Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
For years, the legacy media (hereinafter the “Leg-Meds”) parroted the Democrats’ line that the population of immigrants can be divided into the “documented” ones and the “undocumented” ones.
The euphemism “undocumented” finally became a joke, and so the Leg-Meds and the other Democrats eventually surrendered to the word “illegal.”
However, within that category of “illegals,” they clung (bitterly) to the notion that about 99.9999999% were “law-abiding” and only the remaining 0.0000001% were criminals.
That lie was called out yesterday by President Trump’s new press secretary. This 27-year-old woman owned the Leg-Meds. Here’s the exchange:
REPORTER: Of the 3,500 arrests ICE has made so far since President Trump came back onto office, can you just tell me the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are in the country illegally?
KAROLINE LEAVITT: All of them [have a criminal record] because they are criminals as far as this administration goes.
She’s right. Here’s the text of 18 U.S.Code Section 1325:
(a)Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts
Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.
This quoted section clearly and unambiguously sets out criminal penalties including prison time for illegally entering the country. Imprisonment is only for crimes. You can’t be imprisoned for a mere civil violation of the law.
(If the entry was legal, but the ongoing presence in the country is not, as with a student overstaying his visa, the issue is more complicated. That’s probably why the next subsection sets out civil penalties — rather than criminal penalties — for that circumstance. But the vast majority of illegals are not students overstaying their visas; they are people who snuck across the border.)
Therefore, people who enter this country illegally are illegals – and criminals. It is accurate to refer to them as such. The most precise term for them would be “criminal immigrants.”
Political candidates aren’t always seen by 19,000 people in big sexy arenas like Madison Square Garden.
They also play the rubber chicken circuit at little outdoor makeshift venues of a few hundred or a thousand people in rural America. These are places you would never visit unless you were looking for votes. Think “County Fair.”
So it was for Donald Trump one ordinary day last summer. He was on an outdoor plywood stage in rural Pennsylvania looking for votes from plain folk.
He was just a few minutes into his stump speech, or his stump speech du jour. Trump is not a polished speaker but he speaks from his heart and with his hands. He often strays from the strictures of his teleprompter, sometimes to the point where you wish he wouldn’t.
What happened next was initially trivialized by Associated Press, apparently to avoid martyring or heroizing the man. They reported:
“Loud noises rang through the crowd.”
One of those loud noises instantly kills a man standing behind Trump. Another loud noise wounds another person. And another wounds another. Altogether, eight loud noises come from the shooter and two from the Secret Service to neutralize him.
One loud noise goes through Trump’s ear, missing his cranium by half an inch. His hand instinctively goes to his shredded ear even before he is conscious of the pain there. He pulls his hand away to look at it, and sees the blood. It was only then that he knew he’d been shot.
Involuntarily, Trump does what anybody – and any body – would do. He falls to the floor behind the podium. The Secret Service keep him there for about two minutes as people around him are screaming and scrambling.
Imagine what goes through Trump’s mind in those chaotic two minutes. He’s not altogether sure what just happened. He doesn’t know if the ear wound is just the ear or the head too. He’s still not sure if he’s been shot anywhere else.
Agents try to assess his condition visually and verbally. They decide to get him to the relative safety of a nearby vehicle.
At the time, there was no way of knowing whether the shooter who’d been neutralized was a loner or one of many. Raising the President from the floor and out from behind the podium could make him a sitting duck. But leaving him there risked another barrage of bullets – and perhaps explosives as well.
Trump was smart enough to know all that.
Most men would have chosen to cower under the podium. It was a lousy shield against explosives and AR-15 bullets but at least it offered a bit of concealment.
But Donald Trump is not like most men.
The Secret Service agents wanted to carry him off in a stretcher, but he refused. Instead, with their help he got to his feet and came out from the podium, ear torn and face bloodied.
Then he did something unforgettable. Let him describe it:
I wanted to do something to let ’em know I was ok. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, Fight! Fight! Fight!
Since that day, Trump has said he believes God saved him, that he might save America.
Strong words. Presumptuous even. Some people would say arrogant. But those people have never had rifle bullets from a would-be assassin tear through their ear and kill a man right behind them.
Trump seems different now. Calmer. More thoughtful. Serene. Settled. Dedicated. Workmanlike. Mission-driven.
