Tag Archives: politics

These four women destroyed the Democratic Party with race

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Four young Congresswomen – not even Senators – accomplished something that eluded years of Democratic Presidents and their woes.

Jimmy Carter in his malaise, Bill with Monica and his cigar, Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War – none of that was able to accomplish what these four young Congresswomen accomplished.

They destroyed the Democratic Party.

It was a perfect storm that began around the year 2020. China leaked a bioengineered virus from its biowarfare lab – probably accidentally – to produce worldwide mass hysteria and lockdowns of billions of people.

It gathered steam when a thug died in the hands of a white cop. Protests and riots ensued, weirdly exempted from the lockdowns.

At the time, the country was already weary of Donald Trump and his often productive but typically provocative antics.

These four Congresswomen seized the moment. Never great fans of America, they seized that time of weakness to destroy her, or at least act out their anger at her.

The death of the thug became emblematic of white police brutality. Never mind that this particular thug probably died of drugs, not a chokehold. Never mind that more Blacks die at the hands of Black police officers than at the hands of white ones. Never mind that the leading cause of death among young Black men is other young Black men. Never mind that the murder rate among Blacks is seven-times that of whites, and nearly all Black murders are at the hands of other Blacks.

Led by these Congresswomen, the Left decided that sticking to those inconvenient facts was . . .

RACIST!

The narrative was more important than any dumb facts. To disagree with their false narrative or their false charge of racism served only to prove you’re a . . .

RACIST!

Your only salvation was confession, and then they might let you off easy with just a few hundred hours of DEI training.

Oh yes, DEI. The Left’s long-standing reverse discrimination called “Affirmative Action” had failed, and their effort to sustain their failed discrimination was also failing.

So, the Left did what they do when their policies fail: They rebranded it. (See, e.g., communism rebranded as socialism, rebranded as liberalism, rebranded as wokeism, rebranded as progressivism.)

The new brand for “Affirmative Action” was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” This new brand was the same as the old brand, except, this time, it was coupled with brainwashing.

You had to not only engage in reverse discrimination; you had to believe in it. You had to believe that the company (or college or whatever) was stronger if the guy down the hall had dark skin.

Painting the skin of employees a la Justin Trudeau blackface was not Kosher, but almost. You could hire into a company or admit into a college a privileged Black kid (or ¾ Black kid like Barack Obama’s daughters admitted to Harvard) and get full DEI credit.

The problem was that DEI, like Affirmative Action, tended to conflict with a meritocracy. But the DEI supremacists had a solution to that problem: Do away with merit. Merit became a code word for . . .

RACIST!

The only content of your character that mattered was the pigmentation of your skin. If that meant Boeing planes fall out of the sky because 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of the skin color of engineers who would like to say otherwise, well, that’s . . .

RACIST!

The planes are just . . .

RACIST!

While we’re at it, they thought, let’s do away with sex. A nominee for the Supreme Court announced rather proudly that she could not define “woman.”

That proved to be a slippery slope. Next thing we knew, people that everyone else defines as not women – you know, people with a Y chromosome, high testosterone levels, a penis and testicles – were calling themselves “women” and competing in women’s sports like swimming and even boxing. Unsurprisingly, in view of their testosterone levels and male musculature, they usually won. By a pool length or a knockout.

At which time they joined the women in the showers. If you complained, you were the sex equivalent of . . .

RACIST!

You were alphabet-people-phobic. For that, you get another few hundred hours of DEI training, and then you get cancelled. No soup for you, and no career either.

Two more things. Bear with me.

They spent taxpayer money like drunken sailor-ettes. The Orwellian-titled Inflation Reduction Act threw a trillion dollars in borrowed fuel onto an inflation inferno. That was after previous boondoggle bills literally paid people not to work.

So . . . you pay people not to work at producing goods, and then you wonder why demand seems to be outpacing supply to produce price inflation.

Ah, they knew that would be the effect. But it was worth a little inflation to get money out of the hands of people who earned it and into the hands of people who voted for them.

Speaking of people who vote for them, they opened the southern border. A gazillion people came. All were illegal, many were criminals, some were murderers.

