A recurring theme of American westerns is the temptation of the domestic woman to coax a man not to meet evil in the street and right wrongs but to stay safe and keep the doors shut. To hide in the bosom of a woman in trade for sexual security replacing mother as the overseer of what’s good in the world. Of course, the man must do what they must and meet evil in the street and conquer it, then return home to the woman for forgiveness, which usually he gets. The point to the stories is that women are the guardians to domestic bliss and the love of home and family, but that the threats to those wonderful things come from outside sources, and sometimes to eliminate them, the hero must go and throw all concerns for danger aside and do what has to be done. That theme was particularly strong in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider from 1986. Sure, women had the right to vote long-established. At that time, women were in the workplace sharing breadwinning activities, tricked by the government to become taxpayers serving the government rather than guardians of the house and protecting the children from the villainy of government. But that’s a story for another time. Presently we are faced with the trend of great evil, and it’s time to face it down in the street and figure out what to do about it. In the Pale Rider theme, two women were tempting Clint Eastwood to stay in the house and live happily ever after with them, hoping to ignore the evils of the world from inside, a mother and her young daughter. Of course, Eastwood would forget both and face down the bandits in glorious gunfire, doing what needed to be done despite the cries of safety from the women. And that’s where we find ourselves in a very modern time. We have a challenge to our order of American hopes and dreams and a real need to throw away safety, security, and domestic bliss to face down evil for all its worth and deal with it squarely. After the crimes showed just in election fraud from 2020, I think the case for bringing back hanging as capital punishment is more than justified and is something we should have a serious conversation about.
Men and women certainly have different roles in any social order, and since westerns were produced and society has “evolved,” our opinions about things have become murky. I would argue that all this ambiguity has been on purpose to allow criminal activity. Like all bad guys in the world, they seldom ever sell their actions that way. But it takes good people to see bad people for their worth, and sometimes, the good people must risk it all to do what must be done to protect the world from evil. And to understand how to tell good from bad, it must be clear which is which. As the social order of our times has been formed by those most hostile to tradition, it is helpful to turn to history and our culture of stories for clarity which I’ve done due to the 2020 election. I’ve spent many weeks on the road in 2021 and traveled all over the Wild West studying history. Much of it was to finish off my manuscript to The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, a book that makes a case for many things that need to happen in the 21st century. I’ve probably seen every western ever made, but to think about the vast evil I was witnessing, I needed to go and see the places I had read about over so many years and consider the options. And one thing that continued to come up in the many books I picked up unique to traveling in those western areas was that hanging seemed to work a lot better than the legalisms of the progressive era.
I was in Deadwood roaming the streets as my family waited for a table to eat at a nearby restaurant as I ran across a book that turned out to be fantastic for this purpose called The Outlaws of South Dakota. It was the kind of book you wouldn’t just buy on Amazon, it was a local flavor, and it was perfect for getting a good taste of Deadwood’s history. I had read about so many places in Deadwood that my visit gave me a good foundation for the words on pages, and by the time my family was seated, I had an excellent place to take my research to the next level. And it was clear from that research, no matter where I traveled, from Deadwood to Lincoln County, New Mexico, that when people would hang bad guys for simple threats and slights against innocent people, the society worked a whole lot better. When the attempt to replace justice with lawyers and human resource departments was introduced at the start of the progressive era to stop people from shooting each other in the streets, the trend of criminals was to hide their actions behind rules nobody wanted to follow. And evil spread like wildfire. After banning alcohol with the 18th Amendment in 1919 and the women’s right to vote in 1921, we can see the intention of governments and the criminals who prospered from the power grabs of the progressive era. Replacing the woman as the guardian of domestic bliss was the first step, and robbing a man of something to fight for was the second. The gunfighters in the streets were pushed deep into history, the alcohol slugging loner ignoring the women and meeting a bad guy in the street for frontier justice was a thing of the past, and what the government instead gave us were comb-over lawyers that interfered with justice giving rise to “organized crime” as we would come to know it.
These were the days of Bonnie and Clyde and Al Capone, who would take the government overreach and profit from the chaos. People no longer stood up to evil or even their wives for the right to justice. Now preserving justice was not even a domestic problem; everyone hid in their homes and called the government to do the work. It’s out of this chaos that Saul Alinsky learned from Al Capone himself how to make the Democrat Party into a government-sponsored organized crime syndicate, which is where we find ourselves today. It seems like a long time, but the election fraud that we saw in 2020 was just the result of 100 years of progressive erosion of justice. There was no longer a woman to turn away from maintaining domestic bliss and family love to risk it all to face down evil. Now evil was everywhere, and nobody could see it because nobody was home even to fend it off. Everyone worked for the government to be good taxpayers to fund a monster government that criminals essentially ran.
We were supposed to maintain that government by elected representatives, but we learned in 2020 that the criminals were running the show, and nobody was meeting them in the streets to stop them. They didn’t respect our laws, and they certainly didn’t appreciate any of us. While traveling and reading this year, it became clear that the only way to stop that lack of respect is to get back to the days of what worked and what didn’t. What didn’t work was putting safety first and listening to what the government wanted to do about justice. What did work was that people at the front of justice, alone in faraway places like Deadwood, South Dakota, often hung bad people at the point of a crime, where it happened quickly. And things were much better off than they are now. So perhaps we should be thinking this way again. Because what is going on now just isn’t working, and we need it to. We have a criminal government, and we need to meet it in the street and deal with it accordingly. But to deal with evil, first, we need to see it.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 