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"
Here’s a thought experiment. First, picture Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and other communist despots of the 20th century. (I could add to that list the head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but I don’t want emails purporting to correct me.)
Now imagine if part of their pitch to the public had been the following:
Men pretending to be women should compete against women in women’s sports, and, after the women lose to the men, they should be forced to shower with them;
People should be judged not on their merit or even their economic class, but on their skin color, and, moreover, those with skin colors who commit murder at 7x the ordinary rate should be judged more favorably;
Gay people should get preferences in admissions and hiring;
We should abolish our national borders;
Boys having adolescence issues should be called “girls” and have their penises cut off; and
Criminal laws are illegitimate.
If Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot and the other communists had preached such nonsense, the result would have been fantastic. Because they never would have come to power. And so we would have avoided 100,000,000 deaths caused by communism.
Fast forward to today. In an incredibly lucky twist of fate, would-be socialists and communists calling themselves Democrats over the past two decades did pitch that nonsense.
Enough people paid attention and recognized it as the nonsense that it was, that the Democrats were finally voted out of power.
Yes, there was also the matter of their latest leader and his senility, corruption and incompetence. But in the absence of their culturally woke nonsense, the Democrats/socialists/communists probably would have overcome the drag of their bad leader. They probably would have won the last election, and we’d be well down the road to lethal, ruinous economics.
That’s because socialism polls surprisingly well. Although people understand that men in drag should not beat and shower with women, they understand basic economics less well.
Among young voters especially, there’s a convenient tendency to believe that the reason they aren’t as wealthy as they’d like is because rich people are stealing their money.
Many young people believe this because they’ve never heard of Marx, Lenin, Mao, or Pol Pot, or the destruction and misery they inflicted. That’s no surprise, for their “teachers” are mostly (not all, fortunately) socialists themselves.
Democrats are now at a crossroads. One road is the one they’re on – the road of socialism in combination with woke cultural issues. The other road lets go of the woke cultural issues while continuing the socialism.
It’s common wisdom, at least outside the fever swamps of academia, that the Democrats need to take the road away from woke cultural issues if they want to win elections. To win elections, they should focus on socialism, not rainbows and bathrooms.
I am praying they don’t take that advice. I’m praying they keep losing elections by staying on the road of woke cultural issues in combination with socialism. If they’ll just stay the course, the story of the 21st century might be the 100,000,000 lives that we didn’t lose to communism.
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.
Everyone has read the reports by now. On Oct. 7, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza called Hamas launched a surprise invasion of Israel. They shot, tortured, raped, beheaded and abducted every Jew they could find. Most were women, children and babies.
Over 1,200 Jews died, and countless more were injured. It was a Jewish pogrom, right out of the Middle Ages. The perpetrators filmed their gruesome bloodbath and gleefully posted it on the internet.
Hamas also took about 200 hostages back to the underground tunnels of Gaza, where they’ve been using them as human shields, trading them for Hamas terrorists captured by Israel, and torturing them to death.
Outrage is the world’s rightful response to this sick and sadistic massacre.
But not everyone feels that way. Ordinary Palestinians don’t feel that way at all. Polls show that 70-80% of the Palestinians in Gaza support the massacre.
In stock market investing, you’re supposed to be pessimistic when everyone else is optimistic, and optimistic when everyone else is pessimistic. Warren Buffett famously put it this way: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”
The reason the aforecited principle applies well in stock market investing is that the herd instinct makes people buy or sell stocks because other people are buying or selling. The result is that the stocks get over-sold or over-bought, thereby driving their price too low or too high in relation to their real indicators of value – mainly their current and future profits.
Eventually, the herd drives the stock so high or so low that even dedicated herders cannot fail to miss the fact that the stock is mispriced in relation to objective value indicators. At that point, they finally change direction – they start buying while the herd is still selling, or vice versa – and the price trend reverses. The herd reverses direction, and stampedes off the other way. You can make money by being contrary to the herd. Be a bull when they’re a bear, and vice versa.
So, does the same principle apply in evaluating the state of a culture? Has the assessment of American culture become so bearish that it is surely too much so?
The world of woke is rife with incorrect assumptions about racial minorities. First is the assumption that racial minorities are criminals.
That assumption is wrong. It’s true that a disproportionate amount of crime – especially the violent kind – is committed by racial minorities. That’s true even after normalizing the numbers for the increased poverty level of minorities. I suspect this is due to a familial breakdown caused by many complicated factors.
But it’s certainly not true that minorities are all, or even generally, criminals. To the contrary, the great majority of minorities are law-abiding citizens.
Before leaving that first erroneous assumption to move on to the second one, consider the racism of it: The left operates under the assumption that racial minorities are criminals.
Two menstruating persons walk into a bar and sit in a booth. The cocktail waitperson inquires, “What are you having today?” One of them moans, “What I’m having at the moment are killer cramps! I don’t suppose you serve arsenic, but what else can you offer me?”
“Oh, dear,” replies the waitperson. “Being a transgender gal, I’m afraid I’m not the right person to ask. I mean, I always wanted cramps, so I could bond more completely with the other girls, but my surgeon . . . . Forgive me. Tell you what, though, my manager is a menopausal birthing person, who probably knows a thing two. I’ll ask her to come out and talk to you . . . .”
OK, by now you realize that the only joke here is on you, if you have an employer or a teacher or a civil servant who thinks and speaks like this.
No, that mostly happened with the election of somnolent, senile, drowsy, sleepy, lazy, sluggish, lethargic SlowJoe Biden (in Joe’s case, one such adjective is just not enough) and an ex-bartender called “AOC” which may stand for Auditory Out of Control.
In the old days, by contrast, the Democrats used to say some wise things. For example:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King Jr.
Today’s Democrats say that statement is racist. They say it’s not only permissible to judge people by the color of their skin, but mandated.
Those having white skin must be judged evil-doers, and those having black skin must be judged their victims. Skin color is real, while “character” is a white construct. That’s the thrust of the Critical Race Theory that is indoctrinating our children.
The Dems promote this divisive victimology because they think it keeps blacks on the Dem plantation. It works only so long as blacks stay there.
“Woke” was coined by the left some years ago to describe a person who had become sensitive to the left’s pet issues, especially racial and “social justice” ones. It implied that a person disagreeing with the left about those issues was not just wrong, but unconscious. Becoming woke was unintentionally analogous to the Christian concept of being born again — which is appropriate since leftism is the left’s religion.
This catchy term was initially successful. But the left never succeeds at success. That’s because what’s important to them is not being successful in resolving grievances, but parading those grievances as evidence of their victimhood.
Victim status is more important to the left than winning – and easier too. If the left were a sports team, they’d be lazy and winless but they would always say, gleefully, that it’s because the referees robbed them.
Back in your correspondent’s Version 2.3 or thereabouts, he was an engineer for Boeing. This was back in 1978-79.
My starting salary was $15,400. When I left Boeing to start my personal Version 3.0, my salary was still less than $17,000. My parents thought I was crazy to give that up and take on debt to go to law school.
Boeing was booming. Airlines were being de-regulated, airline travel was becoming less expensive while still being slightly sexy, and everyone wanted to go to Europe for the first time.
Several things about Boeing stick out in my mind. First, they didn’t compromise on quality. The airline customers could specify whatever bells and whistles they were willing to pay for — I worked on a few custom planes for Saudi princes that included frivolities like solid gold ashtrays — but the airworthiness of the plane was non-negotiable.
the Aspen beat 