I don’t pretend to know if God saved Trump so that he could save America. Most of my communications with the Guy Upstairs are from me to Him, not the other way around.
But I know Trump himself believes that. Something happened to him in the eternity of those two bloody minutes as he wondered if they were his last.
From publications like The Wall Street Journal, you might conclude that tariffs as an economics practice is in the same category as piracy, slavery and child labor, but worse.
Economists’ main complaint with tariffs is not that they’re destructive and immoral. Economists don’t make moral judgments, after all. There’s a reason they call their profession “the dismal science.”
No, economists’ main complaint about tariffs is that they’re stupid. “Tariffs are stupid” is Economics 101. It’s a given. It’s econo-dogma. The Pope may or may not be Catholic, but popular business publications preach from their printed and pixeled pulpits that tariffs are indisputably, irrevocably, universally, invariably stupid.
In the spirit of Protestantism and economics contrarianism, let me offer a defense of this much-maligned practice. At the outset, I’ll stipulate to some things.
First, it’s true that tariffs are much like a sales tax. Adding a tariff to imported goods tends to raise the price of those goods, just as we saw a few years ago that adding a sales tax on Amazon goods adds to the check-out price of those goods.
If the U.S. government slaps a 10% tariff on, for example, imported steel, it’s logical to expect the price of imported steel to the U.S. consumer to rise about 10%.
But that’s not always the case, because, while tariffs are much like sales taxes, they aren’t exactly the same. A tariff applies not to all goods, but to specific goods – ones that are imported from overseas and specifically designated for the tariff.
Those tariffed goods compete with other goods such as domestic goods that are un-tariffed and other imported goods that are un-tariffed. A steel importer who simply passes his tariff along to the consumer will thereby put his goods at a competitive disadvantage, pricewise.
For that reason, the importers might absorb some of a tariff in their profit margins. Assume the importer has a profit margin of 30%. A 10% tariff could cut that to 20%. The importer might raise prices by the entire 10% in order to maintain his 30% profit margins, and thereby disadvantage his product pricewise, or he might raise prices only 7% and absorb the other 3% in his margins so that he winds up with margins of only 27%.
To the extent the foreign manufacturer absorbs the tariff in his profit structure, it’s he, not the consumer, who is paying the tax.
He would do this not because he’s a good guy, but because he wants to maintain market share vis a vis his un-tariffed competitors. The invisible hand works, even in an artificial market.
To the extent the tariff does get passed onto the America consumer, it’s worth considering what that consumer is currently paying. Apart from certain French wine and Italian sports cars, I’m always amazed how inexpensive foreign-made “stuff” is.
Consumer electronics are a good example. You can get a new, perfectly serviceable smart phone that puts the world at your fingertips – something you couldn’t buy for a billion dollars a generation ago – for $300. That’s about what a house-call by a plumber to fix a toilet cost you last week.
Americans are wealthy enough to pay a few dollars more for foreign-made “stuff.” Especially if that stuff is made under difficult conditions by exploited and sometimes underaged workers who deserve better pay and conditions.
Second, let’s stipulate that trade wars can be bad. If we impose a tariff on wine that Europeans export to us, we should expect the Europeans to impose a retaliatory tariff on something we export to them, such as American whiskey and Harley Davidson motorcycles.
That was exactly what happened in President Trump’s first term. And that was only one salvo in the trade war. It began with a squabble over long-standing European government subsidies to European aerospace companies which put American companies such as Boeing at an unfair disadvantage. Where that trade war will end depends on the mood of the governments and the power of lobbyists – two forces that are often both unpredictable and unconstructive.
The most famous trade war was launched by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Passed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, the 40% American tariffs imposed by Smoot-Hawley and retaliatory tariffs imposed by our trading partners crippled world trade and slashed business profits, leading to bank failures worldwide, the Great Depression and, arguably, World War II.
Let’s not go there again.
That said, there are several legitimate uses of tariffs that even economists would approve of. One is to protect industries that are strategically important. If steel is a strategic industry (and it is) then protecting that industry from being decimated by cheap foreign imports is a legitimate use of tariffs. It’s entirely possible that America will someday need Pittsburg steel again, and I don’t mean the football team.
