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"
In a methodical and scholarly decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court this week did what I predicted last fall they would do. They said racial discrimination in college admissions is unconstitutional.
Several other Justices joined Roberts’ decision while also writing their own concurrences, including Justice Clarence Thomas in an emotion-packed opinion of Constitutional originalism that would do proud his old mentor, Justice Antonin Scalia.
It’s a landmark decision that is far more important than last year’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade (unless you happen to be a fetus). I take personal delight that the named defendant that history will saddle with the loss is Harvard, a place that once rejected my application to law school and, more importantly, is the vanguard of the liberal intelligentsia.
“I am not a crook,” proclaimed Richard Nixon shortly before he resigned in disgrace.
And he wasn’t. At least not in the ordinary sense. Some lowlifes hired by an overzealous Committee to Reelect the President burglarized the Democrats at the Watergate Hotel. Nixon then foolishly tried to cover it up. That amounted to the technical and manufactured “crime” of obstruction of justice. But what Nixon himself did was not burglary – the burglary was committed without Nixon’s knowledge.
Then there’s Joe Biden.
Joe apparently was on the take. He and his family – at least nine of them at last count – appear to have taken millions from America’s competitors and even enemies around the world. His creepy son Hunter was the bag man for these bribes, but what Hunter was selling was 100% Joe.
That this happened is no longer seriously disputed.
The list of things that nine-year-old boys are prohibited from doing is long. They cannot drive, vote, skip school, get a tattoo without parental permission, buy cigarettes or marijuana or alcohol, or irrevocably mutilate their bodies.
If you’ve ever met a nine-year-old boy, you’d probably agree that these prohibitions are sensible.
Another thing a nine-year-old boy cannot do is to consent to sexual relations with another person. We sensibly deem the nine-year-old brain incapable of granting consent to such an act.
But the people who labeled themselves “woke” until society began associating their chosen label with their nutty ideas, say that a nine-year-old boy – without his parent’s consent or even knowledge – should be able to have his penis amputated. He can get his penis filleted but not fellated.
Amputation of his penis is apparently exempt from the prohibition on mutilating other parts of his body. He still can’t get a tattoo.
The Supreme Court in 1954 unanimously declared in Brown v. Board of Education that racial discrimination in schools is unconstitutional.
The reaction of Democrats was indignation and defiance. Democrat Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the state National Guard to prevent Blacks from entering white schools.
Democrat Virginia Senator Harry Byrd organized the “Southern Manifesto” calling for Brown to be reversed and vowing never to implement it. It was signed by 99 Democrats but only two Republicans, including all but two of the Democrat senators from states in the former Confederacy. Democrats in Virginia passed the Stanley Plan, named after Democrat Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley, barring any state school receiving state funds from following the Brown ruling.
Democrat-controlled legislatures across the South closed many schools to avoid having to integrate them. The Democrat legislature of Florida passed a resolution declaring Brown “null and void.” A Democrat member of the Ku Klux Klan murdered a Black civil rights activist for daring to file a lawsuit to enforce Brown in Mississippi.
Democrat Alabama Governor George Wallace personally stood in the doorway to block Black enrollment at the University of Alabama.
Meet the new bosses, not the same as the old bosses:
There’s a big white Serbian named Jokic who’s a magician with the ball. He can dunk but rarely bothers. He has a soft touch that usually finds the hoop, and loves to get the ball into the hands of others to do the same. He leads by example.
He’s so clever that watching basketball is now something like watching hockey – you lose track of the puck/ball. Jokic never went to college, never learned to trash talk, and never got too full of himself. Instead, he worked tirelessly to become the best center – and maybe the best basketball player at any position – since, well, forever.
Despite whatever click-bait headlines you’re seeing on Fox News, and the predictable rage of rage-aholics, it’s been reported by the Wall Street Journal that Republicans and Democrats have basically reached a debt deal. Credit the skillful negotiations of Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the fumbling negotiations of President Joe Biden.
Biden’s opening card in this game was something he specializes in: nothing. He gambled this spring that he could portray the Republicans as intransigent extremists by refusing to negotiate with them, and the Republicans would wind up having to simply raise the debt ceiling without any concessions from the Democrats. More borrowed money to spend now and repay later, and no conditions on spending it.
