the rug out from under themselves all with good intentions, but we often write our own tragic ends in life before the story ever starts. And that was the case of that story, sad, tragic but worth living. It was a mesmerizing tail not so much of good and evil, but in stupidity and hope, blind faith, and the harsh realities of existence.

If you get a chance, I’d highly recommend The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs and to watch it with an open mind, without the pretense of previous westerns. I would not so much call this a tragedy set in the west because there are moments of great optimism in it. I for one had several favorite characters, my favorite probably being Buster Sgruggs himself and the banker who is tasked with fending off a bank robbery. I can really relate to that guy. But ultimately, I think my favorite character was the old man panning for gold. His shock and awe intertwined with endless hope and persistence is something that anybody could admire. And his story alone makes The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs worth watching. But lucky for us there is so much more to enjoy and it is a real achievement in these changing days of entertainment where something of that quality can be streamed at home rather than a theatrical experience which is yet another benchmark in our march into the future.

Rich Hoffman

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Red Dead Redemption 2: Playing in the future by exploring the great westerns of the past

When Red Dead Redemption came out many years ago, I said that it was one of the best westerns ever produced. As a video game by Rockstar, the company that made the title, it was an awe-inspiring effort that still holds up as one of the greatest games ever made eight years later. Other games that were benchmarks of open world simulation gaming have been titles that I’ve referred to such as Uncharted 4 for the PlayStation 4 console, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild for Nintendo Switch. I wish I had time to play everything because I really enjoy video games, but I only have time for a few that I consider to be exceptional and game changers. So when those types of games come out, I usually take some time to spend with them. And that was certainly the case when it came to the sequel to Red Dead Redemption called appropriately enough, Red Dead Redemption 2. The game has been on the radar for release for a long time, many years now but finally on October 26th of 2018 the game made release so I targeted time to spend with it for my own reasons. The game itself is a prequel to the previous story and is set this time in 1899, a period I am very interested in regarding American history. The result was just astonishing. It really is the closest thing to a real-life West World experience that anybody could hope to get. It is not a perfect simulated reality but as a player you can easily forget about the real world and find yourself living and breathing in that massive computer world complete to every detail including tree bark, flowers and insects. The world of Red Dead Redemption 2 is fully alive with people and places set in the Old West and is just an amazing technical achievement not to mention some of the best writing for a western that I’ve ever experienced. It is truly an amazing achievement that is worth talking about.

But first there needs to be some context as to how powerful and popular video game sales are, especially for something like this. As a person I am well over the age of the average player so when my wife and I picked up our pre-ordered copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 at GameStop at Bridgewater Falls in Ohio at 9 P.M. on October 25, just hours before the official release at midnight I was met with a very large line that snaked out the door, down the sidewalk and down into the parking lot. I had just come off an important oversea call with some business partners and worked some political angles that were important for the upcoming election. On the very next night I would be at the Jim Renacci debate with Sherrod Brown at Miami University and mingling with the crowd there. During those conversations the talk wasn’t about the upcoming election for anybody under the age of 30, it was about playing Red Dead Redemption 2. But I didn’t get any weird looks for being too old to be at GameStop even though I can’t say that I had ever been to a video game release quite like this. One of my daughters used to manage a GameStop store and she’d tell me about these hot releases, such as happen with each new Madden game or Call of Duty. But this game, Red Dead Redemption 2 had been promoted for a long time as the game missed several previous release dates so people were very excited to see the result. My wife somehow managed to get us into group one on the pre-release so literally the moment we arrived we were called to the front of the line to pick up our copy and within a few minutes we were back home to start the 3 hour download of over 100gigs of information just to start playing the game. The game sold over 17 million copies during that opening weekend which accounted for nearly $800 million in sales. Compared to the average Hollywood movie, these video games are just destroying the traditional movie experience. These entertainment platforms are far more popular with young people than any movie and for good reason. I left that GameStop amazed.

It’s no secret that I love gunfighters and the basic morality of the Wild West period. I have always felt that there was something extremely optimistic about Wild West towns, that really beautiful moment in world history where individual liberty was free to dream and yearn for a better life as it matched up against the harsh realities of nature. The great things about westerns and the American historic period about gunfighters is that it was the culmination of a lot of philosophic thought crashing into an Asian culture in the American Indian that puts many of our modern problems into a correct context. And Rockstar Games has done something quite remarkable with Red Dead Redemption 2, they have paid honest homage to great classic westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Magnificent Seven and High Plains Drifter and literally put video game players in those worlds not with a two-hour story but one that goes on for hundreds of hours. I have been taking my time with the game and am at over 100 hours and I still have a lot more story to get through as of this writing. I have been doing all the side quest which include taking up bounty hunting jobs, fishing, hunting, crafting various equipment improvements and generally exploring a massive western themed world from the high snow-capped mountains in the north to the plains and deserts of the lowlands. There is even a fictional town called Saint Denis which is a kind of New Orleans city complete with early versions of electricity that is fully realized and populated with people. For instance, just for fun I went into town on my horse and spent the entire night in a high stakes poker game, and I won a lot of money. The game play was just jaw dropping cool, and realistic. It was as close to an experience of actually sitting down at a table in Las Vegas is, yet the whole thing was set in an Old West environment as the sun set and rose again outside the windows. There are many little side activities in Red Dead Redemption 2 that a player could literally get lost in forever, if there was ever enough time in that sentiment.

The game is quite honest and eager to explore the clash of progressivism with the rugged concept of the American individualist and the amount of dialogue that was written and acted in this story by many random events is just staggering. There really isn’t any way to experience everything and to talk to everyone in just one playthrough of the game. Decisions made have consequences in the overall world so not everyone will be available to players based on what they do or say to other people. But the basic plot of the game guides you through a kind of participatory novel. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a story telling experience that is unlike anything ever produced, novel, motion picture or Broadway play. There are some very probing questions asked in the story that is explored with great depth that no western ever had time to fully contemplate. The attention to every little detail is just staggering and how they all randomly interact with each other only conjured in my mind that Red Dead Redemption was simply an early version of the HBO series West World. You really do forget that you are playing a game as a player, you are pulled into that world and living it.

At this point I still have a lot more to play, I probably won’t have it wrapped up as a story until after the Thanksgiving Holiday. Maybe even Christmas. If I put 14 hours a weekend into the game it will probably take another 6 weeks to finish, that is how big it is as a conceptional element. Players could blast through the story if they wanted probably in 60 hours or so, but for me, I want to live in that world of Red Dead Redemption. I personally love the time period and the optimism of the American frontier and this is the best way to experience it. Even in their worst elements, I consider the drunks, thieves and whores of the Old West to be much better people than our modern counterparts because there is an honesty in human endeavor that is evident in that time period that is lacking in modern life, so I am spending as much time there as I can. And if you are like me and like to play video games but don’t have time for all of them, if you had to pick, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the one to play. It is better than any Netflix series, any movie made, or long-standing network television program. It is modern entertainment in its best form yet and it is something to see. If this is how entertainment in the future will be, then we all have a lot to look forward to. One thing that is obvious about the makers of Read Dead Redemption 2 is that they love American westerns and they have somehow managed to put every one of them into the story of this new video game from the ugliness of criminal outlaws, such as the movie the Wild Bunch explored down to the innocence and honesty of Little House on the Prairie. It’s all there in raw and spectacular fashion and is an experience everyone should have at least once, no matter how old you may be.

Rich Hoffman

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