But almost all had darkish skin. So, if you don’t like them illegally entering our country, and some of them committing criminal acts here, and many sponging off our welfare state, well, then you’re a . . .

RACIST!

It all worked for a little while. But reality has a way of intervening. Systems that disregard merit tend to become unmeritorious. They get reputations for that, and there are consequences. People get turned off by planes falling from the sky, applicants being evaluated on the basis of their skin, illegal immigrants whom we can’t call illegal, prices going through the roof, lockdowns keeping the kids in the damn house all day, teachers who won’t teach, and all the rest.

In the end, the Squad’s passion to destroy America failed because America is, even now, very powerful and basically sensible.

But they did destroy the Democratic Party. The people voted the bums out. Not the Squad – most of them are in safe Democrat districts – but their Democrat colleagues. Especially their senile President and his smiley, witless, joyless VP.

So far, the judgment of the people has been without regrets. My sense is that if the election were held today, the Democrats would lose even more resoundingly.

It won’t be easy for the Democrats to recover. In theory, they can change their policies, but it’s hard to abandon a position when you’ve already announced that to do so is . . .

RACIST!

It’s one thing to argue that your position is the better one on the merits. That argument allows for negotiation and compromise. It’s another thing to climb down from a moralistic perch where you shout that your opponent’s focus on merit simply proves he’s a . . .

RACIST!

We’ve never seen a political climate quite like the current one. The Democrats went way out on a race limb, sawed it off, and are now surprised that they and their limb – not the tree – have fallen.

Jimmy Carter playing God paved the road for radical Islamists playing Satan

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Jimmy Carter informed us back in 1976 that he had “looked on many women with lust” and “committed adultery many times in my heart.”

The fact that a man’s heart or other organs have lusted after many women is not exactly news. The reason men don’t go around broadcasting their lust is because it’s obvious. It would be like saying, I get horny on days that end in a “y.”

But Carter did tell us about his lust – in a formal interview with Playboy, perhaps fittingly. He evidently thought that a man’s lust was newsworthy, if the man was him.

It reminds me of the devil’s temptation of Christ, a story told in three of the four Gospels. The devil failed in his temptation of Christ, but the fact that it happened was Good News-worthy two millennia ago.

Carter was a born-again Christian. (Full disclosure: I am too.) In fact, Carter was a Sunday School teacher. In teaching the temptation of Christ on Sundays and advertising “the temptation of Carter” on Saturdays, he was aware of the parallel he was drawing.

Mind you, I don’t judge a person’s brand of Christianity. That’s beyond my paygrade.

But I do judge their politics. Carter seemed to believe that a New Testament approach could work in international affairs – as in forgiveness and love thy enemy – with the likes of Leonid Brezhnev and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ah, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

When Carter was elected in 1976, the country of Iran was run by a Shah – roughly the equivalent to a Western monarch. The Shah was hostile to communism and generally friendly to the West. Many Iranian students went to Western universities. Women’s rights and human rights steadily improved over the decades of rule by the Shah and his predecessor father.

Carter’s limited experience as the former governor of Georgia and his black and white view of good and evil left him unprepared for the nuances of international geopolitics. In his simplistic syllogism, democracy was good; monarchs were anti-democratic; the Shah was a monarch; and, therefore, the Shah was bad.

In contrast to pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger (whom he despised), Carter was uncomfortable with the notion of the lesser of evils.

And so, when the Shah was threatened, Carter did little to save him. The resulting revolution led to a bloody theocratic state called The Islamic Republic of Iran. Like the Shah’s regime, it was a monarchy except in name, and this time it was led by a monarch – the Ayatollah – who claimed a hotline to Allah (and actually had one to Brezhnev) together with a divine right to rule.  

The Islamic theocrats naturally hated America. They taunted us by holding 53 hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days until the day of the inauguration of the man who defeated Carter’s bid for a second term, Ronald Reagan. (Funny, that coincidence.)

Carter’s sanctimonious forgiveness and love failed to free any hostages. (To his credit, he did attempt a rescue, but it never got off the ground.)

