Tag Archives: Aspen

Aspen newspapers bury Aspen Skiing Company’s hateful diatribe against Trump

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Democracy dies when it gets buried

Right after the election, the CEO of Aspen Skiing Company, which runs Aspen and Snowmass resorts (known as “SkiCo” locally), was grieving. And he wanted everyone to know.

He sent a memo to all 1,500-some employees instructing them on “the gravity of what just occurred.” (This is all he knows about gravity, believe me – I’ve seen this guy ski.)

The memo CEO-splained that the election decision made by over half the nation was “openly at odds” with SkiCo’s values of:

“Equality, democracy, civility, compassion, tolerance, sustainability, open-mindedness, gratitude, freedom, integrity, and justice.”

When the biggest company in Aspen and the surrounding area, serving the public on public lands under favorable Forest Service leases, condemns over half of America – including many of its own employees and customers – for their purportedly undemocratic, uncivil, intolerant, unsustainable, close-minded, ungrateful, tyrannical and unjust election decision, that seems like news.

But the local newspapers didn’t report it. So I wrote a piece about it. My piece received significant attention.

I also sent a letter to the editor of one of those local newspapers that allegedly reports the news (in those few pages that are not devoted to real estate ads). It’s called the Aspen Daily News. My letter strictly observed their word limit and other rules.

They’ve been brimming with Trump-is-Hitler letters ever since the election, and before then too. I figured they might strike a bit of balance by publishing my letter calling out SkiCo for condemning as fascists half of America along with many of its own employees and customers.

I was wrong. The Aspen Daily News utterly ignored my letter.

 In their defense, their refusal might have been for reasons of money – it might have been because they’re whores to SkiCo as one if their biggest advertisers (apart from the ubiquitous real estate ads).

But it’s more likely that they’re just whores to the political left. Pitkin County went 71% for the Democrat, which is approximately 28% less than the political composition of the Aspen Daily News.

If it’s any consolation to me, and it is, the circulation of my piece far exceeded the circulation of the Aspen Daily News. But still, it rubs me wrong that a so-called newspaper is so blatantly biased in burying news.

And so, I’ll publish my letter here, where it will get substantially more readers than in the Aspen Daily News. (Now if I can just figure out how to accept real estate ads.) Here it is: 

In the wake of last week’s election, the CEO of the SkiCo companies circulated a “For Internal Distribution Only” memo to all 1,500-some of its employees bemoaning “the gravity of what just occurred.” He went on to complain that the election result was “openly at odds with some of the values [SkiCo] stands for.”

Those SkiCo values with which last week’s free and democratic election is at odds, the CEO said, are “equality, democracy, civility, compassion, tolerance, sustainability, open-mindedness, gratitude, freedom, integrity, and justice.”

SkiCo easily employs the largest number of people in the Roaring Fork Valley, its payroll is the largest in the Valley, and its customers are the Valley’s biggest source of revenue. Moreover, SkiCo enjoys leases of public lands at very favorable rates for the purpose of serving the public – all of them, regardless of race, color, sex, religion, or political beliefs.

Like anyone else, the CEO is entitled to his opinion that a majority of the country does not share his vaunted “values.” But foisting that opinion onto 1,500 employees that he has the power to fire, and onto hundreds of thousands of customers to whom he can deny lift tickets, is a tad heavy-handed. To use his own terminology, it’s not particularly tolerant.

I should mention that an esteemed friend who is prominent in the Aspen area also sent in a letter to the editor – to the other Aspen newspaper, the Aspen Times – objecting to the CEO’s coercive memo to his employees. (No, there’s not enough news in Aspen to support two daily newspapers, but there’s certainly enough real estate to advertise.) Her letter was similarly civil, and similarly unpublished.

Next time you drop $20k for a week in Aspen, consider where that money is going.

Aspen Skiing Company joins “The Resistance”

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Your correspondent has reviewed a memo labelled “For Internal Distribution Only” from the CEO of the company that owns and operates the skiing operations at Aspen and Snowmass (referred to locally as “SkiCo”).  

It’s a doozy.

