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"
Political assassinations in America are usually committed by nutjobs. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communism-sympathizing loser. James Earl Ray was a career criminal who copped a guilty plea to avoid the death penalty and then falsely maintained his innocence until the day he died in prison.
This time feels different. This murderer looked normal. He earned college credits while in high school. He was a straight-A student. He had no criminal record.
He lived at home with his parents, two registered Republicans active in their Mormon church in conservative Utah. The family all talked ‘round the dinner table, as families used to.
One of those family dinner table talks early this week was about Charlie Kirk, who was due to visit the area on Thursday.
You know the rest of the story. As Charlie was talking in his trademark sort of way – not ranting, not raving, not cursing, but simply sitting and talking in a normal conversational way – the murderer shot him in the neck from a rooftop with a high-powered rifle. Charlie bled to death in seconds.
After video of the murder scene circulated, the murderer’s father turned him in with the help of a family friend who was retired from law enforcement.
Apart from the murder (but how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?) the whole scene looks like a Norman Rockwell painting – a perfect glimpse of Americana.
Over a half a century ago, philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She was struck by the pedestrian personality of Eichmann in his trial and before his hanging in Jerusalem. He was not evil in the obvious ways. He had no horns, no cape, no devilish laugh, no foaming at the mouth, no apparent Hitlerisms.
Rather, Eichmann was a not-very-bright technocrat who’d dropped out of high school. He believed he was not just following orders (he was) but that he was following the law. He exhibited no hatred for the Jews, apart from his role in killing six million of them.
If Adolf Eichmann had been born into modern America, he might have become a mid-level manager in the EPA, the IRS or the Social Security Administration. He lacked both the credentials and ideology to be in the White House of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and he certainly lacked the passion.
Which brings me back to Charlie Kirk’s murderer. He was a devotee of the vapid echo chambers of online “discussion” but he exhibited little nuttiness or passion, until Thursday anyway.
Yes, he was a straight-A student, but in today’s schools that barely puts a kid in the top half of the class. Yes, he earned college credits while in high school, but then dropped out of a fourth-rate college. Yes, he participated in discussions at the family dinner table, but why was he living at home and eating his mother’s cooking at age 22?
The kid was a casual underachiever just going through the motions of an unlived life. He was the picture of banality.
The banal evil of Adolph Eichmann was six million times worse than the banal evil of Charlie Kirk’s murderer, but here’s what gives me pause: There are at least six million of these kids out there.
President Trump’s efforts to bring down crime have been successful in Washington, D.C. The rate of murder and other violent crimes is down substantially, and the rate of car-jackings is down dramatically.
Even the Democrat mayor of the city admitted that the crime rate has dropped. Oddly, however, she mumbles in the next breath that the program is “not working,” apparently to mollify national stage Democrats to whom she answers.
Such as Democrat Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer. He was asked at the outset whether the initial 30-day period for the effort could be extended. His response was “f*** no!” It will be interesting to see him now choose between enabling murders and climbing down from his vulgar perch. I’m guessing he’ll choose the side of murder, and stay on his vulgar perch.
So, if it worked in D.C., why stop now? We can curtail crime and simultaneously embarrass Democrats around the country. We should next send the troops to Chicago, right? And then Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, St. Louis and Portland, right?
I don’t think so. My reasons are legal, philosophical and political.
Legally, D.C. is a special case. It’s under the direct jurisdiction of the federal government (notwithstanding the limited “home rule” that Congress legislated some years ago). One federal judge has already ruled that the deployment of troops to Los Angeles to quell the illegal immigration protests was illegal. I don’t have much regard for that particular judge – the bowtie-wearing, San Francisco-residing, 83-year-old little brother of retired liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer – but it is conceivable that his big brother’s former Court will uphold his ruling.
Now the more important reasons – the moral and philosophical ones.
D.C. is the workplace and often the home of over a hundred thousand federal employees who have little choice about their workplace venue.
It’s also the face of America to millions of foreign visitors who reasonably assume that it reflects American values, just as we would assume that Paris reflects French values, London reflects English values, and Berlin reflects German values. (Each of those cities has a lower crime rate than D.C., especially in the category of violent crime.) How America presents itself to the world through its capital city is rightly a national and federal concern. How Chicago presents itself to the world is less so.
Here’s the most important point. The crime in Chicago and other major cities is largely due to ongoing choices they make in law enforcement. Recall that only five years ago, many residents of American cities were calling for the “defunding” – i.e., abolition – of city police forces. Even now, police forces are short-handed because the Democrats ruling these cities are hostile to law enforcement. They hate the cops more than they hate the criminals.