(This is not to say I approve of President Biden blocking the sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon. That’s a complicated question. After all, Nippon proposed not to end American steel production but to maintain it in America while improving efficiencies – which could lower prices and strengthen the industry here, not weaken it.)
Another legitimate use of tariffs is to protect an industry that is culturally important. In rural France, for example, winemaking is culturally important. The argument can be made that the French winemaking culture ought not be at the mercy of mass-produced wine from, say, Romania.
Or maybe it should be, to produce better wine and lower prices for all. But that’s a judgment for a culture to make. Tariff protections for isolated industries such as winemaking will not to cripple the world economy.
Another legitimate use for tariffs, most economists would agree, is to threaten them without imposing them. Threatening to impose a 25% tariff on French wine if the French don’t quit unfairly subsidizing their aerospace companies that compete unfairly with Boeing, is fine by me.
Of course, such threats are credible, and effective, only if they get carried out once in a while. The next thing you know, we’re punishing American whiskey makers for the French unfairly subsidizing their aerospace companies.
Those are my stipulations on the subject. Now back to tariffs as a sales tax.
In the world of economics, activities are either productive or consumptive. Productive things are good, because they produce resources. They grow the pie. The bigger the pie, the more for everyone at the table.
In fact, productive things are actually double-good because what they produce, in turn, is often productive in its own right. It’s a virtuous circle.
In contrast, consumptive things are viewed as bad in the world of economics. They don’t grow the pie; they eat the pie. They use up resources. It’s fine to eat a little of the pie, but recognize that then there’s a smaller pie. Eat too much of it, and there won’t be any for a hungry day.
Let’s contrast sales taxes in the form of tariffs with other taxes. Income taxes are thought to be bad because they punish people for a productive activity – working. That’s how you obtain income, after all. Punishing people for working is bad economics policy (even if – especially if – it helps certain class warfare politicians get elected).
Investment taxes like capital gains taxes are even worse. They punish people for making investments. If people don’t make investments, then new businesses are denied the capital they need to grow and innovate.
Apple Computer started in a garage. Without capital investments, it would still be there.
And so, economists generally favor sales taxes which discourage consumption, over both income taxes and investment taxes which discourage production and investment.
Crafting our sales taxes as tariffs might be an especially good approach because we can imbue them with some nuanced policy considerations. Much as liquor and gasoline get taxed extra-high because we want to discourage their consumption, we could extra-tariff such things as, well, Chinese steel if our desire is to avoid over-relying on it.
Ah but, you say, then the Chinese will retaliate by slapping tariffs (notice how tariffs always get “slapped”) on our imports to them, such as . . .
. . . um, I can’t think of any.
OK, but, you say, SMOOT-HAWLEY.
Fine, I agree that we should not slap, or even place, 40% tariffs on all our imports. We don’t want a trade war, global economic disruption, bank failures, a Great Depression, and World War III.
I submit that it’s not one or the other. I submit that we have a lesson to learn from Smoot-Hawley, sure enough, but perhaps we’ve learned it too well.
Commuting the duly imposed death sentences of convicted murderers and rapists
Setting oneself on fire
Surrendering Afghanistan to barbarians from the 11th century
Jumping Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle
Closing all the schools to prevent transmission of a disease that barely affects children.
Answer: What these have in common is that all are stunts. They are designed to attract attention, and they succeed in doing so. But that’s all they do.
If you tell me you’ve taught a poodle to mix a martini and serve it to a parakeet, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Wow, that’s something!”
And it is indeed something, in the sense that it’s unusual. It gets attention. But it’s not consequential, other than to make a spectacle of two otherwise dignified animals.
If you tell me you plan to tie a bungee cord to your ankle and jump off a high bridge such that the bungee cord stretches almost to the breaking point as it catches you a few feet above the ground, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Huh, that’s something you don’t see every day.”
But, as in stupid pet tricks, it’s inconsequential, other than to demonstrate a certain daredevilry. There are good reasons not to issue dares to the devil for the mere purpose of getting clicks on YouTube.
Third, there’s his relationship with his boss. Barack Obama was widely worshipped by liberals. Although Joe stood next in line for the presidency upon the completion of Barack’s papacy in 2016, Barack spurned him in favor of another candidate, was ambivalent about him running in 2020, and finally pushed him to the curb altogether in 2024 – for being too old and stupid.
