Not to brag, but as a statement of fact, I know many people are wondering why I have not been canceled out of existence. Many bad people have certainly tried, and the shadow banning of me is just flat-out ridiculous. But the truth of it is that my phone never stops ringing, even though I don’t make any attempts to broadcast what the political left considers toxic masculinity as a gun-wielding conservative, way to the political right of John Wayne. I consider him a long-haired hippie compared to the way I think of politics. But I do work extensively with people of all kinds of political affiliations and religious beliefs. I get along with everybody until they do me wrong. Yet if I answered all the calls and emails, I would never have time to do anything else, so I have to be very selective with my time. It’s such a problem that I spent a whole chapter of my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business explaining why selective management of time is so important. You might want to spend all kinds of time with people, but spending infinite amounts of time with them has a cost, usually a big one. That leads to the answer to the question as to why this modern attack vector has not canceled me out by the liberal’s global progressive mindset. Well, it’s because I have something the world really wants, a unique skill and that people are willing to put up with some conservative eccentricities so they can get some of what I have. And that skill is a very keen sense of root cause analysis.
For more than 30 years now, I have been an expert in Lean Manufacturing; I’ve been through all the reiterations and have advised many on it over the years. I know it backward and forward. But, I am not at all in love with it. I see it strictly as an eastern spin to Japan’s lessons from Deming after World War II. They were smart; they took one of the American manufacturing consultants into their arms after it was American manufacturing that essentially won that war, and they set out to beat us at our own game. They turned what they learned into Lean and then sold it back to us, which now has much of the world thinking that they can copy Lean into their own cultures, only to find that it doesn’t work so well in the West. I have never been all that impressed with Deming or the people who worship him as a manufacturing god. Those in the Lean movement with martial art terms that they think sound cool when selling eastern ideas to the West thinking it will help make companies better and more profitable. If anything, it has only contributed to the spread of communism as we assumed that they knew something in the east that we didn’t know in the West, which essentially started this push toward global communism. I have a saying that many who know me often hear, “get rid of the Black Belt and embrace the gunbelt.” I wrote my own book about this way of thinking after many years of experience and my root cause analysis of the state of the world, which needs some fresh insight.
However, I’m not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater. One of the Lean tools that are most commonly used in the world to determine root cause analysis is the “five whys.” Now here, my gunfighter analogy would say that I shoot from the hip on those kinds of things because I have great experience and troubleshooting ability. I can usually arrive at a root cause analysis by walking into a room. But to use a more traditional tool to bring other people into the knowledge, they need to see a process like the “five whys” to work out the problem. And that’s precisely what I did when it came to asking the questions about why liberalism so often fails, why the Biden administration sucked so much. Why do so many people hate Donald Trump? And essentially, why the state of the world was so bad when liberals did their work in it. Those weren’t political statements; they were observations based on reality. I had my shoot from the hip understanding of it, which long-time readers here understand I usually peg things months, years, or decades ahead of when trends hit. That’s why my phone never stops ringing, and it never will. Much of the time, I’d love the phone to stop ringing. But there is a cost to everything. But to prove my thoughts to people, I needed a more traditional root cause analysis. So I found myself way out West with my family at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which gave me what I had been looking for. I’ve been to museums all over the world, some of the best that there are. And the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was, and is, something extraordinary.
It was at that museum that I learned to what extent Edward Bellamy had played a role in shaping socialism in America during that little vacuum of history when the Buffalo Bill Wild West show was the most popular form of entertainment in the world, from around 1880 to 1910. Bellamy’s book Looking Backward came out in 1888. It was a continuation of Karl Marx that essentially started quite a movement in America toward socialism that seamlessly merged with progressivism around 1910, during the Teddy Roosevelt years. In the Bellamyites, much of modern liberalism was formed, which populates our nightly news cycles. Specifically, the nationalization of all means of production. It has loomed in the background for the last 150 years, and they have constantly made gains for their movement over that entire time. But to see the root cause of the problem of liberalism, you must go back to that period before the Progressive Era and at the end of the romantic Gilded Era, what I think of as the age of the gunfighters. Many believe in gunfighting as a barbarous age of aggression and violence; I see it as much better than the concepts of Bellamy and his followers of the modern-day progressives in the Democrat Party.
Like any root cause analysis, when trying to solve a problem, it’s not acceptable to put up with something causing you a defect, whether in manufacturing, psychology, or global politics. If a bad idea is causing trouble, then you have to get rid of it. And liberalism was a bad idea from the moment it was released with the work of Karl Marx. What Edward Bellamy did with it was infect America with a disaster of thought that we see fully on the stage today. But to see it correctly, you have to go back to a time before the problem gained support, which Edward Bellamy did for the work of Karl Marx during the period of massive westward expansion in America. In my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, the basic premise is designed to help put a business back on track or a country; however the thought exercises are wished to be used by the reader. But accepting the failure of a thought is not acceptable. That’s not to say that in the past, they had everything right. There are always ways for “continuous improvement.” But a continuation of a bad idea which liberalism is is not the path to success for anything. And to deal with it effectively, we must as a culture accept that premise as a fact and not make concessions with failure just to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings. That frankness is why the phone never stops ringing; there are so many people stuck in the world between a problem and broken feelings on how to have a proper solution. Usually, the problem is easy to fix, but the people involved make it difficult. But the fix is the fix, and for America to be right again, we must solve the sickness at its source, to the world before Edward Bellamy and his destructive book Looking Backward.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 