Since the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran has shuffled along in their seventh-century oxcart. They throw gay men off tall buildings, they chop off the hands of shoplifters, and they stone prostitutes to death. They threaten to annihilate Israel, and they are just weeks away from having a nuclear bomb with which to do so.

In this odd world of ours, I sometimes see a bumper sticker reading “What would Jesus do?” I’ve always assumed that the owners of the cars to which those stickers are stuck have no interest in Jesus. They’re instead just trolling Christians. They’re trying to contrast the typically conservative political leanings of Christians with what they regard (unburdened by any actual knowledge) as the liberal leanings of Jesus.

But some Christians are actually guided in their geopolitics by that bumper sticker question – What would Jesus do? Never mind that Jesus spent his entire life in a place without iPhones which could be walked in the long direction in a few weeks and the short direction in a day. These particular Christians believe that Christ taught not just the tools for a relationship with God, but also for a relationship with Taylor Swift, John Maynard Keynes, and the Ayatollahs.

The teachings of Christ are probably harmless in dealing with Taylor Swift. (I know nothing of Swift’s beliefs, and I don’t mean to pick on her.)

However, the teachings of Christ are probably less helpful in dealing with John Maynard Keynes. Can we honestly suppose that Christ had insights into economic questions like how to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number, and what the capital gains tax should be, and that those insights are revealed if only we read between the lines of, say, Corinthians?

As for the Ayatollahs, the teachings of Christ are wholly unhelpful in dealing with them. Or in dealing with their jihadi foot soldiers who seek to conquer, enslave, rape, take hostage, behead and eliminate people they regard as infidels by means of suicide bomb vests, airplanes in skyscrapers, and pickup trucks on sidewalks.

The what-would-Jesus-do Christians seem unaware that we already know the answer to their bumper sticker question, “What would Jesus do?”

What Jesus would do is what he did do. He taught love, forgiveness and pacifism. He surrendered and sacrificed himself. He was excruciatingly tortured – naked and humiliated on the cross – that he might rise again to show us The Way.

The madmen of Islam would very much like us, now, to try doing with them what Jesus did with his enemies two thousand years ago. The last Western leader to try that was Jimmy Carter. And here we are.

Increase legal immigration

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Guess what these people have in common:

  • Albert Einstein
  • Enrico Fermi
  • John Audubon
  • John Muir
  • Elon Musk
  • Nikola Tesla
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Irving Berlin
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • Levi Strauss
  • Dikembe Mutombo
  • Liz Claiborne
  • Mariano Rivera
  • Melania Trump
  • Andrew Carnegie
  • Audrey Hepburn
  • Yo-Yo Ma
  • Ayn Rand
  • Elie Weisel
  • Sergey Brin
  • Bob Marley
  • Sammy Sosa
  • Carlos Santana
  • Henry Kissinger
  • Rupert Murdoch
  • Alexander Hamilton

You’ve probably guessed it – each was born outside the United States, and immigrated here. Most became full, legal American citizens after undergoing the citizenship process, including passing history, civics and English language tests that most American college graduates would flunk.

The list could go on for thousands of pages, but you probably get the drift.

And by the way, you can add to the list a full quarter of the American winners of scientific Nobel Prizes. American technological prowess owes a lot to immigration.

Legal immigration is a strength of America, and always has been. America has been the most attractive place on earth for immigrants for a long time – due in part to the role of immigrants in making it so.

Do build the wall. Do secure the Mexican border. Do deport at least the illegal aliens who are criminals. Do require businesses to check the immigration status of employees, and do impose substantial fines on those who hire illegal ones.

Illegal immigration over the last generation became a tool of the anti-American left. Leftists intent on destroying Western Civilization used it to import the tools of destruction. Only slightly less bad are Democrats who used it to recruit a Democrat constituency.

The rest of America has finally seen the destruction wrought. And ironically, the leftists misread the political sentiments of the only immigrants who can vote legally – the legal ones. Those immigrants who worked tirelessly to come here legally – and vote legally – tend not to sympathize with illegal ones who want to cut the line, and tend not to vote for leftists or Democrats who want to help them do so.

One of the most racist assumptions of the Democrats was that legal Hispanics favor illegal immigration simply because many of the illegal immigrants have brown skin.