When they’re not short-changing the cops, they’re hand-tying them. Many crimes are simply not investigated or prosecuted. For example, shop-lifting has effectively been de-criminalized. If you want to get fired from your job at a local store, call the cops on a shoplifter or, worse, chase after one.
Other crimes have also been effectively de-criminalized on the grounds that too many racial minorities were being arrested for committing them.
People who commit crimes are criminals, but they aren’t stupid. They know what they can get away with, and so that’s what they do.
In short, big-city crime is a big-city choice. Specifically, it’s a choice by big city Democrats. They could decide tomorrow not to tolerate crime. So far, with the exception of the D.C. mayor who has had an epiphany on the subject, they have not decided that. We cannot coerce everyone into epiphanies.
Finally, there’s a legitimate issue about using federal troops for routine law enforcement. From the German Gestapo of a century ago to the Mexican Federales of today, federal law enforcement in local matters has a sordid history.
To be sure, the crime in American large cities inflicts real harm on the residents who, by and large, are not criminals of any kind. They sometimes get attacked, shot or killed and they often get their property stolen or vandalized. Even in the absence of tangible harm, they live insecure, semi-terrified lives.
But they keep electing those soft-on-crime Democrats. They are entitled to, but I say let these residents see and suffer the consequences of their choices – for years and years, if that’s what it takes.
Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago is widely seen outside of Chicago as the worst mayor in America. Even within Chicago, which is an overwhelmingly Democrat city, his approval rating this summer is down to the mid-20s. Maybe that means the Democrat residents of Chicago will throw the bum out.
But don’t count on it. Especially if he can make political hay by distracting the Democrat residents from his incompetence with a show of “standing up to” the Orange Man that they hate more than the criminals and even more than the cops.
You may ask, “What about the residents of Chicago who do want to throw the bum out? Who do want effective law enforcement? Who do want to reclaim their city from filth and crime? Who do vote with their minds and not with their tribe?”
My answer is, they have an alternative. Unlike federal employees locked into workplaces in D.C., the residents of Chicago who vote with their minds but get outvoted every time can vote with their feet.
My advice to them is to get the hell out of the failing cities. Let the failing cities burn and rot. Maybe then, and probably only then, the residents will insist on effective governance. If they don’t even then, well, at least they’ve self-concentrated in places we can watch and, if necessary, avoid or isolate.
And who knows? Their proclivity toward killing one another might prove to be an unfitness in the Darwinian sense.
Yes, my advice to sane people in insane places is to move to another place. Move to Texas, move to Florida, move to Idaho. Move to Galt’s Gulch.
It’s now a truism that the policies of the left are widely viewed as outrageous – at least the cultural ones such as allowing male voyeurs and exhibitionists into girls’ bathrooms, discriminating to benefit favored races and sexual orientations, grabbing the guns held by hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans while simultaneously coddling criminals who will never give up theirs, and abolishing the nation’s borders.
Such issues have earned a name – the “80/20 issues” – because something near 80% of Americans oppose the left on such issues.
That 80% figure would probably be even higher if not for some Democrats whose hearts and minds are on the 80% side but whose instinctive tribalism boxes them into the 20% side just because they (correctly) see the 20% side as part of the formal Democratic Party platform.
Yet, the left seems unable to effectuate a course correction on those outrageous policies disfavored by 80% of the people.
One result is that the Democrats lose elections. Who cares about the nuances of tariffs, an issue on which reasonable persons disagree, when they’re putting boys in drag into your daughter’s bathroom at school, an issue on which reasonable persons do not?
My reaction to the Democrats’ truculence is one word: Good. I hope they stay bound to the losing side of those issues. Because I want them to keep losing elections.
But I’m left wondering: Why? Why is the left so bound to the losing side of issues that cost them elections?
I have a theory.
Recognize that the left is not like you and me. At the core, they aren’t trying to solve problems. Instead, they’re trying to provoke ordinary people. What better way to provoke ordinary people than to put messed-up teenage boys into the bathrooms of those people’s daughters?
But that, in turn, leaves a question: Why does the left want to provoke ordinary people?
Here’s where it gets sinister. They hate America. They really do, you know. Polls consistently show that the hard left feels genuine hate for America. Even mere Democrats – as opposed to hard leftists – often feel something less than love for the nation.
Thus, the left is fundamentally different than the right. On the right, neo-Nazis are loathsome and even mere right-wingers are sometimes not very appealing, but I’ve noticed that most of them do not hate America as a nation and an institution and a culture and a people.
The left’s hatred of America is the reason they seek to provoke Americans. Hatred is the mother of provocation and, ultimately, violence.
Did Hitler really want to own Russia? I doubt it. But he certainly hated Russians. He never did succeed in owning Russia – he never even reached Moscow – but his hatred of Russians succeeded in killing 20 million of them.
