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"
A decade ago, the EPA determined the Keystone Pipeline would produce “no adverse environmental” effects. But Joe “Follow-the-Science” Biden (does anyone seriously think Biden knows anything about science or bothers to follow it?) killed the pipeline hours after being sworn in last January.
Since then, Biden has waged war on the American oil and gas industry. Scolding Americans that “we’ve already waited too long to deal with the climate crisis,” he has halted new oil and gas leases on federal lands and ordered a re-examination of existing leases.
Glenwood Canyon in Western Colorado was the last obstacle in I-70 across America. They just needed one last 14 mile stretch along the Colorado River to connect with Glenwood Springs. From there the highway was already in place down-river and onto the deserts of Utah.
They blew it.
They chose to follow the old wagon road alongside the Colorado River through the magnificent canyon lined with steep 2,000-foot cliffs of sandstone, shale, limestone and granite. The river snakes between the cliffs, varying unpredictably between a trickle and a torrent depending on recent thunderstorms and last winter’s snowpack a hundred miles away.
My TV has been broken for over a year (OK, maybe I don’t know how to work the remote) but I watched a little of the Olympics at a friend’s house this week. “A little” seems to be all that anyone is watching this time. Ratings are down 49%.
The events were dull but I learned something from the advertisements. I learned that most people in this country are black, and all of the good ones are.
Blacks, who comprise about 13% of the U.S. population, comprise most of the actors in the advertisements. Aliens in faraway worlds receiving television signals from earth are apt to conclude that the most powerful culture on Earth is run by good black people.
Joe Biden told a half-empty town hall meeting sponsored by CNN this week that if you get the vaccine then you won’t get COVID, that he plans to ban both handguns and rifles, and that a small restaurant owner struggling to hire workers who would rather be paid COVID dollars not to work should simply increase the wages he pays.
These lies and absurdities are of course not the first, and are only one facet of a man who is weirdly and wildly declining – from an already low base. He’s been a serial plagiarist since college days. Back in 2006 he said, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” In 2007 he congratulated Barak Obama for being “articulate and bright and clean.”
In his most recent presidential campaign, a young woman asked him about his weak showing in the Iowa caucus. His answer was to ask her if she’d ever been to a caucus. She said she had. He then called her “a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”
Biden called a man at a campaign stop last year “full of shit” for contending that he wanted to take away guns – which is exactly what he promised to do in this week’s CNN townhall meeting.
He scolded a black radio interviewer that “you ain’t black” for being undecided whether to vote for him or Donald Trump. He warned blacks that Mitt Romney planned to “put y’all back in chains.”
Mitt Romney!
He called a questioner at another town meeting “fat” and a “damned liar” and then challenged the man to a pushup contest or an IQ test.
Which brings us to Biden’s recent physical and mental stumbles. He has repeatedly referred to his vice president as “President.” He referred to his Secretary of Defense as “senator” and later that same week forgot his name entirely. He hemmed and hawed and finally was reduced to calling him, “the guy who runs the outfit over there.” He gestured as if in the direction of the Pentagon while actually gesturing in a different direction.
Daily COVID deaths and new cases are down to pre-pandemic levels in America. Even the CDC says masks are no longer required for vaccinated people. Heck, even school teachers are returning to the classrooms – sans masks – now that their demands for more money and less work have been met.
Weirdly, however, many people are still wearing masks. In fact, I often see mask wearers driving around alone in their cars. What’s up with that?
A little historical context is necessary. Dr. Fauci originally told us that masks were not effective. It turned out that he never really believed that. He was lying in order to conserve the masks for people he thought deserved them.
Then when masks became plentiful, the good doctor said they are effective after all and so we should wear them. He himself took to wearing two at a time, both over his mouth. I rather wish he’d worn half a dozen.
I’ve observed, and many studies have shown, that conservatives are happier than the leftists that we used to call “liberals.” Conservatives are more generous, more married, more religious, more fit, more humorous and more optimistic.
Unsurprisingly for a group with such traits, they have more and closer friends. They clearly love their country more. They work harder, they play harder, and they’re more likely to see meaning in life.
I don’t think conservatives are that way because they’re conservative. That’s a big load to put on a political outlook. No, I think they’re conservative because conservativism attracts people who possess those qualities.
And so conservativism shouldn’t be sold like Scientology. Conservativism won’t make you happy if you’re not already. But if you are happy, you’ll find a comfortable and natural home in conservativism.