OK, the Democrats overplayed their hand. But let’s not overplay ours. We would be foolish to turn away the brave, the entrepreneurial, the smart, the industrious, the legal.

Trump’s powerful America will produce a safer world

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Henry Kissinger argued that geopolitical negotiations are successful only if they are backed by an implicit or explicit threat of force. In that argument, he echoed Teddy
Roosevelt’s quip a century earlier that America should “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

The contention that adversarial negotiations are successful only if you have some leverage to exert is an obvious truism. But American leaders need to re-learn this truism every so often. They naively – and sometimes malevolently – come to believe that the way to get along with the bad guys is to kowtow to them.

Our latest example began with Barack Obama. He was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism – a basic American tenet which goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s empire of liberty, Abraham Lincoln’s almost-chosen people, and Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill. Obama answered,

“Yes, there’s American exceptionalism, but I suspect the Brits also believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, Americans are exceptional in the same way that everybody else is – which is to say they are not exceptional at all. Moreover, implicit in his answer is that the only true exceptionalism in American is their conceit in believing in it.

Poisoned by his distaste for American civilization, Obama went about his stated task of “fundamentally transforming” it. His first act in this transforming was to go around the world apologizing for American misdeeds of the preceding two centuries.

Forget about America winning the Cold War; helping to win two World Wars; delivering billions in gifts to countries around the world; taking the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free; rebuilding Japan and Germany from totalitarian ashes; putting a man on the moon; spending a trillion dollars to create a well-intentioned but failed Great Society to pull up its underclass; and inventing Silicon Valley.

Forget all that. It is time, Obama preached, for America to apologize to the world.

And so, he did. For eight years, he did what he could – and that was a lot – to reduce American power and prestige in the world. He thought a smaller, weaker, apologetic America would result in world peace.

Barack Obama is nothing if not insincere. I suspect his peace-through-weakness approach was not designed so much to achieve peace, but to achieve his fundamental transformation of America. His vision had less to do with Liberty Gleaming, and more to do with Workers Uniting.

Obama’s reign of pusillanimity – his war on America – continued for eight years before briefly yielding to a four-year interruption. But the interruption was too brief, too chaotic and too sabotaged. Obama then returned in the form of his hand-picked puppet and eff-up in chief, Joe Biden.

Joe was too shallow to grasp Obama’s scheme of fundamental transformation, but he certainly knew what side his bread was buttered on, and he knew who knew about the skeletons in his closet.

Joe did what he was told, willingly and even eagerly. By golly, the man from Scranton was determined to outdo his teacher. With that eagerness, combined with a degree of plain incompetence that bordered on its own kind of exceptionalism, Joe took another step toward the fundamental transformation of America.

And the world. From Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza to the Mexican border and to everywhere else, Joe succeeded in projecting American pusillanimity and incompetence to produce worldwide chaos, violence and death.

Joe was the anti-Midas; everything he touched turned to shit. Sometimes, as in the border, it was on purpose.

Now there’s a new boss in town who’s not the same as the old boss. He was elected a month ago, and won’t assume office for another month, but already he’s making waves, and not the pusillanimous kind.

In response to his threat to impose steep tariffs that would decimate their economies, Mexico and Canada have already promised to clamp down on illegal immigration from their borders into the United States.

In response to his candid support of Israel and his no-nonsense threats against barbaric terrorists, a fragile truce has emerged in that forever conflict. Jefferson, who forcibly subdued the Barbary pirates, would nod.

Nearby, in response to his tough stance against Russian imperialism, rebels in Syria were emboldened to reclaim their country from years of a Russian-sponsored dictatorship.

In response to his muscular defense posture but unwillingness to write blank checks forever in an unwinnable war of attrition, Ukraine and Russia are quietly negotiating peace. Kissinger would approve.

In response to his indefatigable populism, the people of France are once again inspired by the people of America. Those people yearning to be free are demanding a government that represents . . .  wait for it . . . people yearning to be free.

Those people of France begged him to attend the re-opening of their Lady of Paris – the Notre Dame – while Joe Biden mumbles and stumbles around in the swamps of Brazil.

