Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
“Woke” was coined by the left some years ago to describe a person who had become sensitive to the left’s pet issues, especially racial and “social justice” ones. It implied that a person disagreeing with the left about those issues was not just wrong, but unconscious. Becoming woke was unintentionally analogous to the Christian concept of being born again — which is appropriate since leftism is the left’s religion.
This catchy term was initially successful. But the left never succeeds at success. That’s because what’s important to them is not being successful in resolving grievances, but parading those grievances as evidence of their victimhood.
Victim status is more important to the left than winning – and easier too. If the left were a sports team, they’d be lazy and winless but they would always say, gleefully, that it’s because the referees robbed them.
The ACLU sued the United States for money on behalf of illegal immigrants for being separated from their children when they were caught and detained at the border. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that the Department of Justice was considering settling the case for about $450,000 per individual – a settlement amounting to over a million dollars in the case of a family of three and over two million for a family of five.
The basis for the ACLU’s lawsuit on behalf of the immigrants is not clear. Most legal experts agree that whatever the morality of putting children into shelters, it is lawful. That’s what happens when parents commit a crime and are incarcerated. The lawsuit appears designed to establish new judge-made law to the effect that when the crime is illegal immigration, the children must be incarcerated with the parents (who may or may not actually be their parents) in an adult prison.
Traffic accidents illustrate the phenomenon. It was widely assumed that traffic deaths would decline during the pandemic because fewer miles were being driven.
These grim figures correlate with declining use of seatbelts, more drunk driving and more speeding. COVID effectively suspended the rules of the road.
That’s not all. Drivers are not just aggressively trying to get somewhere in a hurry; they’re looking for a fight. They hop in their car and drive around looking for prey.
COVID suspended the whole rulebook of civilized behavior. It’s like a children’s game where the rules are suspended for a few moments, except the few moments have dragged on for about 20 months now.
We see the same effect everywhere. People were told they don’t have to work, so they stopped working. Or they were told that they could pretend to work from home, so they pretended to work from home.
People were told that the police are bad and should be starved of the funds necessary for them to do their jobs. So policemen and women are quitting. Unsurprisingly, that adversely affects law enforcement.
People were told that it’s OK – even noble! – to loot department stores, or at least that they could shoplift with impunity. So they did.
People were told that lives don’t matter unless they’re black ones, so the murder rate is up 30%. That’s the biggest one-year jump in history.
People were told that government handouts are not limited by the amount of taxes the government collects from the people. Instead, the government has as much money as it wishes to print, so it can give unlimited quantities to the people. Money grows on trees, except you don’t even need a tree.
People with all this free money – and free time since they aren’t working – can then go buy things, if only there were people still working to make those things.
Children were told that they didn’t have to go to school. So they didn’t. And they didn’t seriously replace their truancy with online learning. We lost at least a year of education – of children who were already being educated badly.
With the guard rails removed, civilization crashed like a garbage truck driven by perfidious pants-pooping drunk vagrants colliding with a dumpster fire.
The left likes all this de-civilizing because they dislike civilization. Civilization involves qualities like merit, morality, honesty, logic, justice other than the social kind, intellectualism and consequences. The left finds such things an obstacle to the utopia they plan to establish and rule.
As for me, I’m done pandemic-izing. Let’s have rules again. I want my world back.
Kamala Harris told us before this week’s election that, “What happens in Virginia will in large part determine what happens in 2022, 2024 and on.”
OK, let’s run with that. Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points in 2020. This week, his surrogate in the governor’s race for whom he, Harris and other Dem poobahs personally campaigned lost by two. That’s a 12-point swing.
I applied that 12-point swing to the 2020 midterm elections for the House of Representatives to get a feel for the 2022 elections. In other words, to graft this week’s result onto the 2022 midterms, I subtracted six points from the vote share of each Democrat in 2020 and added those six points to each Republican. The result was a 46-seat swing to the GOP.
Joe Biden visited the Pope. Politicians do this. The meetings are of course carefully scripted so that nothing controversial occurs, such as the Pope reminding the visitor that according to Church doctrine and scientific opinion a fetus is a living creature and the species is homo sapiens.
It’s not really a meeting; it’s a show. The president tries not to say something stupid while the Pope intimidates him with his Pope getup complete with the lamp shade hat.
This show is traditionally broadcast live. Just a few days before this one, however, the White House announced that it would not be. Because reasons. Unspecified ones.
We were told afterward by persons in whose interest it would be to tell us this, that the meeting went very well. In particular, the Commie Pope Pope Francis told Biden that he should continue to receive communion. Aborted fetuses don’t vote, don’t fill the offering plate and don’t tell tales.
All good and well and and predictable.
But a side story developed. According to the resistance, rumors circulated in Rome like a swirly in an overflowing toilet that the big meeting required an intermission due to, um, a bathroom incident. More specifically, an incident that is supposed to occur in a bathroom but didn’t. It seems in the course of meeting the Pope, the President pooped his pants.