Despite the problems of the world and the unending need for improving it, conservatives see a magical and spiritual place full of opportunity, adventure, joy and love. Conservatives see the world not as a glass-half-empty, but as a glass-half-full that gets fuller even as they drink from it.
Conservatives would be conservative wherever they reside. But I’m glad that so many are here in America, and I’m proud to be in their company. God bless the USA.
In the theater of the absurd that passes for wokery, they ban words and phrases that purportedly trigger unpleasant emotions in the audience. These include:
“Mumbo jumbo” because it’s a corruption of the name of the African god Maamajomboo. Who knew?
“The most qualified person should get the job” because it triggers feelings of inferiority in persons who are inferior to the most qualified.
“Peanut gallery” because it triggers memories of the old days when black people sat there and ate peanuts. Don’t use that phrase, especially around a black person because the painful memories may reduce him (er, I mean them – see below) to tears.
“Cannibal” because it triggers the Carib tribe (oops, “tribe” is triggering, I meant the Carib cannibal community – see below) of the West Indies who ate people. But only as many as they needed to feed themselves.
Once-beautiful Denver succumbed to vagrant enablement a few years ago. It was a pathetic attempt not to be outdone by Seattle and Portland – which have long sought not to be outdone by San Francisco. To be a great city, the thinking apparently goes, you have to be a filthy one.
And so filthy vagrants overran downtown Denver and hip “LoDo” where they now camp on the sidewalks, poop in the gutters, shoot-up in the streets and assault passersby.
The city is finally sweeping them, a little, in anticipation of its hosting of the baseball All-Star Game next month. Aware that the town will be on national TV, so far this year Denver has conducted as many vagrant camp sweeps as all of last year. The tent city is finally gone from the downtown jewel across from the state capitol building, Civic Center Park. The chain link fencing surrounding the capitol itself has finally been taken down, and vagrants are prohibited from camping there.
Yesterday, Joe Biden held one of his so-called press conferences. With the aid of 3 x 5 cards, he speaks, sort of, in response to pre-approved questions from pre-approved reporters.
In reply to their softball questions, he leaned into the microphone and whispered Freddy Krueger-like, all pasty white, wrinkled and weird, that “consequential” money would be flowing to people who vote for Democrats.
The bizarre scene dubbed “Creepy Joe” immediately trended on Twitter. “Doctor” Jill must have 911 on one speed dial number and the guys with butterfly nets on another.
Less than half the money actually goes to infrastructure, a word that now means whatever the Dems say it means from minute to minute. But, no matter, a deal is a deal.
Except when it’s not. After Biden’s announcement, the hard left that controls the Democrat party objected. AOC objected that the negotiators were too white. Other Democrats objected that the negotiated compromise failed to send enough money to people dead and alive who vote for them. Other Democrats objected that … well, you get the point. People not in the actual negotiations always think their side got the short end of the stick.
Now that racism has been outlawed in business, and racists have been driven from the public square, you don’t witness much racism in America. Being racist is a bad move socially and career-wise. That’s good.
But black achievement in America still lags badly behind white, Asian and Hispanic achievement. The black illegitimacy rate is triple the white rate and the black murder rate is 7x the white rate. Both figures are worse than before affirmative action, worse than before the Great Society programs of the 60s and 70s, and even worse than the days of Jim Crow laws.
The latest explanation for this continued malaise is that there’s a type of racism that you can’t see, but can only feel, and it’s getting worse. They call it “systemic racism.”
Systemic racism in America is like water to a fish in a pond. It’s everywhere, but undetectable except in its effect. That effect is to keep American blacks uniquely – not Asians or Hispanics or even black African immigrants – oppressed.
A scientific sounding name has been assigned to this: “Critical Race Theory.” The people who dreamed up the name ironically seem to think that calling it a “theory” makes it true. As in, “It’s like Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s a scientific theory, you know.”
CRT was originally an ordinary academic idea that people tend to see their world through the prism of race. The racists and race-baiters of the world twisted that uncontroversial idea into the notion that white people systemically persecute black people, even as the white people favor the black people in admissions, hiring and promotions. The racists and race-baiters now have persuaded ordinary well-intentioned white people to chant such nonsense as, “I’m a racist.”