Everyone knows that Aspen is rich and liberal. The billionaires crowded out the millionaires decades ago. What passes for “thinking” by think-tanks like the Aspen Institute is the notion that “balance” means hard-leftists like Madeline Albright and Jonathan Capehart on one side and soft-leftists like David Brooks and Liz Cheney on the other.

Years ago, SkiCo decried Donald Trump’s enforcement of America’s immigration laws. Enforcement of those duly enacted American laws, they declared, was un-American. (Coincidentally, enforcement of the immigration laws also impacted SkiCo’s supply of low-paid workers.)

So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to see SkiCo’s reaction to the election. Still, it’s worth noting, especially if you happen to be one of their customers.

The memo from the CEO to employees begins by bemoaning “the gravity of what just occurred.” A majority of voters, he said, chose “a vision that can be viewed as openly at odds with some of the values [SkiCo] stands for.”

In case you don’t get the drift, the CEO helpfully spells it out. SkiCo’s self-declared “values” with which he contends over half of America is “openly at odds” are:

“Equality, democracy, civility, compassion, tolerance, sustainability, open-mindedness, gratitude, freedom, integrity, and justice.”

In short, in the public opinion of the CEO of SkiCo, the election represents a triumph of the opposite of all that. It represents a triumph of inequality, anti-democracy, incivility, unsustainability, close-mindedness, ingratitude, tyranny, and injustice.

He fails to explain how an open election, in which a candidate won a majority of both the people and the Electoral College, is anti-democratic. Perhaps he meant anti-Democrat.

Oh, and intolerance. With no sense of irony or self-awareness, the CEO of SkiCo – the leader of a prominent company offering services to the public with the power to fire employees – declares to those employees that half the country with whose votes he disagrees are intolerant.

In closing, he muses, “Clearly, the approach of trying to model, speak aggressively, and ‘teach’ others is not sufficient.” (The scare quotes around “teach” are his.)

That sounds slightly threatening. After failing in his effort to “teach” the deplorable, unteachable garbage that constitute half of America, is he perhaps considering limiting access to the gondolas to card-carrying Democrats?

I can see the gondola operators to the line of skiers:

“Papers? Papers? No, I don’t care about your lift ticket, I want your voter registration papers!”

The First Amendment probably does not protect the employees of SkiCo who happen to be Republicans (yes, there are some) and have received the CEO’s coercive political memo, since SkiCo is not an arm of the government. On the other hand, SkiCo does enjoy numerous leases of Forest Service lands owned by the government. Also, its gondola and chair-lift operations could make it a “common carrier.”

And some states offer state law protections that could be implicated. If SkiCo has any employees in California, for example, the memo could be in violation of California state law. (Talk about irony.)

But the legalisms are a column for another day. Today’s point is that the operator of Aspen and Snowmass considers you persona non grata if you’re in the half+ of the country that voted for Donald Trump. Maybe you should consider them resorta non grata.

Enter the “When will Joe drop out?” pool and win a free drinking hike in Aspen with me!

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I like to hike, and I do a lot of it here around Aspen. I also like to see mean old Joe Biden and his hillbilly grifter family humiliated. And I like to drink wine. And I like interacting with my readers.

I figured out a tasty blend of these amusing activities. But first, here’s my take on the election.

Last night’s softball interview with Democrat flack George Stephanopoulos did little to quell the calls for Joe to drop out in the wake of last week’s catastrophic 90-minute cognitive test, a test on which he crashed and burned and his ashes were buried. The pundits and oddsmakers put the odds of Joe dropping out at around 60% these days.

The calls to drop out are even coming from the Democrats. Of course, their motivation is not the good of the country. Their motivation is that he is now dragging down the down-ticket Democrat candidates. And their secondary motivation is that they want voters to forget their contention just weeks ago that Joe is “sharp as a tack.”

It’s tough to reconcile that contention with Joe’s 90-minute implosion – or with current statements coming out of the White House that he’s much less senile between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and that they’ll be sure to keep him under wraps altogether after 8 p.m.