His enemies in America say this guy who supports the Jewish nation of Israel is just like Hitler. Other enemies say he’s too volatile to be in charge. Still others say he has surrounded himself with stupid yes-men (like Elon Musk?). But his American enemies mostly disbelieve their own rhetoric – they’re just bad sports and sore losers.

In the rest of the world, his enemies are lying low like rats in the basement. They’ll stay there – but only for so long as they see America as an unabashed empire of liberty, a strong and chosen people, a shining city on a hill.

Donald Trump and his progeny have an opportunity unseen in two generations. They’re off to a good start.

“Transgender Miners at the Supreme Court . . .”

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. . . Is how a headline reads in today’s Wall Street Journal. To which my reaction was, what next?

First, the trannies were in the closet. Then they came out, apparently just to go to the bathroom. The one for girls.

Then they were in the Cabinet of the future former President and current organized crime boss who both commits and pardons family criminal acts. (One stop shopping, is he.)

The next thing we knew, they were competing in athletic contests against real women – or, as much of the media dubs them, “birthing persons” or “menstruating persons” or “persons with a bonus hole” or (my personal favorite) “non-transgender women.”

Now, no less than the Wall Street Journal informs us that we have transgender miners. Yep, they’re in the mines. Those would be the mines on federal land, no doubt.

“Glory Hole” takes on a whole new meaning.

Not only that, but these transgender miners have a case today before the Supreme Court – a Court that is not especially sympathetic to identity politics (though they did rule a few years ago – centuries ago in terms of the cultural climate – that businesses cannot discriminate against tranny employees).

Given the composition of the Supreme Court, one might expect a miner of all people to know that the first thing to do when you’re stuck in a ditch is to stop digging.

What’s that you say? The WSJ headline refers to “minors” and not “miners”? And the Supreme Court case is about transgender children, not transgender miners?

Nehva mind . . .

In that case, let me put on my legal hat.

The claim being heard by the Supreme Court is that state laws prohibiting hormone manipulation and gender mutilation (er, “affirmation”) of children having some growing pains are a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution.

The gist of the argument is: If a boy who thinks he’s a boy can get certain hormones to affirm his boyhood, then why can’t a boy who thinks he’s a girl get other hormones to affirm his girliness? If the second boy can’t get his hormones, then you’ve discriminated against him on the basis of sex. The boy got the hormones, and the boy who thinks he’s a girl was refused them.

The argument has a circular quality to it. The boy thinks he’s a girl, and so he’s entitled to receive hormones to make him one. To refuse him those hormones is to discriminate against a boy who thinks he is a girl but is not  because he hasn’t received the hormones, and so it’s sex discrimination.

If you can follow that, you should be a lawyer.

There’s another, more basic flaw to the argument that boys who think they’re girls have a Constitutional right to receive hormones to make them girls (sorta). Recent studies in Europe have shown that gender “affirmation” treatment generally has a poor outcome. To be sure, a boy who becomes a “girl” has his genitals mutilated. But also – as if the genital mutilation is not a bad enough outcome – gets nowhere in his psychological well-being. He’s just a prone to suicide, for example – an act that is tragically common among trannies.

Moreover, many “transitioned” children later regret their transition, and seek to “de-transition.” If you thought the transition surgery was dicey, imagine the de-transition surgery.

Countries in Europe have now stepped back from gender “affirmation” treatment for children, and several have outlawed it – just as many states here have.

So, the Supreme Court can dodge the Constitutional Equal Protection issue that even lawyers have a hard time articulating, and decide the case in a more basic way that even you and I can understand.

They can say: This treatment is controversial and unproven. The states can, in the exercise of the plenary powers reserved to them, make a reasonable judgment that it should not be performed on children.

This is anything but unprecedented. Note that most states prohibit children from getting tattoos. But now there’s supposed to be a Constitutional right for them to mutilate their genitals in the interest of a faddish identity group that is recruiting them?

The Denver mayor is an illegal unrepentant insurrectionist

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Denver mayor Mike Johnston, as I imagine him in his insurrectionist get-up

Resistance 2.0 is upon us, and it’s getting ugly.