Do the leftists really want self-proclaimed teenage transexual peeping Toms in the girls’ bathrooms? I doubt it, but what a great way to express the hatred in their dark hearts for our nation, our culture and our people.
And in their dark minds, they hope that maybe the chaos they wreak by ritually torching age-old cultural norms will destroy that culture.
Imagine how things would have been different for Hitler if, prior to his invasion of Russia, he had demoralized them with boys in the bathrooms of Russian girls, if he had grabbed the guns of the Russian civilians, if he had abolished the Russian border, if he had fueled race wars within Russia.
The hateful left and their naive Democrat enablers are playing the long game of history, not the short game of the next election. In taking the 20% side of these issues – the side of confusion and chaos – the left will certainly lose many battles for elections, but they could well win the war against our civilization.
The Left pretends to pity the plight of the people we used to call “vagrants” but are now required to call “homeless.” Their numbers keep growing – despite the fact that we keep throwing money at them and giving them free housing, free meals and other free stuff.
Let’s stop right there. That last sentence, expressed as I just expressed it, is easily recognized as a “Fox Butterfield.” He was a New York Times columnist who expressed puzzlement at the “paradox” that more criminals were being sentenced to prison even though crime was down.
After years of being puzzled by this paradox that he perceived, Butterfield finally acknowledged that he had confused the cause with the effect. It’s not that fewer crimes had caused more criminals to be sent to prison. That would indeed be a paradox. Rather, it was that more criminals being in prison had caused fewer crimes to be committed.
Butterfield thus unwittingly gave his name to a comedic bit of mis-rhetoric and illogic. A “Fox Butterfield” is a statement expressing puzzlement because it confuses causes and effects. The true cause and effect are apparent to most people – but not to the person making the Fox Butterfield statement, because it is contrary to his belief system.
Something similar is at work in the issue of vagrants (which is not a four-letter word, by the way, and maybe that’s the reason Democrats don’t like it).
The Left pretends puzzlement about the apparent paradox that giving free stuff to vagrants for the purpose of escaping their vagrancy seems to produce more vagrancy, not less. If vagrancy is caused by vagrants losing their stuff, then shouldn’t it be remedied by giving them free stuff to replace what they lost?
Ah, but any person without a preconceived belief system sympathetic to vagrancy knows that it isn’t caused by losing one’s stuff. Rather, it’s caused by losing one’s mind. Usually to drugs, insanity or both. And so, it’s not a paradox that giving free stuff to vagrants fails to remedy their vagrancy – their minds, after all, are still missing in action.
In fact, giving free stuff to vagrants not only fails to help them, it actively hurts them. It enables them to continue their vagrancy.
That’s what has happened in America over the last generation. Camping on the sidewalk and pooping in the gutter used to be against the law. It still is, but the Democrat mayors of big cities decided to break their oaths of office by allowing it anyway – and to reward the lawbreakers with free stuff for doing so.
Sure enough, but contrary to Democrat expectations borne of their erroneous belief system, the result was more sidewalk camping and gutter pooping, not less.
Contrast this with big cities in the rest of the world. Most are poorer than American cities, and in Europe they tend to be at least as Leftist as in America. But you seldom see vagrants. They’re simply not allowed.
Why did the Democrats choose to enable vagrancy in America?
Two reasons. First, many Democrats mistakenly thought it was the humane thing to do. In their erroneous belief system, they believed that vagrants are just like you and me, except they’ve had a bit of bad luck. They’ve lost their job through no fault of their own, but because of . . . you know . . . capitalism. All that these unfortunates need, these Democrats believe, is a helping hand. And if we don’t give them that helping hand, they could well starve to death.
These beliefs are wrong in so many ways. Vagrants are nothing like you and me. They didn’t just lose their job; they’re almost all drug addicts or alcoholics or mentally ill or some combination thereof. A helping hand does not help them; it enables their misery and lets them inflict it on the rest of us. They won’t starve to death; nobody starves to death in America other than people who are literally too messed up to put into their mouths the food that is offered.
Thus, the first reason that Democrats enable vagrancy is simple ignorance on their part.
But the second reason is more sinister. Many Democrats enable vagrancy for the same reason they abolish the nation’s borders, decry merit as racist, preach that work is evil, undermine the family, mock religion, and tell us there are 72 genders.
It’s the same reason they want to cancel Sydney Sweeney for being too feminine and too white, neuter Bud Light for being too masculine and too redneck, and bury the Cracker Barrel logo for being too American.
It’s all because they loath America, Americans and Americana. Failing to destroy America militarily in two World Wars and one Cold War, they are now resigned to destroying her with a culture war from within. Indeed, surveys confirm that the defining trait of Democrats is their ambivalence (at best) for America.