The most damning thing from the Biden-opoulos interview was Joe’s reiteration that he refuses to take a cognitive test to confirm or refute the charges of senility.

Of course, that means he has indeed taken such a test and failed it, and so the White House has buried the results. At his age and demeanor, it would be medical malpractice for his physicians not to have administered such a test.  

Everyone knows all this. Senile Joe and “doctor” Jill and criminal Hunter are engaged in simple denial.

But they will eventually come around to the next stages of grief. They’re already showing some anger. Next will be bargaining – for pardons, book deals and the like. Then depression when they learn that none of that is available. And then, finally, acceptance.

I say it will all happen very soon because the Democrats are desperate and the time is short. Rehabilitating Kamala to be his replacement is a major project. It’s already started, but they need more time with her.

So, I predict that Joe will drop out tomorrow afternoon, July 7, during his awake time between 10 and 2. Specifically, I put it at 1:34 Eastern Times.

Make your own prediction! The person who gets closest wins a day of hiking and drinking with me near Aspen. Or, at your election, an evening of walking and drinking inside Aspen proper. (So-called friends have suggested that the second place prize should be two such outings with me, and the third place prize should be three.)

From the start, we can do our best Joe imitations. Such as “C’mon man!” if one of us falls behind and “Here’s the deal” for no particular reason and “Anyway” whenever we don’t know what to say.

Two hours into it, we can do our best wide-eyed, shuffling, stiff-legged gait imitating Joe. Four hours into it, we can do our best asleep-with-the-nuclear-codes imitation.  (Don’t worry, we’ll have a designated driver, and the codes will be cheap fakes.) All the while, we’ll enjoy taunting the Democrats of Aspen, of whom there are a great many but not many great.

Leave your predictions in the Comment Section below. (For consistency, use Eastern Time.)

How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen – the Quiet Years

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My book about the decline of Aspen was published last year, entitled “High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen.” It debuted at Number 6 on Amazon in its category of political books. That put the book in rarified air with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters (who helped me promote it when I appeared on his show).

Although I’m no longer in the stratosphere with Tucker and Jesse, sales are still climbing and, more importantly, so are royalties. You can get the book at Amazon or Barnes and Noble for $18 or $8 for the e-version.

Meanwhile, here’s a teaser. It’s Chapter Two, about the odd period between the silver boom and the post-WWII boom, entitled “Cows, Potatoes and Ghosts — the Quiet Years.”

high-attitude-ch-2Download

Aspen in the Early Days

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Book excerpt from “High Attitude”

Here’s a free excerpt from my recent book, “High Attitude – How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen.” It’s Chapter One, about the early mining days. This chapter is mostly non-political, but of course I couldn’t resist a political observation or three.

The link is at the download below.

The full book is also available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Current reviews average 4.5 stars out of 5. If you like the book, feel free to leave your own online review!

high-attitude-ch-1-1Download

Aspen locals excoriate wealthy visitors, even as they fleece them

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The favorite parlor game of Aspen locals is to bash the wealthy visitors who over the last half century turned this dilapidated near-ghost town into a renowned place of beauty, recreation and money.

The gist of the bashing is that the visitors are “greedy.” Utterly lacking any self-awareness, those same locals simultaneously demand that the “greedy” visitors give them ever-more money, especially in the form of taxpayer-subsidized housing which the local insiders get for dimes on the dollar.

This hypocrisy reached a peak when a local wrote a column last year in the Aspen Daily News suggesting that the visitors should stop visiting. He apparently wants them to just mail their money in.

That same local has now written another column decrying a $17 million donation by a wealthy visitor to the Aspen Music School, which is graciously thanking the donor by putting his name on the music tent. That gesture of thanks, says the local, amounts to Aspen selling its soul.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Aspen Daily News about this. Here it is. (The local’s original column is at the link in my letter).

High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen

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Dear Readers,

My gift to you is an excerpt from my book published this year, “High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen.” The excerpt is the Preface of about 19 pages, and is in the PDF below. I may publish additional excepts in the coming months.