The latest is from the formerly-mediocre and now-failed city of Denver, of which I am an embarrassed alum. The mayor promises to forcibly thwart the United States government’s enforcement of the United States immigration laws. He says he’ll send Denver police and 50,000 moms to head the feds off at the pass.

This valiantly woke mayor even promises to personally break laws and go to prison if necessary.

Here’s the back story:

Denver declared itself a “sanctuary city” back when liberals could make such feel-good declarations without any adverse consequences. But over time, the adverse consequences came good and hard, as did the illegal immigrants.

Armed with the knowledge that in Denver they would receive a hearty Mile Hile welcome and armed with the knowledge that they would not be deported (and, in many cases, armed with drugs and guns, too), the illegal immigrants came by the thousands.

Over 40,000. Denver now hosts the highest illegal immigration population per-capita of any city. Denver might not be a great city, or a great place to live anymore, but, as the host with the most, it’s a great haven for illegal immigrants.

Providing services for these illegals has strained the city budget to the point that the city has cut back on police and other emergency protection as well as basic services like street repair and snow plowing.

In a splendid exercise in irony and hypocrisy, Denver has tried to foist some of its illegals onto neighboring towns and cities. The libs of Denver thus pat themselves on the back for “welcoming” illegals into the city while simultaneously re-shipping them to cities that don’t.

The mayor declares that the city should continue to welcome illegal immigrants because it puts the city on “the right side of history.” As if history proves that illegal acts by illegal immigrants typically produce good and legal outcomes, so long as you express that conclusion in a flowery cliché. 

I have a question for these “right side of history” Democrats. Now that history has recorded that Republicans have won control of the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, a majority of state governorships and a majority of state legislatures, how’s that “right side of history” argument working out for you?

Back to Denver. The mayor’s latest rhetoric goes a step beyond the “sanctuary city” status that is common in our Blue cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and so on – you know, the toilet towns. Those so-called sanctuary cities had merely announced that they welcomed illegal immigrants, and would not help the feds enforce the federal immigration laws against them.

The Denver mayor now goes a step further than that. He promises war. He says he will send armed local Denver police to intercept the federal law enforcement personnel at the town limits, and will recruit moms from local Denver neighborhoods to help. He promises to personally go to jail if that’s necessary to stop the United States government from enforcing the United States immigration laws.

He boasted that his rebellion would be like Tiananmen Square where anti-communists were run over by tanks.

But wait! Democrats like communism – Karl Marx, Mao, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, the whole gang. The Democrats aren’t anti-communists, they’re anti-anti-communists. If the Democrats had been at Tiananmen Square, they would have been in the tanks, not under them.

And double but-wait! Didn’t the rebels lose in Tiananmen Square?

Ponder all this. The mayor of Denver says he personally will commit crimes for the purpose of preventing the United States government from enforcing United States laws; promised to enlist tens of thousands of armed local policemen and a citizens’ militia of 50,000 moms to join his rebellion; and promised to lose.

I wonder, will the mayor wear a buffalo horn hat?

I also wonder, won’t the mayor’s criminal interference with the United States government’s enforcement of the United States immigration laws within the United States (1) cause Denver’s the illegal immigrant problem to continue unabated and (2) worsen it by drawing even more illegal immigrants to Denver from other cities and towns?

The mayor later walked back his comparison to Tiananmen Square, perhaps because it dawned on him that the Democrats are on the side of the tank-riding communists, not the tank-crushed anti-communists. But he didn’t walk back his threat of secession or rebellion or insurrection.

Democrats, are you OK with this?

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.

Why do American Jews vote against Israel?

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For a hundred years, American Jews have overwhelmingly voted for the Democrat candidate. Franklin Roosevelt received about 80% of the Jewish vote each time. This dramatic tilt toward the Democrats continued up through the turn of the century, when they gave Al Gore about 79%. They gave Obama 78% in his first election, and even gave him 69% in his second – after Obama’s antipathy toward Israel became impossible to overlook.

Some of this Jewish support for Democrats is understandable. Like most immigrants, the Jews suffered discrimination at the hands of silk-stocking Republicans. American intellectuals in the early- to mid-20th century took their cue from Europe, where antisemitism was rampant (and still is). Two generations ago in America, there were still Jewish country clubs because the ordinary Republican-dominated ones denied admittance to Jews.