There’s less to this conspicuous white show of self-flagellation than meets the eye. When questioned about their racism, such people recite, catechism-like, that everybody sees things through the prism of race, and so everybody is a racist.
So all they’re really confessing is that they’re racist just like everyone else. But they think they’re actually a little better than the other racists because, unlike the others, they admit to their racism.
It reminds me of certain religious people who go around advertising that they’re sinners, just like everyone else. But they imply that they’re a little better than the other sinners because, unlike the others, they admit they’re sinners.
I submit that the premise of the racism-admitters is correct but their conclusion is erroneous.
Their premise that humans see things through the prism of race is correct. The person who says “I don’t even notice a person’s skin color” is obviously lying. We do notice skin colors. There are good anthropological reasons for that. Hominids who didn’t distrust hominids who looked different were often invited over for dinner.
But the conclusion does not follow the premise. Seeing things through the prism of race may make us racists in an anthropological sense but it doesn’t make us racists in an evil societal sense.
There are racists and there are racists. Yes, we all (white, black and other shades) see the world to some extent through the prism of race, just as we see the world to some extent through the prism of our gender, our height, our weight and our socio-economic background. It’s a behavioral instinct rooted in our DNA.
But such instincts do not make us evil racists, misogynists, misandrists, dwarf-tossers, fat shamers or snobs. What does make us those things is when we allow our primitive behavioral instinct to control our modern feelings and actions. Civilized people don’t let that happen. They use their minds to control their racist instincts, just as they control their violence, anger, procreation and other animal instincts.
The erroneous conclusion that we don’t control our racism instinct – that we’re all racist because we all see the world through the prism of race – is destructive in several ways.
First, it dilutes the meaning of racism. If everyone is racist, then nobody is. Racism becomes seen as the ordinary human condition. It’s normalized. And then the real racists – the rare white supremists and Islamic (and European and American) Jew-haters and the Black Panther types – are given cover.
Second, stating that everyone is a racist implies and sometimes outright states a corollary that “everyone” doesn’t actually mean everyone. It doesn’t include non-whites. Non-whites cannot be racist, says this corollary.
But that corollary can’t be right. If racism is embedded in humans anthropologically, then it’s equally embedded in whites, blacks and Asians. Worse, that false corollary either (1) dehumanizes blacks and Asians by implying that they’re not part of the world of “everybody” or (2) condescends blacks and Asians by implying that while they’re racist like everyone else, only whites are strong enough to bear the label.
Third, this notion that whites systemically but secretly persecute blacks even as they formally favor them undermines black achievement. It sends a powerful message to blacks that the system is stacked against them and that their failings are not their fault.
The way to encourage achievement by any group is to celebrate their achievements, not to pound into them the notion that they’re permanent victims for whom achievement is impossible.
Fourth, amplifying this premise – that race is a prism through which people sometimes see the world – into this conclusion that race-is-destiny, sets the stage for governance by race. Like so much in this field, this approach is sufficiently bad that it has earned a euphemism. The euphemism is “Identity Politics.”
And so we’ve officially started judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Today, anti-racism not only permits but perversely requires racial discrimination — all while denying and disguising it.
Interestingly, this dishonest act of anti-intellectualism is committed most often by the intellectual elites. In academia and big corporations, it’s official policy. Their unfair and immoral policy to subordinate character – or merit – to skin color does not bode well for them. Nor does it bode well for science, culture, mathematics, religion, philosophy, engineering or anything else where there is such a thing as good versus bad, right versus wrong, truth versus falseness and success versus failure.
Stated another way, abolishing merit will produce less of it and less of the advances that depend on it – which are pretty much all of them.
Good white people may feel extra good about themselves for buying into the bunk that they, alone among the races, are innately and irredeemably racist merely because they see through the prism of race. But this self-indulgent feel-goodery is expensive. It’s harmful to themselves, to our culture and to the non-whites that are the supposed beneficiaries of it.
Such people are usually well-intentioned. But for the good of humanity, I wish they would start thinking with their heads and not their hearts.
That leaves the question, what do we do about black underachievement? I don’t know what the answer is. (By the way, I don’t think the problem is one of IQ, as the left implies in their insistence that black achievement be measured on a scale that accounts for their race.)
But I do know what the answer to this problem is not. It’s not to do more of the same. It’s not to continue the same failed policies that have enabled and perpetuated it for over half a century.
the Aspen beat 