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"
For years, a public high school football coach made a practice of saying short prayers after football games. He prayed whether he won or lost. Some of his players typically joined in, and some didn’t.
For that, he was fired.
This has been a long drive for the left. It started on their own 2-yard line about two centuries ago with Karl Marx scorning the masses he pretended to champion by mocking their “opiate” of religion. Marx and his fellow travelers preferred the opiate of opiate.
Marx’s antipathy toward religion gained traction in the Soviet Union. Revealing one’s faith was a detriment to advancement in the Communist Party, and the Party controlled everything. The faithful had their property confiscated and they endured open ridicule and ostracism by institutions such as schools, employers and the media. (Does this sound eerily familiar?)
Readers will remember the Aspen Times. They’re the little but old – venerable, we’re told – newspaper of Aspen. These days it’s a hard left rag in a hard left town of limousine liberals who are screwed, swindled, salved and soothed by the local Stalinists in an obscene spectacle something like a Mexican donkey show.
One of the frequent perks for Aspen Times editors and reporters, as for many other members of the ruling Aspen establishment, is housing subsidized by the limo-libs for dimes on the dollars – often slopeside.
I was the token conservative columnist with the Aspen Times for seven years. But I grew a little big for my britches. Over that time, I became the most-read columnist in the newspaper. Then I started to become more-read than even front-page news. I was occasionally the very most-clicked item in the newspaper.
Ah, but that wasn’t their goal. I was hired not to succeed in offering a viewpoint contrary to the Aspen leftwing establishment, but to be a token. So, on Christmas Eve in 2019 they fired me. By email.
It’s a biological fact that, generally speaking, males in relation to females are naturally larger, more physical, more ambitious, stronger, faster, cruder, stinkier, hairier, more competitive and hornier. Those traits are wired into them as tightly as the DNA in their Y chromosome, and are all awash in the testosterone hormone produced in their testicles.
At times, those traits can be problematic. At other times, they can save the day, save the world, or save a child.
–Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1984 at Normandy (photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved and the world prayed for its rescue. Here, in Normandy, the rescue began. Here, the Allies stood and fought against tyranny, in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.
I figured that Tom Cruise playing “Maverick” in the sequel to Top Gun would be all woke. He’d also be at least bi or gay, and probably trans. Look what Hollywood did to Star Wars.
After all, something like 20% of attention starved, navel-gazing, influence-susceptible college students with too much time on their hands – I’m talking about the movie-going crowd – now “identify” (whatever that means) as something other than what used to be called “normal.” And is still called “normal” by statisticians, given that only 2% of the population at large fall outside that category.
I further figured that in the unlikely event that Cruise was neither woke, nor gay, nor bi, nor trans, then he’d just be a cinematic strawman to remind us that biological male masculinity is toxic, primitive and, worst of all, uncool to everyone. (Except, men might observe, to healthy women. Try getting laid with a limp wrist etc.)
I was wrong. Either Hollywood has changed or maybe we’ve passed peak wokeness and peak sexual deviance (I use that term “deviance” in the statistical sense — I make no judgments about your bedroom habits).
That said, Maverick is not exactly MAGA-rick. Thankfully, overt politicking has been kept out of the film.
The closest we have to politics is the rumor that Hollywood edited out a scene showing Mav in his iconic jacket preserved from the first movie – the one with, among other things, the flag of Taiwan on it – for fear of offending the Chinese who regard Taiwan as a breakaway province that is really part of China. But then the producers reinserted the scene albeit for only a brief second.
I wonder if this was a strategy cooked up by the movie marketing department, or was really the decision and spontaneous turnaround that it’s portrayed to be. Either way, I like it.
Back to Mav, the aging Naval Aviator. The word “Aviator” deserves upper case in this context for reasons of culture if not grammar. They’re the best of the best. Special Ops like the Navy Seals and the Army Green Berets are plenty tough and I advise against a bar fight with them, and Air Force pilots are no slouches, but – hey! – Naval Aviators land jets on boats. Their eyesight, judgment, reaction times, testosterone levels, decision-making, testicles and killer instincts are the best.
In a day when we mock such traits and suppress them in our sons (and then wonder why some of those boys snap) we still value such traits in the particular men, and also a few women now, who are willing to die to kill an enemy who wants to kill us.
The original Top Gun movie was in 1986 when the Soviets still terrorized and tyrannized Eastern Europe and a year before President Reagan demanded at the Brandenburg Gate that they “tear down this wall.” (Did that movie influence him?) There’s a lot of water under the bridge and people through the wall since then. Wokeness accounts for exactly nothing of that victory for humanity.