Ouch. “Old” doesn’t hurt so much even though this is a guy who went to the trouble of hair plugs and tooth caps, but “stupid” hits close to home.
Joe has gone through life feeling that he had a lot to prove about himself. He was right about that. What he was wrong about was the way he went about that proof.
He decided to prove he was a greater leader than his intellectual superior, Barack. But why stop there? He then set his sights on proving he was the greatest Democrat since FDR, or since, I dunno, maybe Abraham Lincoln. (Half of Democrats think Lincoln was a Democrat. No joke!)
The problem is, Joe has never really thought enough about philosophy, government, religion, or the human condition (I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Joe hasn’t thought about) to have a coherent platform from which to govern.
He had no bold policies; he had only boldness.
Much like Evel Knievel. History has largely forgotten that Evel’s rocket-powered motorcycle jump of the Snake River Canyon landed not on the other side of the canyon, but at the canyon bottom. But they do remember the stunt and the name.
Early in Joe’s term, he decided to pull out of Afghanistan. Never mind that the pullout left a strategic crossroads utterly unguarded. Never mind that we squandered a 20-year investment of time and thousands of American lives. Never mind that we left behind billions in high-tech weaponry for the barbarians. Never mind that we could have instead pulled out in an organized manner, as Joe’s generals urged.
What was important to Joe was that he make a bold statement. And he did. Just like Evel Knievel.
It was a bold “Hold my beer, and watch this!” stunt.
The world did watch Joe’s bold stunt. They were impressed with his boldness. With his common sense, not so much.
But Joe didn’t care if they thought badly of his common sense. In the world of stuntmen and carnival barkers, all publicity is good publicity.
It’s like setting oneself on fire. It might not be productive, but it’ll get you plenty of clicks on YouTube. Probably more clicks than Barack gets, at least on that particular day.
That was the pattern of Joe Biden’s presidency. He didn’t so much try to destroy America. He’s too stupid to accomplish that, and too self-centered to try.
Joe’s defiance of the Supreme Court, his commuting of the death sentences of rightly convicted murderers, his transference of college loan debts onto the backs of blue-collar Americans, his takedown of the southern border, his inflation-inducing handouts – they were all designed not so much with policy in mind. Joe’s mind is too small for policy to live there.
No, Joe’s stunts were designed simply to draw attention to Joe. He succeeded. Joe’s stunts did draw attention to Joe.
But not in the way Joe expected. We’re now seeing his anger in learning that attention does not equal achievement, that infamy does not equal fame, that notoriety does not equal greatness.
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.
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.
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:
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.
As Kamala continues her fall free-fall, the Democrats fear the worst. They fear that Kamala, like her predecessor and boss, has been found out. And the American people don’t like what they found out.
The people have found out that Kamala has always advocated an open border, is apparently ambivalent (at best) about Israel defending itself, wants taxpayer-funded “gender correction” surgery for male convicts so that women in female prisons can “enjoy” their company, and wants to double the capital gains tax.
In a nutshell, the Democrats fear that Kamala has been found out to be a hard-left socialist. Indeed, she has a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders.
Hmm, now we know who makes the demands in the Obama household. But I won’t go there.
Of more interest than the Obamas’ personal life is how mail-in voting has dramatically increased the coercive power of demanding people. That’s because mail-in ballots are not necessarily confidential.
In traditional voting, the voting booth is generally a one-person affair. Nobody else – nobody – knows how you voted, unless you tell them (and you could always fib, to preserve the peace). But with mail-in voting, the “demander” of a household can fill out the ballot, demand that the demandee sign it (or simply forge the demandee’s signature), and mail it in.
I won’t accuse Michelle of advocating that sort of fraud. But even short of telling Democrats to engage in fraud, she is certainly telling Democrats to “demand” that people sharing the same household, over whom a demanding Democrat has influence or even raw power, such as a battered spouse or an elderly parent, vote for the Democratic candidate.
If such actions involved a different political party, they could be characterized as a threat to democracy.
Speaking of demands, next up in the shrieks from the left is a left-wing British newspaper called The Guardian which announced in an editorial that “Americans who believe in democracy have no choice but to vote for Harris.” When your foreign guardians say you have “no choice” then I suppose you’d better do what they say.