Many of these Democrats don’t want to help the American poor as much as they want to hurt the American “rich” – defined as everyone who has more money than they do. They would prefer a nuclear Armageddon destroying everyone over a prosperous economy lifting both rich and poor.
Of course, if they were to get their wish for Armageddon, they’d hate that too. They hate wherever they are and whomever they’re with.
They have no country, no religion, no gender, no history, no traditions, no happiness, and they disbelieve in family. You might generously call these sorrowful souls “homeless.”
President Trump and NATO leaders at the White House, Aug. 18, and President Biden and NATO leaders at G7 summit in 2024
Vladimir Putin confirmed last week at their Alaska summit that if Donald Trump had been president three years ago, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.
It was probably an attempt at flattery (which Trump did not acknowledge) but, still, it’s probably true. Even if it’s pure flattery, I cannot imagine Putin bothering to bestow such flattery on Trump’s predecessor.
At this same summit, Trump ordered a flyby of a B2 bomber – the ones that recently made a significant impression on the world, on Iran, and on Iran’s desert nuke factories.
After the summit, the leaders of NATO rushed to the White House to meet with the President. Seems the tariff imbroglio is all forgiven. Ukrainian President Zelenski showed up wearing something suit-ish. Trump called out “Emmanuel!” to French President Emmanuel Macron, who answered “Mr. President?”
Speaking with one voice – Trump’s – the leaders of the free world declared a desire for peace but made clear that they would not toss Ukraine under the Russian tanks. In fact, they hinted at NATO membership for Ukraine.
Sure, Russia will get some potato farms in Eastern Ukraine, and Putin will save face with his people (after slaughtering a quarter million of them) but Ukraine will survive, NATO will thrive, Europe will be strong, and America . . .
There’s a Democrat in Texas (yes, really!) who lost a race for senator, and then lost a race for governor. He’s a designated loser.
His name is Robert but he has a nickname. Since he’s proven himself not exactly an Alpha, you might assume his nickname is “Beta.”
Close. It’s “Beto.” Beto has a lot more in common with “Beta” than with “Rambo.”
Beto/Beta attended elite private boarding schools and then Columbia where he took a degree in English Literature. It was probably Shakespeare that taught him not to be.
But Beto/Beta has a strategy to show his toughness and finally rise to leader of the pack. He says the F word. A lot.
When he lost the senate race, he informed his supporters, “I’m so f***ing proud of you!” He and his supporters promptly regrouped and went on to lose the gubernatorial race.
Offering incisive commentary on Donald Trump, he exclaimed, “What the f***?” Significantly, the object of his invective is now President; Beto/Beta is not.
His brave response to a mass shooting was, “This is f***ed up.” Shooters everywhere scurried.
His recent legal argument in opposition to the Texas rules requiring state legislators to, well, legislate rather than flee the jurisdiction, was, “F*** the rules!” The Democrat lawbreaking lawmakers caved yesterday. Beto/Beta fought the rules, and the rules won.
Other Dems have joined the f-fest. New York Senator Charles Schumer, formerly the Senate Majority Leader and one of the most powerful people in D.C., at least on paper, was asked whether the National Guard would be permitted to keep the peace in D.C. beyond just 30 days.
“No f***ing way” was his response. (But Schumer is already checkmated. Crime will be down during this 30-day period. At the end of the 30 days, Dems will then be in the position of saying they want it to go back up.)
Dems always had potty mouths – LBJ cursed like a Texas roughneck – but the election of Trump really unhinged them. They’re angry and frustrated. Turns out that advocating crime, boys in the girls’ bathrooms, racial quotas and open borders didn’t go over as well as they anticipated.
So . . . drop the f-bombs!
A Dem in New York who says he’s a “former journalist” (of course, there’s no such thing as a current journalist – they’re all former ones) has started a campaign to unseat a Republican Congressman with the erudite slogan “Unf*** our country!” That’s typical of journalistic eruditeness these days.
Another “former journalist” Dem running for Congress – this one a woman – declared in a video clip she posted on X that it was time for the Dems to, “Grow a f***cking spine.” How endearing. They even put the F word into their teleprompter speeches
Back when these potty mouths were future former journalists, I’m sure they were very careful never to let their political leanings get in the way of objective reporting. Uh huh.
Another sitting Congresswoman ejaculated on live TV, “Somebody slap me, and wake me the fuck up!” As for her second request, she seems plenty woke already. But I’d be happy to fulfill her first request.
So, why are Democrats spouting the F word as eagerly as fourth graders who just learned it?