If naval aviation didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it just to preserve our species. A memorable line in this movie is when Maverick’s commanding officer scolds him that his kind are headed for extinction because future wars will be fought by drones operated remotely by dweeb-like soldiers thousands of miles apart with no danger to their own selves.
As I pumped about $70 worth of liquid gold into my tank in preparation for the three-day weekend established to memorialize three-day weekends, I noticed that the guy next to me put quadruple that into his.
His was attached to one of those ginormous RV things that always seem to be in front of me on the mountain passes of Colorado.
A friend has one of these. He says they get about six miles to the gallon. I think he’s got that reversed.
Those monstrosities are a pet peeve of mine, and so are their RV’s. Admittedly, that alone is not a knock on them. Regular readers (I know I’m flattering both you and me to suggest there’s anything regular about my readers) are aware that I have an entire petting zoo of pet peeves that I lovingly pet.
Imagine two creatures a few hundred thousand years ago. One is a human that is casually observing the other, a 750-pound Eurasian cave lion. The beast (the lion, that is) lunges at the human (who is not a beast at all – the cranium of humans at that time was about the same as ours, and the cranium of Neanderthals was bigger). The lion shreds our would-be ancestor like so much pulled pork.
What happened? Why did this human with as much grey matter as you or I, or more, fail to see this coming?
For the first few million years of our evolution, humans drew conclusions in the same way that other animals did – from their senses. Their database was what they personally saw, heard, smelled, felt and tasted. This was a poor method for gathering data from which to draw conclusions about nuanced matters, because the amount of data gathered was small. It was limited by the lifespan and experiences of the single person gathering it.
A future ex-lawyer named Michael Sussmann is going to trial next week for his role in feeding the FBI bogus Russian collusion stories.
Those stories are scurrilous and vulgar lies which distracted the nation and the Trump administration for years and for which someone should be held accountable. But Sussmann was not the person who manufactured those lies. He was just the bag man who passed them on to the FBI.
And so those lies are not what Sussmann has been charged with. He’s been charged with a more pedestrian lie – the lie of telling the FBI he was not working for a client when in fact he was. Not just any client, but the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
He’s guilty as hell.
But in a broader sense, this bag man is just a fall guy. The FBI surely knew all along that he, his partner Marc Elias and their firm Perkins Coie, a Seattle law firm with aspirations, were Democrat operatives. Everyone knew that.
Some 63 million American babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade. Almost 40% were black even though blacks comprise only about 13% of the population. The black abortion rate is nearly five times the white rate.
Justice Clarence Thomas observed in a Supreme Court case a few years ago that in New York City a black baby is more likely to be aborted than to be born.
Altogether, that amounts to over 20 million dead black babies since Roe v. Wade. To put that number in perspective, the number of unarmed blacks killed by police in that period is a few dozen – amounting to something like 0.0002% of the number aborted.
Over a third of the black population of America has been lost to abortion. If the dead black babies were placed head to toe, they would stretch from coast to coast. If they were buried in a cemetery at standard densities, the cemetery would be about 20,000 acres or 31 square miles.
But of course, they’re not buried in cemeteries. They’re disposed of as medical waste in incinerators or landfills. That’s right, dumps. We often dispose of aborted babies in dumps. Even the murdered Jews at Auschwitz didn’t share a trench with garbage and racoons.
Where’s Black Lives Matter on this genocide? They make an extravagant living pretending to grieve the death of a career criminal, drug addict, wife beater and arrest resister. But if black lives truly matter to them, why don’t they even blink an eye at 20 million dead black babies?
Actual photo of Biden’s appointee to Office of Nuclear Energy (really!)
Not that I have anything against such a person. Some of my best friends are autistic, and most of my readers are. They’re probably also transsexuals or have at least thought about it (it is sort of weirdly interesting from an anthropological perspective, sort of like Neanderthals and dinosaurs). And cocaine can’t be any worse than, say, instant coffee, Australian wine or transsexualism.
As for being black, anyone with half a brain identifies as such. Because these days that will get you admitted to medical school (many college applicants do in fact falsely claim to be black) and appointed to the Supreme Court. It also gets you immunity against prosecution for slapping anyone you damn well please at any time you damn well please, and perhaps shooting them too. Soon, it might also get you some reparations green.
the Aspen beat 