All of that is shameful, and, I’m glad to say, nearly all of that is now behind us.

In this century, it’s the Democrats who exhibit an antisemitic undercurrent. It was evident in Barack Obama’s support for Iran – a Jew-hating terrorism state that denies there was a Holocaust in the past while openly urging one in the future.

Obama was willing to let Iran get nukes, ostensibly not for the purpose of making good on their Holocaust threat (wink, wink). He even sent them billions that they used to fund their nuke program.

In the Biden administration, the Democrats’ anti-Israel stance grew. They begged the Iranians to rejoin the one-sided deal that Obama gave them (and Trump revoked) and also stopped enforcing international sanctions. That allowed them to resume lucrative oil exports to fund their nukes again – and to fund terrorists attacking Israel.

After the October 7 pogrom, many Democrats equated Israel’s effort to defend itself, on the one hand, with Hamas’ invasion, rapes, beheadings, torture, random rocket attacks, and kidnapping and murder of men, women and children, on the other hand.

I assumed that these last four years of Democrat hostility toward Israel would finally tilt the Jewish vote toward Republicans in 2024.

I was wrong. Jews voted 68% for the Democrat in 2020, and this year they still voted somewhere between 66% and 79% for the Democrat (it’s difficult for exit polls to get a fix on the number). And this was for a Democrat who openly pandered to Muslim radicals.

So, what’s up with American Jews?

I have a theory.

But first, let me admit the ignorant and the speculative nature of my theory. I grew up in the wilds of Colorado, and literally had never met a Jew (at least not knowingly) until I went away to college. My current Jewish friends tend to be strong Israel supporters and, likewise, strong Republicans; my generalizations therefore do not apply to them specifically. I now have tremendous respect for both Judaism and Jewish culture (and have often written about it) but cannot claim any real expertise in the subject.

Subject to all that, here goes.

Somewhere around seven million Jews live in America – nearly as many as in Israel. Together, those two countries comprise 80% of the world’s Jewish population.

Israeli Jews are different than American Jews. Israeli Jews are mostly first- or second-generation immigrants to Israel. Jews who immigrate to the Jewish state of Israel tend to be practicing Jews, unsurprisingly. A disproportionate number are Orthodox Jews. They believe deeply in Judaism and they believe deeply in Israel. 

American Jews, not so much. While many are devout, at least a third are not observant of their religion at all. (This is not intended as a criticism. Most self-identifying Christians are not observant of their religion either.) Deeply religious Orthodox Jews are relatively rare in America.

The result is that American Jews are less invested emotionally in the Land of Abraham.

That’s hard to dispute. But I submit that it goes beyond that.

Many American Jews have not just failed to embrace Judaism, but have casually or consciously rejected it. People who reject long-standing family and religious traditions tend to feel some guilt and need some rationalizations. Rejection of one’s heritage typically morphs into hostility toward that heritage.  

In the case of the many non-observant American Jews, it’s possible that their ambivalence toward Israel – which seems to manifest in outright opposition every four years at election time – is rooted in a rejection of their ancestral faith which naturally morphs into hostility toward it.

In agnosticism, as in religion, there’s no zealot like a convert.

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.

Here’s why Trump will win – it’s pretty simple

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Political pundits have too much data, and they overanalyze it. There’s a lot of data available, a lot of pundits to analyze it, and a lot of clicks to corral.

But the disengaged American middle doesn’t pay attention to nuances like last month’s job figures or the latest inflation report. They couldn’t find South America on a map even if you showed them where North America is.

To the American middle, abortions are something other people get – and they’re usually a different kind of people. Less than a quarter of Americans are biologically eligible for an abortion, and I’m guessing that more of them are trying to start a pregnancy than end one.

In any event, the votes of those people who are fixated on terminating pregnancies are not up for grabs. They’ll always vote for Democrats.

More important to the undecided American middle is the personality of the candidates. Many candidly admit this. They choose candidates based on whether they like them personally. That category of voters is the worst.