Several reasons. First, they’ve always been just a step from the gutter. While conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley, Milton Freidman and Thomas Sowell were slicing and dicing the Democrats so eloquently they didn’t know they’d been filleted until they saw their guts on the floor, the mob and their molls were infiltrating the JFK White House and the rest of the Democrat machine, from Chicago to Philly to San Francisco.
It’s all about raw physical power. The Democrats’ idea of intellectual debate for two generations has been, “Nice argument you got there, be a shame if something happened to you.”
Second, the Democrats truly are angry. They’ve lost the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, most state legislatures, most governorships, their lunch money, and their cookies. They’ve lost it all to people they hate, and, in their ignorance, despise and disrespect.
When people get angry, they often get profane. It feels good to express anger.
Third, much of the Dem f-bombing is to rally their filthy f***ed up base. They’re making a show of uncontrolled anger – in a controlled, manipulative sort of way.
This manipulative f-bombing does indeed rally the filthy Dem base, but that base is already rallied. They always are. They wouldn’t be filthy f***ed up Democrats if they weren’t on Adderall.
It’s the middle-of-the-roaders that the Dems need to rally. Those middle-of-the-roaders who decide elections are not paying much attention (that’s why they’re middle-of-the-roaders) but they don’t like hearing government would-be leaders shouting words that they would not let their children hear or speak.
So, bring it on, Democrats. See if you can f*** your way back into f***ing control of the f***ing government.
An alternative approach might be to change your language, change your tone and change your policies. Nah, f*** that!
Here’s a thought experiment. First, picture Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and other communist despots of the 20th century. (I could add to that list the head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but I don’t want emails purporting to correct me.)
Now imagine if part of their pitch to the public had been the following:
Men pretending to be women should compete against women in women’s sports, and, after the women lose to the men, they should be forced to shower with them;
People should be judged not on their merit or even their economic class, but on their skin color, and, moreover, those with skin colors who commit murder at 7x the ordinary rate should be judged more favorably;
Gay people should get preferences in admissions and hiring;
We should abolish our national borders;
Boys having adolescence issues should be called “girls” and have their penises cut off; and
Criminal laws are illegitimate.
If Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot and the other communists had preached such nonsense, the result would have been fantastic. Because they never would have come to power. And so we would have avoided 100,000,000 deaths caused by communism.
Fast forward to today. In an incredibly lucky twist of fate, would-be socialists and communists calling themselves Democrats over the past two decades did pitch that nonsense.
Enough people paid attention and recognized it as the nonsense that it was, that the Democrats were finally voted out of power.
Yes, there was also the matter of their latest leader and his senility, corruption and incompetence. But in the absence of their culturally woke nonsense, the Democrats/socialists/communists probably would have overcome the drag of their bad leader. They probably would have won the last election, and we’d be well down the road to lethal, ruinous economics.
That’s because socialism polls surprisingly well. Although people understand that men in drag should not beat and shower with women, they understand basic economics less well.
Among young voters especially, there’s a convenient tendency to believe that the reason they aren’t as wealthy as they’d like is because rich people are stealing their money.
Many young people believe this because they’ve never heard of Marx, Lenin, Mao, or Pol Pot, or the destruction and misery they inflicted. That’s no surprise, for their “teachers” are mostly (not all, fortunately) socialists themselves.
Democrats are now at a crossroads. One road is the one they’re on – the road of socialism in combination with woke cultural issues. The other road lets go of the woke cultural issues while continuing the socialism.
It’s common wisdom, at least outside the fever swamps of academia, that the Democrats need to take the road away from woke cultural issues if they want to win elections. To win elections, they should focus on socialism, not rainbows and bathrooms.
I am praying they don’t take that advice. I’m praying they keep losing elections by staying on the road of woke cultural issues in combination with socialism. If they’ll just stay the course, the story of the 21st century might be the 100,000,000 lives that we didn’t lose to communism.
Real-world entities would address this problem with a combination of (1) increasing their revenues and (2) decreasing their expenses.
But Denver is not a real-world entity. It’s a government entity. It plans to do what governments do in government-world: It plans to borrow money.
A lot of it. They’re putting on the ballot a bond proposal amounting to almost a billion dollars. By the time the bonds are paid off with interest years down the road, it would amount to nearly two billion.
The politicos have the gall to proclaim that this does not amount to a tax – as if the money to repay the near-billion of borrowed money plus the near-billion of interest on it, will come from somewhere other than Denver taxpayers.
Maybe they assume the money will come from taxpayers elsewhere, because Denver will default on the bonds and get a federal bailout. In today’s political environment, good luck with that.
$1,900,000 for a bike/pedestrian path (bicyclists and pedestrians love sharing paths, don’t you know) in a poor-ish section of town to “highlight local artists, history, heritage, and culture.”