That Hillary campaign slogan didn’t work so well for her. She lost.
She lost a lot. She lost about 30,000 emails, 30 states, 304 Electoral College votes, the Supreme Court, Congress, most of the state governorships, and 80% of the land area of the country. She lost Wisconsin, for gosh sakes.
She lost her balance, her sobriety and her quarter-mil influence-peddling speaking gigs.
She lost several million dollars that her campaign paid to sleazy lawyers to fabricate a bogus Russian pee-pee dossier on Donald Trump that is now leaking all over her and those lawyers, at least one of whose journey to the White House looks to be detoured to the Big House for lying to investigators. Time will tell whether he and Hill share a cell.
She lost to people she characterized as Deplorables. She’s a loser.
The words “motherhood” and “mother” are now cancelled. The proper woke term is now “birthing person.” That’s because “mother” means a woman who has birthed a child, and allegedly we now also have men who birth a child.
Never mind that these “men” have no Y chromosome and were born female with female genitalia and female chromosomes. They are now “men” because, well, because they say so. According to their science – which you’d damn well better follow — whatever they say they are, they are. To contend that science says anything different is hateful and unscientific because it hurts their feelings.
Then there’s the flag of the United States of America. This piece of cloth symbolizing a republic, to which we used to pledge our allegiance and for which soldiers died, has been canceled too. Because it’s a symbol of racism.
Joe Biden’s enterprising son, Hunter, has a creative side. He’s an artist. Not just any artist and certainly not a starving one. He is . . .
America’s.
Greatest.
Living.
Artist.
It’s not unusual for people in the public eye to have an artsy side. Winston Churchill comes to mind. Angelina Jolie recently parted with this original Churchill for about $11 million which is probably more than she got when she parted with her last husband.
But, of course, the last husband probably wasn’t as original as Churchill. And besides, Churchill won WWII, while I’m guessing Jolie’s last husband lost WWIII.
A majority of Americans now think that Joe Biden is not up to the job of being president and that his administration is incompetent. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it for the Democrats is that they’re now accurately perceived as bullies.
The latest from the Department of (Social) Justice is that they are unleashing the FBI on parents who object to school boards teaching false, woke and politically correct tripe that America was founded on slavery. For opposing this anti-American propaganda that school boards force-feed to our children, the parents are labeled domestic terrorists.
The bland, neutered, omnipotent, unaccountable, establishmentarian, government censors (think of the Ghost Busters’ characterization of the raging pusillanimous bureaucrat, “It’s true, this man has no dick”) undoubtedly imagine that siccing the FBI on defenseless ordinary parents constitutes speaking truth to power, as leftists always do. How courageous of them!
Long-time readers will recall that your correspondent was a conservative columnist for the uber-liberal Aspen Times for seven years. In that time, I became the most-read columnist in the Aspen area. My columns frequently generated more clicks than front page news.
That was not acceptable to the Aspen Times. After all, I was hired to be a token, not to be a success. On Christmas Eve in 2019, they fired me. By email. As for their reasons, they stated that my “values” were incompatible with theirs. The story was widely published, including on national sites.
Ah, but there’s justice in this world. The Aspen Times conducts a “Best of Aspen” competition each year where readers vote for their favorites in various fields. One is “Best Columnist.” The winner for year 2020 – after I’d been fired in 2019 – was yours truly.
As things turned out, being fired from the Aspen Times was a blessing for me. My blog now reaches a readership that is orders of magnitude greater than the entire Aspen Times circulation. I recently passed the half-million mark.
The left’s monopoly over the media is over forever. Yes, they own Old Media. But they don’t own Substack, WordPress (which hosts my blog) or multiple other outlets. They sure don’t own me.
That pains them. They’re now trying to control these alternate sources of news and opinion. But their task is like whack-a-mole or plugging the holes in a leaky dam. In the days of the internet, censorship is impossible. That drives them stark, raving, foaming and frothing mad.
The Aspen Times’ annual “Best of Aspen” competition has now begun for 2021. You and your friends can vote. In fact, they permit you to vote early and often (though it seems that you can vote only once a day).
I’ve once again been nominated for “Best Columnist.” The link to vote is HERE. Scroll down to the “Best Columnist” category near the end. They’ll ask for an email address, but it’s easy to later opt out of their email list or simply block them.
For a real hoot, I’ve also been nominated for “Mr. Aspen” which is the first of the categories at that link. (Interesting that there’s only a “Mr” and “Ms” category – what about the other 61 genders???) Imagine if the conservative columnist fired by the liberal Aspen Times for bad “values” is voted by its readers not only “Best Columnist” but also “Mr. Aspen.”
Note: I get nothing but grins and schadenfreude out of all this. If you ever want to join me in grins and schadenfreude by getting on my free subscriber list, the link is HERE.
the Aspen beat 