“Trump is not as nice as me,” they sniff self-satisfyingly to themselves. It’s like they’re voting for Homecoming Queen and the ballot reads something like:

  • __Donald J. Trump
  • __You

So, put aside the Nate Silvers of the world (though Nate is very good), their hard drives of mostly accurate data, their algorithms, and their punditry. Here are the basic reasons why Trump will win.

He’s not Joe Biden, and Kamala is

As the sitting Vice President, Kamala is tied to Joe Biden. (Don’t try to picture that.) She’s done nothing to untie herself, for fear of alienating her hard-left base who thought Biden was just swell – in his policies if not his persona.

The only time in modern history that a sitting Vice President ascended to the Presidency was when George H. W. Bush did it after the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Joe Biden is no Ronald Reagan, and Kamala Harris is no George H. W. Bush.

Reagan left office with an approval rating at 63%. Biden’s has been in the 30s. (In a final humiliation, it’s now crept up to 40% as people have decided to approve of him going away.)

Bush had been a naval aviator, war hero, Yale graduate, Ambassador to the United Nations, and Director of the then-respected Central Intelligence Agency. Kamala has been . . . not.

Trump is almost a Cool Kid

Trump is much more “popular” in comparison to his opponent than he was in both 2020 and 2016. He still won’t win that Homecoming Queen crown, and people who decided long ago that they hate him for his vulgarity, his hair, and his tendency to say things in public that Bill Clinton did in private, are not likely to change their minds. But the disengaged American middle is seeing a more likeable guy than before.

Surviving endless “lawfare” and two assassination attempts doesn’t hurt him either.  

The Border

The left almost succeeded in branding Americans who wanted American borders as “racist.”

But they didn’t quite succeed. The indefensible chaos at our undefended border spreading to our police-defunded cities defies common sense.

Indeed, it goes beyond nonsense. Americans – including and perhaps especially the disengaged middle – see this as pure insanity.

Blacks don’t see Kamala as Black

Let me preface the following discussion with stating that I discuss “Blackness” only because the leftists have demanded that we not be colorblind. So here goes.

Black America is uninspired by Kamala, and it shows in both the polls and in early voting. This is despite her promises to send them free money.

As for why she’s unable to buy the Black vote, a comparison is instructive.

Barack Obama was our first Black president (unless you count aforementioned Bill Clinton). Obama was actually born of a white woman, and his private school upbringing in Hawaii was not exactly life in the ghetto.

But he was married to a woman who was clearly Black and he himself looked pretty Black. He had hair that was both black and Black.

Kamala, too, was born of a mother who is not Black (she is Asian Indian) and grew up in a relatively privileged setting (both Kamala’s parents were professionals).

But unlike Obama, she doesn’t really look Black. Her skin tone is lighter than Obama’s. Her hair is black but not Black. She has not perfected the Black accent that flowed from Obama when he condescended to audiences that were Black.

And here’s Kamala’s biggest liability in being Black. She’s married to a lily-white corporate lawyer who had a fling with his nanny in his previous marriage.

From Detroit to Baltimore to Chicago to East St. Louis, they shrieked:

“Wait a minute! Who has a nanny ?!?!?”  

Sorry, Democrats. Blacks think black Kamala ain’t Black.

Prices are much higher

Prices are nearly a third higher than when Biden took office. People don’t need to wade through the dense detritus of Politico or RealClearPolitics to know that. They’re reminded of it several times a week when they go to the grocery store.

The fact that inflation has almost returned to normal levels around 2-3% a year does not resonate with many people. In fact, many disbelieve those figures because they erroneously believe that declining inflation must mean declining prices.

There you have it. I’m guessing the election will be called for Trump by Wednesday morning.

Bonus prediction: Republicans will pick up two to four seats to re-take the Senate. The eminent Justice Clarence Thomas will retire from the Supreme Court next year to enable Trump and the Republican Senate to replace him.

That won’t change the political composition of the Court much, since Justice Thomas is a conservative. But the follow-up departure of Justice Sonia Sotomayor will.

This has been corrected to make clear that the fling with the nanny was when Kamala’s husband was married to his first wife, not to Kamala.