$20,000,000 for a skateboard park.
$1,900,000 for a “bike pump track.” I don’t know what that is, but I’m sure it will pay for itself many times over in happiness for those who do.
$20,000,000 for an “American Indian Cultural Embassy.” For those who can’t read diversity-speak, that’s an Indian museum.
Gee, that’s never been done . . . .
$12,300,000 for maintenance of the existing “Blair Caldwell African American Research Library and Museum.”
Gee, that’s never been done, either . . . .
A few million for improvements to branch libraries for people who don’t know about the internet but love hanging out in branch libraries. In long trench coats, no doubt.
$10,915,000 for maintenance of a branch library in a bad part of town. Notice the other branch libraries only got a few mil.
$10,000,000 for a “Children’s Justice Center” which will be “intentionally designed to support healing and justice.” We’re warned that this ten million won’t begin to cover the total cost of the project. (As if we thought otherwise for even a minute.)
$1,000,000 for a Senior Center. That sounds nice, but do we really need to spend a mil to “center” our “seniors”? I’m a senior myself (don’t tell anyone) and I’m already plenty centered without hanging with the old farts at the “Senior Center” or the pervs in trench coats at the branch libraries, thank you very much.
Maybe “Senior Center” is a typo. Maybe they meant a “Señor Center.” Of course, Denver is a sanctuary city where they do their darndest to thwart federal enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, thereby jeopardizing federal grants while borrowing money to pay for basic city services.
I won’t go to a Senior Center, but I would certainly go to a “Señor Center.” I’d walk in and say, “Mi nombre es Señor Senior.” When they look at me funny, I’d ask, “Habla Espanol?”
$3,000,000 for improvements to the Denver Art Museum. In my opinion, they could effectuate some double savings by using the “art” there to surface the skateboard park.
$32,000,000 for “affordable housing” or what we used to call “the projects.” Because when government gets into the housing business, good things happen!
$10,000,000 for a new branch library, naturally, to serve the new affordable housing.
Many millions for many swimming pools. ‘Cuz everyone wants to share warm pool water with the kind of people who will using them!
$70,000,000 to “transform” a city golf course into a “robust regional park” with a “regional scale playground.”
$1,500,000 for new tennis courts. But wait! The senior in me says, what about pickle ball? And the hoodlum in me says, what about midnight basketball?
There’s also a few hundred million for ordinary road maintenance and improvements. Some of that is a sly sop to the Denver Broncos – the city wants to buy up some land to build them another new stadium. The owners of the Broncos, who happen to be the Waltons – of Walmart riches – evidently need taxpayer subsidies.
Even the road maintenance and improvements that aren’t handouts to the Waltons are questionable. That’s the sort of thing that should be covered by ordinary budgets. The city should not have to borrow billions for it.
As large metropolitan areas go, metropolitan Denver as a whole is not all that left-leaning (though, to be sure, it does certainly lean left). But within the city limits, it’s hard, hard left. I might be the only Republican in town, and I’m only here part-time.
Denver is still woke, even now when “woke” is a four-letter word. Since the Great Depression, only two Republicans have represented Denver’s district in Congress. The current one is a Democrat no-name who has been in office for 28 years, and her Democrat predecessor was the inestimable Pat Schroeder, who was in office the preceding 24 years.
The last Republican mayor of Denver left office in 1963. I cannot recall the last Republican city council member.
And so, while formerly blighted and benighted cities like Detroit and San Francisco are tentatively rebounding, Denver still hasn’t hit bottom.
I spent a career in downtown Denver, and I loved the place. But now, downtown vacancy rates are at historic highs, the nightlife and restaurant scenes are non-existent, property values are falling, the roads stink, the people stink, and the Rockies stink.
Given the political make-up of Denver, it will get even worse. Well, not the for the Rockies – they’ll just leave town. As far as I’m concerned, they can take with them the mayor, all of city council and the owners of the Broncos. I hate Denver.
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The nature of humans and their relationships is complex and interesting. It involves friendship, hate, cooperation, competition, love, impulse, greed, work, betrayal, family, tribes, envy, sympathy and dozens of other emotions.
Great writers and even bad ones have written billions of words on these powerful feelings, and how they function and dysfunction in groups of humans. Writers keep writing about them and their readers keep reading about them because they strike a chord within us. We witness them in our everyday lives.
Democrats have reduced it all to one thing: class struggle. In this class struggle, everyone is pigeonholed into one of two competing categories: the oppressed and the oppressors. But beware, there are some arbitrary exceptions because there’s something of a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed.