Another recent headline from this same foreign newspaper informs us that “There’s Nothing Wrong With Foreign Volunteers Working for Harris.” (This one seems to have been buried by The Guardian, but the link can still be found at Real Clear Politics.)
It’s true that there’s nothing illegal about foreign “volunteers” working for the Kamala campaign, and there’s nothing illegal about a leftist foreign newspaper defending that practice. But whether it’s right or wrong is a matter of ethics and American politics. A foreign left-wing newspaper has no standing or moral authority on the subject.
Ah yes, the allegation that Trump is a fascist, a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Stalin, a Pol Pot, a Mao, and a poo-poo breath. Let’s take those in order.
First, “fascism.” That word has lost its meaning, if it ever had one. Today, it’s simply the left engaging in name-calling against the right. One component of “fascism” that people generally agree on, however, is that it entails government control over the economy and censoring speech that is critical of the regime.
Compare the extent to which Joe Biden and Donald Trump, respectively, sought government control over the economy and over people’s free speech in their presidential administrations, and you will realize the extent to which Democrat allegations of Trump’s supposed “fascism” are pure projection.
On to Hitler. Lost or buried by history is that “Nazi” stood for National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It’s doubly ironic that socialist Democrats who want to eradicate the Jewish state of Israel (or let others do the dirty work of eradication) accuse Trump – a stout defender of Israel and a man with close Jewish relatives – of being something like the monster who sought to exterminate the Jews under the flag of . . . socialism.
Mussolini? A two-bit Hitler tag-along who died at the end of a rope wielded by his own people. To the extent he had any political principles, they were as a labor union leader – another leftist.
Stalin? Pol Pot? Mao? Weren’t they leftists?
We can’t leave Hillary’s rant without noting her warning that Trump is a “clear and present danger.” Hillary might not recall that this person she warns is a “clear and present danger” has already been the target of at least two assassination attempts by people who viewed him as . . . a clear and present danger. Or maybe she does recall that.
Poo-poo breath? That one, I made up. I’m tempted to admit that Trump is a poo-poo breath, but I’ve actually changed my opinion of him over the years. He seems happy. Moreover, his breath may or may not be good but he’s a breath of fresh air in the fetid fever swamps of Washington DC.
Trump these days seems truly interested in people. Working the frier for hours at McDonalds seemed to make him happy, fun and – dare I say it? – full of Joy.
Maybe the experience of surviving two assassination attempts gives a person that.
I can’t quite imagine Hitler or Pol Pot working the frier at McDonalds and joking around with the customers and staff. For that matter, I can’t imagine that from Kamala – whose similar portrayals are all staged with actors and whose only connection to McDonalds is that she apparently lied about working there.
Then we have Kamala’s putative, putrid boss mumbling “lock him up.” Perhaps on Joe’s mind is the probable prison term to which his son will be sentenced for criminal felonies. The only offense for which he wants to lock up Trump is apparently the “offense” of ousting the Democrats.
Trump has beaten every single one of the Democrat’s lawfare schemes. But the “offense” of ousting the Democrats is one to which he will gladly plead guilty.
The national nightmare of wokeism, DEI, censorship, incompetence, disguised and undisguised socialism, open borders, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris is nearly over. As Ronald Reagan proclaimed, it’s almost morning in America.
Note to readers: I published this right after Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, won the Nobel Prize for Literature eight years ago. You’ll see that it has some relevance to current events. (This year’s winner, just announced, is someone named Han Kang. I’m sure she’s very good, but I’ve never heard of her. But I don’t read many books – too many words!)
The establishment got spanked. Here’s the story:
Some old geezers in Scandinavia are very proud of some prizes they give. They call them “Nobel Prizes.”
The prize comes in several flavors. The “Peace Prize,” for example, is awarded by Norwegian politicians. They give it to other politicians they like.
One year they gave it to a guy who said he invented the internet, then lost an election for United States president, then refused to accept the election results, then threw the country into chaos for a month, then lost in the courts, and then got rich inventing global warming.
Another year they gave it to an American president who succeeded in getting elected and nothing else (I suppose they had to give him one for getting elected after giving one to the earlier guy for failing to get elected) and who later succeeded in escalating but not winning a war in Afghanistan, which is now the longest-running war in American history.
