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
The Gunfighter's Guide: 