For example, if your skin color is dark, then you’re oppressed. Unless you’re a dark-skinned Asian who wants to be judged fairly on merit, or a Black man like Martin Luther King, Jr. who wanted to be judged on the content of his character, or a political conservative like Justice Clarence Thomas or Professor Thomas Sowell or Secretary of State Marco Rubio – in which case you’re an oppressor.
If you’re a man who likes to pretend he’s a woman, then you’re oppressed. Unless, like Caitlin Jenner, you object to men pretending to be women competing against women in women’s sports – in which case you’re an oppressor.
If you like to do sexual things with people of your own sex, then you’re oppressed. Unless, like several of President Trump’s appointees, you happen to be politically conservative – in which case you’re an oppressor.
If you’re one of the 51% of humanity who is a woman, then you’re oppressed. (Never mind that you live six years longer than your oppressor.) Unless, like most women, you think men don’t belong in the women’s locker room – in which case you’re an oppressor.
If you haven’t made much money because you’ve chosen to use your time doing things other than working hard at well-paying jobs, then you’re oppressed. Same goes if you’ve made plenty of money but you’ve chosen to spend it all.
Enough about the oppressed. On to their oppressors.
If you’re a white man, you’re an oppressor. (That’s true even in Africa where white men are a distinct minority because . . . reasons.) Unless you’re a white man who chooses to use his time doing things other than working hard at well-paying jobs, and therefore has no money or has spent it all – in which case, as mentioned, you’re oppressed.
If you’re . . . well . . . hmm.
I planned to set forth the other types of oppressors but straight white men are pretty much the only ones. Oh, and Thomas Sowell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Thomas, and a couple billion Asians.
Credit this oppressor/oppressed view of humanity to Karl Marx, an intellectually feeble straight white man hiding behind a grotesque beard of pseudo-intellectualism. Of the myriad human emotions, he was blind to all but one: envy.
His envy led to his famous formulation for how to run an economy, which I paraphrase:
“From each according to his ability to make things, and to each according to his desire to have them.:
Marx’s formula doesn’t work for obvious reasons that are replayed predictably through the course of history. People who have the ability to make things stop making them if those things are taken away from them, and people who desire those things are never satisfied with what’s given to them if they aren’t required to expend any energy to get them.
Of course, the government can force people who are capable of making things to keep making them, even if they know those things will be taken from them. And that’s what socialist states wind up doing. But then you’re not running an economy, you’re running a slave labor camp. That’s not a sustainable plan.
The Democrats are blind to this logic and this history, perhaps because they want to see themselves as part of the oppressed du jour, to whom, conveniently, the oppressors du jour owe a living, and a good one at that.
Hence the Democrats’ obsession with heroizing losers who are failures in life, from the Rosenbergs to George Floyd to Hunter Biden. For a Democrat, the greatest achievement is to be a failure and therefore a victim, because that means you’re oppressed, and that means you deserve sympathy – along with the material things that your oppressors made and you want.
Give the Democrats some credit. They’re good at the first element of this non sequitur – the element of failure. I would say they’re still working on the other elements, but that would suggest they’re engaged in an activity they’re unwilling to engage in – work.
Until Democrats learn to achieve and celebrate more than just failure – until they learn to walk the walk of complex human emotions and relations – they still have talk. They can still talk the talk of oppressor/oppressed and perpetrators/victims. From such simple talk, they evidently derive great pleasure.
I think Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Faulkner might say . . . yawn. I know I do.
Turns out, this is an actual country, not the name of a Cub Scout troop. And it’s not den-mark. It’s Denmark. And they don’t call themselves “Denmarkians. They call themselves “Danes.”
Anyway, the Danes are mad as hell. Or at least heck.
You see, back when the Spanish were looting the locals in South and Central America, and the Portuguese were lucratively, if inhumanely, trading slaves in what’s now Brazil, and the English were accidentally planting the seeds of a great republic in North America, the Danes were . . . [drum roll] . . .
. . . stealing ice from the Eskimos. Here’s the story.
But first, change “Eskimo” to “Inuit.” The word “Eskimo” went extinct in favor of “Inuit” about the time the predecessor word to “Black” went extinct in favor of “Black.” You see, “Eskimo” is the Inuit’s own word for “eater-of-raw-meat.” Which they were. (Have you ever tried to start and build a campfire on a glacier?) But they don’t like to be reminded of that fact.
To, um, engage with the Inuit people, the Danes (back when they were called Vikings – a demographic not known for being kind and gentle – and later the “Norse”) stole the home of the Inuit. They took what’s now Greenland.
The Danes got many of square kilometers that nobody but the Inuit wanted. After all, Greenland is roughly 50 times the size of Denmark. But the land is not exactly the Fertile Crescent. It’s not even the potato farms of Ireland. It’s mostly covered with ice year-round. (See, “eater-of-raw-meat,” above.)