The book was well-received, with an average review of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon. If you like it, or think someone for whom you need a last-minute gift might, the whole book is still available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble for $17.99 in the print version and $7.99 on Kindle.

Merry Christmas! Glenn

High Attitude preface CLICK HERE

Chad Klinger: A virtue-signaling dystopia? How ‘Mr. Aspen’ sees Aspen

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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.

You can get the book at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. This review was published in The Aspen Times. Chad Klinger lives in Snowmass Village.

Aspen, our evil twin Skippy, and Torre! Torre! Torre!

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Up in Aspen where the town, the slopes and the people range from high to highly high, they’re having an election for mayor and city council.

The election is hotly contested, there’s a lot of hot air being blown about and, as always in Aspen, the sex is steamy, if unconventional. All this makes the Global Warmers howl, but their howls are dampened by air temperatures in the single digits and a Colorado snowpack that is about 130% of normal.   

All 7,000 residents of Aspen want to be mayor or on city council. That’s always been the case, and so a few years ago the mayor and city council voted to start paying themselves a salary in order to recruit for this little part-time hobby job the residents not included in the word “all.” Because inclusiveness.

One resident who wants to be on city council already is. He’s named Skippy. He has a last name too, which everyone has forgotten. He just goes by Skippy.

Not Skip. Skip-py.

Continue reading →

Aspen newspapers continue to whitewash or ignore allegation that Boebert’s opponent was blackmailed

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A few weeks ago, the Democratic candidate for Colorado’s Third Congressional District was accused of being blackmailed into changing his position on a matter of city policy while he was a city councilman in Aspen. He’s running against conservative firebrand Lauren Boebert, a person the liberal Aspen elite undisguisedly hate and would love to see beaten by Frisch.

The Aspen newspapers – part of that Aspen liberal elite – have mostly dismissed or buried the blackmail story, to the extent they’ve covered it at all. The Aspen Daily News finally published something over a week after the story broke elsewhere:

“The story — which Frisch, his family and his campaign deny — goes something like this: in May 2017, Frisch rode his bike to the storage unit owned by the local taxi company, which was caught on security footage. A staff member of the company subsequently found Frisch engaging in an extramarital activity in one of those units; a year later, when the city council was considering a “mobility lab” that Gardner found threatening to his business, the taxi company owner blackmailed Frisch into changing his vote, swinging the city council away from moving forward with a contract that would have brought rideshare companies such as Lyft more meaningfully to Aspen.”

The blackmail allegation glossed over by the newspaper is that the taxi owner has a video showing everything in the story except the sex in the storage unit; it’s undisputed that he sent that video to Frisch in an email; and the taxi owner himself says “it absolutely was blackmail.” It should be noted, but the newspaper article does not, that the blackmailer is no Boebert supporter — he calls her “clueless.”

Here are some questions that a real newspaper reporter might ask Frisch after his blanket denial:

  • You say you deny the story, but what part?
  • Do you deny that it was you in the video?
  • Do you deny that you waited for the woman in the video and then went into the storage building with her, as the video seems to show?
  • Do you deny having sex with her in the storage unit, as the taxi assistant says she witnessed?
  • Do you deny having received the taxi owner’s email attaching the video in the time frame during which city council was considering the mobility lab?
  • Do you deny that you failed to respond to the video with something like, “Huh? What’s this video?”
  • Do you deny that you failed to contact authorities to report what appeared to be an attempted blackmailing of you, as the taxi owner himself contends?
  • Do you deny that the blackmailing was successful – that the video changed your vote, as the taxi owner contends?

A fair reading is that Frisch implicitly admits the entire story, except the last point: He denies that the attempted blackmailing was successful. Rather, he apparently asserts that he was in the process of changing his mind anyway.

What Frisch is obviously eager to change now is the subject. But a real newspaper with real and unbiased reporters would not be so eager to oblige. A real newspaper with real and unbiased reporters would ask Frisch these questions. If he refuses to answer them, then a real newspaper with real and unbiased reporters would report his refusal.

Alas, apparently no such newspaper and no such reporters exist in Aspen.

“Democracy dies in darkness” – Washington Post