One year they gave their Peace Prize to a Palestinian terrorist.
There’s also a Nobel Prize for “literature” for the person they deem the planet’s best writer. This one is given by an obscure club of 18 lousy writers in Sweden. They call themselves the Swedish Academy. Everyone else calls them “Who?”
Their motto sounds like an advertisement for a suburban dinner theater: “Talent and Taste.” (I’m not making that up.)
This year, they gave their Nobel Prize for literature to Bob Dylan. Or at least they tried. Seems Bob wouldn’t return their phone calls.
Bob has a history of bucking the establishment. He was born Robert Zimmerman in a small Minnesota town. He learned some acoustic guitar and taught himself the harmonica. He changed his name, went to Greenwich Village and made a new name for himself as a folk singer. Hippies liked him.
Then he decided to plug the guitar in. The hippies went berserk, even without their drugs. Overnight, their cheers turned to boos just because Bob had tried something new.
Hippies were like that. They always wanted you to be new and different, but only if you did it their old-and-same way.
Bob survived being ostracized by the hippies for being different. On the sheer strength of his creative talent (not so much his singing voice) he became truly great.
The hippies eventually grew up, or at least older, and became liberals watching public television fundraisers showing Peter, Paul and Mary singing saccharine versions of Bob’s songs about ’60s protests that they never actually participated in.
And then Bob threw another switch. In middle age, he became a Christian.
Like the hippies earlier, the liberals went berserk. Christianity is for hicks, they believed, not for Bob and other sophisticates like themselves.
Later still, Bob defended Israel’s right to defend itself. The liberals, now rebranded as politically correct “progressives,” didn’t like that, either. Bullies never like people who believe in defense.
Nobel Prize announcements are watched almost as closely as “American Idol” and the Swedes know it. So this year they grandiloquently proclaimed that Bob had “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Huh? What are “poetic expressions”? Is that a wooly phrase for “poetry”? Anyway, I told you they were lousy writers.
That evening, Bob gave one of the hundreds of concerts that he still gives at age 75. He made no mention of his big prize. And for a month he still wouldn’t return the Swedes’ phone calls.
The Swedes got mad— for Swedes, anyway. One said Bob’s refusal to acknowledge this prize that he never asked for was “an unprecedented situation” and called him “impolite and arrogant.”
I already told you twice that they’re lousy writers. But they do have a talent and taste for unintentional irony. If they want to avoid “unprecedented situations,” then maybe they should give their little prize for creativity to someone less creative.
As for “arrogance,” it’s this self-appointed committee of hacks, not Bob, who presume to judge the world’s best writing. And then when Bob refuses to acknowledge their judgment, they presume to whine, “Just who does he think he is?”
Here’s who. He’s an independent thinker who is unwilling to allow himself to be used by establishmentarian prigs seeking to award themselves the authority to decide what is good.
Eventually, Bob returned their calls. And he says he’ll show up for the big ceremony, “if it’s at all possible.”
Bob being Bob, it sounds like he’ll have a concert to give that night instead. Even bad Swedish writers would recognize the symbolism.
In other symbolic news about the establishment, the dishonest, self-dealing insider whom the establishment hand picked to be the next president lost to a businessman who builds things.
The choices in this election are evidently Donald Trump and Not-Donald Trump. Nobody is voting for Trump’s chimeric, charlatanic opponent, but many are voting against Trump.
Those Against-Trump voters fall into three camps.
Camp 1 comprises people who genuinely disagree with Trump on the issues. I think these voters are mostly wrong, but I grudgingly respect them. At least they’re analyzing the issues, even though they’re coming to the wrong conclusion.
So, OK . . .
If they think Trump is wrong to tighten up the southern border;
If they think Trump is wrong to extend the tax cuts (which disproportionately benefited middle- and low-income Americans);
If they think Trump is wrong to keep nukes out of the hands of the Ayatollahs;
If they think Trump is wrong to encourage oil and gas production at home at reasonable prices and under stringent environmental safeguards rather than in places like Russia and Venezuela where they produce it dirtily and then sell it to us expensively;
If they think Trump’s economy of 1.4% inflation and low unemployment was bad compared to much higher inflation and unemployment under his successor;
If they think Trump is wrong to oppose racial discrimination in hiring and in college admissions; and
If they think Trump is wrong in his desire to slim down the Federal government;
. . . then I think they’re mistaken. But if they believe those things, then they’re probably right to vote against Trump. I say “probably” because it’s hard to be certain that Trump’s opponent is in their camp, since she waffles daily and hides her positions (with the aid of a complicit, biased media).
