All these events have put me in a nostalgic mood. I knew where things were going to go after the Biden move into the White House. I was finishing up my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and decided with my wife to hit the road in the coldest part of February 2021 to complete it. I wanted to be as far away from Washington and politics in general as I could get. I was sick of the government debacle of Covid, of the subject of election fraud, and of thinking of the pain that was going to come from a radical administration that was essentially obsessed with the old book by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward. Looking Backward was an 1888 publication that was the third most popular book in America back when books were a thermometer of what public sentiment was. It was the book about a future socialist Utopia in 2000 when a man is induced to sleep for 130 years only to wake up to find the world strangely wonderful. Long gone were the strikes of Marxism that infected the late 1880s, that European import attempting to destroy everything good about America. I was seeking the reverse effect as my many years of research had shown me that if we wanted to fix America, we had to destroy the progressive era and all the lead-up to it. So to finish my book and quest, my wife and I found ourselves in the far-flung town of Roswell, New Mexico, in our RV, looking out across a desert from our mobile kitchen at a frozen tundra and 14 degree temperatures. It was the perfect place to finish the book, and reflecting on it nearly a year later; it was stunningly correct in every way.
Roswell was the perfect place to see real America, without some of the shared politics that we see in more urban areas. I happen to live in a wonderful place with great politics, so the effects of the Biden administration and its socialist incursions would be slow and not so immediate. To really see what I needed to see to finish my book, I needed to go to one of the towns destroyed by government tampering due to globalism and the FDR New Deal politics, and Roswell is an interesting story. Honestly, my wife and I traveled a lot in 2021, and all the trips were essential “looking backward.” I will have quite a story to talk about my discovery of how that book Looking Backward is a key to this whole story of socialism in America. I remember very well when I suggested on WLW radio a decade ago that the teacher unions were socialist concepts. These conversations led to a statewide attack on all public sector unions in Ohio in 2012, which fell apart because Governor Kasich was only faking his conservativism. He would have understood how to win that fight if he had known what was going on in the subculture of progressivism, which would eventually consume him and destroy his role as governor in Ohio. Each place we traveled to in 2021 contributed something important to my personal quest. But to finish off the book, I wanted to be in Roswell, where John Chism had run his big cattle empire and where an obscure little dine-in restaurant called The Cowboy Café just outside of town made fantastic omelets. So I finished the book at our RV dining table, looking at those windswept snow banks building up outside our window, then we celebrated the book’s completion by grabbing a late breakfast at The Cowboy Café.
The sad thing about The Cowboy Café when I was there was that they had been hit hard by Covid rules by their ignorant, progressive governor who had gone all-in on full tyranny, much like all the blue states had that year, and it was only getting worse under Biden. We weren’t allowed to dine in at The Cowboy Café; we could only pick up and take it back to our RV, which personally I liked better. I wouldn’t say I like to eat around other people; I like to have space for my thoughts. I eat in front of people all the time, but I never enjoy it. I much prefer the comfort at our RV while on the road to step away from society and all the noise, so I can read, think and write. But for them, the restriction significantly impacted their business because people in Roswell go to The Cowboy Café to be seen and talk to other people, the old-fashioned way that farmers and hard-working people always have. I can think of many similar places near my home, like Middletown and Hamilton. Still, it was easier for me to see many things in Roswell because it was an exotic atmosphere hiding behind the veil of all the alien conspiracies. As it turned out, the alien story was just the way the town had chosen to survive as a result of all the liberal policies that shipped all their jobs overseas from World War II on, and that was the story for many of the far-flung towns in New Mexico and all up and down Route 66 upon getting there. The impact of liberalism wasn’t so apparent in towns like mine; you had to go where America was further to see it. In Roswell, New Mexico, it was like an archaeological dig that showed various layers of human progress preserved in town perfectly. In places like Middletown and Hamilton, Ohio, you get that history too, but it’s sprinkled in with progress. In Roswell, things are as they were 100 years ago, growing until the mid-40s when the alien crash happened and refocused everyone’s attention to conspiracy instead of the military takeover of the area and the missile testing that then became the booming business.
We ate at The Cowboy Café for the rest of the week for breakfast and lunch, and I came to really like Roswell, New Mexico. My wife and I found a little grocery store that specialized in local suppliers that were nice. We became attached to a private brand of corn chips from a Mexican farmer who lived nearby that was fantastic to eat while we spent long hours camping in our RV waiting for the weather to break so we could turn north and go home. We ate those corn chips for hours while watching The Weather Channel, which reported so many flash snowstorms along our path, but we didn’t care much. Roswell was an excellent place to be and to think for me. And thinking back on it, it was the perfect place to finish the book. If I wanted to attack the ridiculous premise of progressivism and its destructive aftermath in our nation, Roswell was the place to see everything clearly. And The Cowboy Café was the perfect story of tenacity which exists in all those small towns. The world might have given up on such places, but the people find ways to survive. But then again, that is why so many people supported Trump. Why Joe Biden was not elected president, he was put in place by globalists who were afraid another term of Trump would destroy their investments into what was their bible in Looking Backward. Their socialist Utopia was actually deader than the town of Roswell, and to cling to it, they had to steal an election. But when you talk to people in places like The Cowboy Café, you quickly learn what a fake our modern politics is. And the truth is out there, not the truth of aliens and government conspiracy so much, but as to what people think and feel. I’m glad to have had those experiences at the times that we had them.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 