This has been a very emotional time for me. The time I’m referring to is the seven decades in which I have lived or, rather, until my recent discovery, merely existed.
From the time I was born, I was uncomfortable with the society-imposed notion that I was sometimes wrong. I knew deep down that it was a lie. I knew deeeeep down that I was an infallible trapped in a fallible body. I knew deep down that I’m always right.
It hurt. It hurt to be told by infalli-phobes that I was not infallible. How dare they! Teachers, parents, friends, and aye, even – especially – lovers, told me I was not perfect. They hurt me. That makes them wrong. And evil.
I was … ohhhhh, it hurts to re-tell this … I was cut from the freshman baseball team when I was about 14. There I was – infallible at ball and all – and the shop teacher/coach – the shop teacher! – cut me. Thinkin’ I should sue his estate, but shop teachers tend to be judgment-proof. No matter. I’m totally over it now.
In a 168-page commentary by a former wisenheimer local newspaper columnist, one doesn’t expect to find the breadth and depth of Alexis de Tocqueville or the wit and wisdom of H.L. Mencken when it comes to vibrant, insightful social analysis.
But in his newly-published book “High Attitude: How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen,” Glenn Beaton has his moments.
Here’s one of them: “Aspen and the rest of America changed in the ’60s, in some ways for the better but mostly for the worse. America recovered, but Aspen never did.”
I guess this explains why, when I first came to the valley 14 years ago for the first time in 30 years, I was seeing men my age looking and acting pretty much as they had, say, in 1970 — with pony tails, tie-dye, a religious belief in the redemptive power of art and “sustainability,” and an absolute giddiness in anticipation of the first pot dispensaries following the legalization of a drug that profits no man, apart from the money to be made.
Let’s face it: Aspen and its environs constitute a uniquely hybridized subculture that, like most others, is intoxicated by its own importance and largely dismissive of what it has taught itself to dislike.
Enter an alien intelligence, with origins in conservative Colorado Springs and a truly liberal education leading to endeavors in both civil engineering and the practice of law and ultimately to his present career as a freelance gadfly, who likes to hold one of those illuminated, magnifying cosmetic mirrors up to our faces, revealing, well, whatever it reveals.
And while he is at it, he also provides us with a basic literacy in our prior history. Like most people strolling down Main Street, I didn’t know Paepcke from Plato, as Beaton puts it; but thanks to his book, I’ve developed a considerable appreciation not only for Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke, but for people named Wheeler, Fiske, Litchfield, Pfeifer, Anderson, and other “founders” of present day life in Aspen.
And, alas, I am also far better acquainted with the adventures of people named Thompson (a person for whom “narcissism is too generous a term,” says Beaton), Braudis, Grabow, Sheen and Mueller, Sabich and Longet, Trump and Maples, multiple Kennedys, and many others — those who prompt Beaton to opine that “if America in the ’60s was like a conventional mom and dad who occasionally got drunk and passed out, (post-’60s) Aspen was like their 13-year-old kid who got into meth and never recovered.”
His history of the place, from Ferdinand Hayden’s 1873 survey through Skico’s contemporary paternalism, is basically a parade of foil characters who mirror each other’s virtues and vices. To appreciate the integrity of the Aspen Center for Physics, for example, one only need consider the steadily more partisan, virtue-signaling, woke drift of the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival and Aspen Music Festival and School.
To understand true, selfless, largely-anonymous virtue, as distinct from feel-good displays of moral superiority, one only need consider the men and women of Mountain Rescue Aspen.
It’s all there in front of us. What Glenn Beaton does is sharpen our vision and periodically allow us to laugh.
The Supreme Court decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson overruled Roe v. Wade, their 1973 decision that purported to find an abortion right in a U.S. Constitution that never mentions or alludes to it. Abortion is now rightly governed by the people’s elected legislators, and, sadly, to some extent by unelected bureaucrats, but, in any event, not by judges.
The Dobbs decision was leaked a couple of months in advance of its issuance. The effect of the leak was an outcry from abortion proponents, illegal protests at the homes of the conservative Justices, and an attempted assassination of one. The leak was unprecedented in over two centuries of Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Chief Justice Roberts turned the matter over to the Court’s marshal, a person not skilled in criminal law investigation. Apparently unaided or little-aided by the unlimited resources of federal law enforcement, she concluded that there was no “preponderance of evidence” to name the leaker.