Camp 2 of Against-Trump voters are those who sincerely believe he’s a “threat to democracy.” I have a bit less respect for those voters because I think they’re being melodramatic rather than analytic.
Some of them are at least sincere and are voting the way they think serves the country. Others, however, are just parroting the “threat to democracy” line to rationalize their true reasons for being against Trump, namely that they are in Camp 1 or 3.
As for the threat Trump poses to democracy, Camp 2 points to Trump’s action and inaction on Jan. 6, 2021. Indeed, it was not his finest hour.
But the notion that we almost lost the Republic that day – to a hooligan in a buffalo-horn hat and his unarmed sidekicks who made a ruckus and swiped some souvenirs from the Capitol Building – is overblown, at best. Note that the Supreme Court ultimately decided that the gross offenders were grossly overcharged by the Democrat prosecutors, and the Court threw out the most serious charges.
This Camp 2 also points to Trump’s personality. Bellicose is perhaps a word to describe it. In a prior life, the guy had fun with a reality TV show where his punch line was “You’re fired!” In a more serious vein, Trump has bragged that he fired people right and left in his first administration.
Sometimes people do need to be fired. But good bosses don’t relish firing people. Moreover, a boss who frequently fires people should be looking a bit at his own failings in hiring and supervising such people to begin with.
But none of that makes Trump a “threat to democracy.” If you want to talk seriously about a threat to democracy, then talk about an administration that:
Refuses to physically protect to its political opponents;
Routinely characterizes its opponents as “threats” to the nation;
Calls for a “bullseye” to be put on its opponents;
Pressures media outlets to censor news and opinions they don’t like;
Hides the encroaching senility of the Democrat President, acknowledges it only when they get caught, and then replaces him behind the scenes with a woman who helped hide his senility to begin with and has never won a Democrat delegate in her life – while they still keep the senile President in the office of “Leader of the Free World” even as they acknowledge that he’s too senile to run for that office;
Seeks to put skin color ahead of merit in hiring and college admissions;
Frequently compares their opponents to Nazis:
Repeatedly overreaches in legal matters to the point that their court record on challenges is abysmal;
Refuses to follow Supreme Court rulings, and slams the Court as “illegitimate.”
In other words, talk about the Democrats.
That brings us to Camp 3. These are the voters I respect least, even though they’re the most amiable on the surface. These are the voters who mostly agree with Trump on the issues, but they simply don’t like his personality.
Trump is certainly not a slickster. He didn’t even graduate at the bottom of his law school class like the current Delaware beach bum and sometimes Oval Office occupant. In fact, he never went to law school at all. I doubt he even knows how to say “Pass the sweet-and-sour shrimp.”
But despite, or perhaps because of, all those things, I have a hunch that I might like the guy in person.
On the other hand, if I wouldn’t, so what? We’re not electing Homecoming Queen. We’re electing someone to preserve and enhance the interests of America and the world.
The left knows that. That’s why they hate Trump. It’s because he protects the interests of the country and culture they hate: America and Western Civilization. (If they lived in Africa or Southeast Asia, they’d hate them too, but that’s another column.)
If you’ve read this far, you’re not a leftist. But maybe it makes you feel good to join the left in voting against a person you find tacky and bellicose – someone you deem beneath you in social graces, polish, and good hair – even though he protects American and Western interests. Well, fine.
But actually, not fine at all. The price for your personal feel-goodery is to put our people, our nation, our civilization, and our world, at risk. This election is about something bigger than your feelings.
As for those who will vote neither for nor against Trump, my question is this: Do you really think Trump and his opponent are exactly equally bad at protecting our country and culture? Are you seriously contending that you graded them out on the issues and each of them came to a grade of, say, 73.41?
C’mon, man. You know which came out higher. Your refusal to vote for him is an exercise in virtue-signaling to yourself and others.
But this isn’t about you and your virtue and your signals. Get over yourself, and do the smart thing. The world is at stake.
the Aspen beat 