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"
The three libs were outvoted last week when the Supreme Court declared Harvard’s racial discrimination illegal. So, they did what liberals do when they lose – they shouted, invented “facts,” and implied that the majority were racist.
The facts they invented included the following.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recited as a “fact” that Black pediatricians, as compared to white pediatricians, double the survival rate of black babies. She implied that Black babies die more often when under the care of white pediatricians because the white ones are racist.
Therefore, her reasoning goes, we should favor Blacks in college admissions – so that we can double the Black baby survival rate.
My father’s father – my grandfather – died in the depths of the Great Depression when my father was five. He was the second husband his mother buried. She then single-handedly raised my father, his brother and his half-sister.
For a few years anyway. My father flunked the sixth grade, twice. He dropped out of school altogether in the eighth grade to go to work to help support the family. Kids grew up early in those days.
He joined the army at age 17 just before the war ended, and served in Europe and Japan. He got his GED, and landed a job as an engineering technician.
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 Aspen beat 