In other words, she has her suspicions but did not succeed in confirming them. As I wrote some months ago, I think Roberts didn’t really want her to succeed, because he felt that the political turmoil from identifying the leaker would be yet another blow to the Court.
The author of the Dobbs decision, Justice Alito, recently spoke at the George Mason University law school, a place called “Scalia Law School” after the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia. Or rather, I should say he virtually spoke. His speech was by Zoom after the school decided they could not guarantee his safety. These days, he and the other conservative Justices need 24/7 armed guards and must travel in armored cars.
Alito offered his view on the identity of the leaker and the effect of the leak. It’s detailed in a piece by James Taranto, the excellent Features Editor of the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall HERE).
Alito speculates that the leaker intended the effect that the leak produced. That speculation seems sound. It’s hard to believe that the leaker thought the effect would be anything different. The purpose was obviously to intimidate the conservative justices into changing their minds.
Perhaps in a case of psychological projection, the leaker underestimated the courage and resolve of the conservative Justices.
Alito dismisses the complicated theory that the leak was actually by a conservative Justice worried that some of the other conservatives were wavering in their votes. He notes that a conservative leaker would be physically endangering not just the other conservatives, but also himself.
I would also note that the leaked draft proved to be nearly identical to the final opinion. It’s not likely that Alito would have gone to that much effort in drafting a final, polished opinion if there were any doubt about gathering the necessary votes for it. And when the opinion was issued, it was unequivocally joined by five conservatives, none of whom expressed the slightest doubt about the holding. (Chief Justice Roberts concurred in the judgment upholding the Mississippi law at issue, but, typical of his compromising ways, said his preference would be not to outright overrule Roe).
Let’s get to the bombshell of Alito’s recent comments: “I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody.”
Yikes. Let’s consider this.
Alito says it was not a conservative Justice, so that leaves only the three liberals, Justices Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor, and their law clerks. (Justice Jackson had been nominated to replace the retiring Breyer but was not yet confirmed or on the Court.)
I rule out the law clerks, for several reasons. One, a law clerk would be jeopardizing a lucrative and powerful career as a lawyer, a career he’d worked toward for many years. The kind of people who graduate high in their law school class at Harvard and Yale desire lucre and power. People without that desire don’t get there.
Two, Alito would be too unacquainted with those law clerks to have suspicions about particular ones. They would be people he said hi to in the elevator.
That leaves the three liberal Justices. Before considering which it was, note that Alito’s seemingly cautious comment is, in the context of the cloistered decorum of the Supreme Court, like a loud fart in a quiet church. Alito’s comment was a shot across the liberals’ bow.
Viewed more sinisterly, it was a subtle but strong announcement that he has kompromat on them.
As for which of the three it was, I doubt it was either of the first two. Breyer and Kagan are just not that type. I disagree with most of their political positions over the years, but in my judgment they are not cut from criminal cloth.
So that leaves Justice Sotomayor. Self-described in her 2009 confirmation hearing as a “wise Latina” (this was before the left invented and imposed on them the insulting “latinx” moniker) she has been anything but. She snarks acerbically but witlessly at the conservatives in her opinions and even in oral argument as her fellow Justices sit just feet away from her at the long Justices’ bench.
I suspected Sotomayor at the outset and wrote a piece about my suspicions. I now think more than ever it’s Sotomayor, I think Alito thinks so, and I think history will say so.
Now I have a prediction. Sotomayor, a diabetic who is not in great health, will retire before a Republican president and senate are elected in 2024. Alito at the relatively young age of 73 will soldier on, fighting the good fight. I hope to read his memoirs where he says what he thinks about this, but not for a very long time.
Glenn K. Beaton practiced law in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.
“High Attitude – How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen” is now published and selling well. You can find it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
The unemployment rate is very low, but we have millions fewer people working in America than pre-pandemic. So what gives?
Here’s what gives. It’s because the unemployment rate does not measure the total number of people who are unemployed. It instead measures the number of people who are unemployed but looking for work. Many people who are unemployed today are simply not looking.
the Aspen beat 