Choosing the name “Greenland” for this icebox-in-need-of-defrosting was a nasty joke. The Danes named it that to encourage their fellow countrymen to colonize the place. Imagine their disappointment after a month at sea in the North Atlantic when their “green” new farms turned out to be glaciers.
Even so, the Danes’ colonies in Greenland survived, due in part to a climate that was warmer than today’s. Like most of the world, Greenland did better back when the climate was warmer, not colder, than today.
All this happened well after the greatest Dane in history, Laurence Olivier, also known as Hamlet, gave the answer, “to be.” (And then, he was. For a little while.)
“To be,” however, was not the fate of Greenland. They were never meant to be, even for a little while. There was no gold rush, no taming of the West or even the North, no railroads, no cattle ranches, no saloons, no nothin’. They didn’t even have slaves.
The icebox cruelly called Greenland still has a population of fewer than 57,000 people. That’s roughly the population of Bothell, Washington. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of Bothell, Washington.
Spread over a landmass, or rather ice mass, that is four times the size of Texas, this place called Greenland is one of the least-inhabited places on earth – second only to Antarctica, which the Danes would also have stolen from the Inuit except there were no Inuit there.
In WWII, Denmark declared itself neutral in an obvious attempt at appeasing Hitler. In a matter of days, Hitler’s armies marched through zero resistance in Denmark on their way to Paris. History tells us more about Danish pastry and Danish collaborators than Danish resistance.
After Denmark was overrun, Greenland was rescued by the Americans from the Nazis and their U-boat submarines. The Americans went on to rescue Europe and the world, then gifted Greenland back to Denmark. The Americans further gifted to Denmark – and the rest of western Europe – a massive rebuilding from the ruins of the war.
Apart from those few years under the umbrella of America’s protection, it’s fair to say Greenland’s fortunes have been like her winters – endless darkness.
But in Greenland’s latitude above the Arctic Circle, the summer brings endless sun. Greenland may now be embarking on her summer, or at least her spring.
You see, the North Atlantic Ocean was unappealing to yesteryear’s conquistadors, but it is strategically important to today’s would-be conquistadors such as Vladimir Putin. Also, the ice sheets of Greenland show signs of shrinking due to Global whatever-they’re-now-calling-it. Greenland could wind up almost as warm as, oh, northern Alaska, in which case you could do all the things in Greenland that you now do in northern Alaska.
Like eat raw meat.
This literal and metaphorical turning of the seasons in Greenland has not gone unnoticed by the Americans. We have a National Weather Service, you know, which is on the lookout for such things when they’re not asleep at the flood-warning switch.
And so, our Troller-In-Chief told the Greenlanders that maybe he’ll just, you know . . . invade.
President Trump is not afraid to think and talk outside the box. Sometimes it seems like he lives there.
Greenland is still technically part of Denmark, sort of. They’re something like a colony, but without the success of one. So, the Danes took offense to this suggestion that America might liberate and protect the Greenlanders, as we did 84 years ago while Denmark was appeasing the Nazis.
That suggestion sent the popularity of America among the Danes south faster than a thermometer in Nuuk in November. The Wall Street Journal announced that this has “ended Denmark’s love affair with the U.S.”
Sheesh, can we still be good friends?
Building on the media’s typical everyone-hates-America story, the Journal interviewed some Danes who indeed do. They all had names that are unpronounceable and often unspellable. Suffice to say they’re real sad and kinda mad about their unrequited and now undone love for us.
But, they warned, if we make good on our threat to take over Greenland, they’ll . . . they’ll . . . they won’t talk to us anymore.
I admit I’m exaggerating their feebleness, but it’s for the noble purpose of mockery. The Danes’ real warning was more threatening, but just barely. Here’s the actual quote from a Danish military analyst (though I’m a little surprised such a job exists):
“I guess the rules of engagement would be, hand over the keys and take the next plane home, because there is very little we could actually do about it, and it would be sort of pointless to fight it because we have four dog sleds and some civilian police there, that’s it.”
In Greenland itself, they see this as more comedy than tragedy. Many of them have wanted to separate from Denmark for years, much as the Basque want to separate from Spain, the Welsh from Great Britain, and the Californicators from Earth.
In fact, I suspect the Greenlanders are pleased with the inordinate and unusual attention they’re receiving. On a per-person basis, Greenland’s icy escapade is more attention than Americans received when our 1980 hockey team performed the Miracle on Ice.
Maybe now we should troll the Greenlanders with a tweet and a smirk that we’ve found some other country, a younger and warmer one – maybe Fiji – to invade. But we can still be friends.
the Aspen beat 