00:00:46.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:53.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:15.000And I've been saying this for quite some time.
00:01:17.000I've been visiting Aspen for the last decade, and I've said for a while that Aspen is a perfect example of the oligarchic hellscape that the left wants to bring to America.
00:01:30.000A book makes the argument better than I can.
00:02:14.000So, Glenn, I've been visiting Aspen for quite some time.
00:02:17.000For people that have not been to Aspen, it is as close to heaven on earth in the summer as you can get to.
00:02:23.000And that's one of the reasons why it has been so attractive to not just the billionaires, but the billionaires of the billionaires, the plutocrats of the plutocrats.
00:02:32.000Tell us about how Aspen used to be and what these people have done to it.
00:02:38.000Well, Aspen has a long and very interesting history.
00:02:41.000You know, it started as a silver mine town in the 1880s, 1870s, and it had its boom for a while.
00:02:48.000At one point, it was supplying one-sixth of the country's silver supply and one-sixteenth of the world's silver supply.
00:02:57.000They had electric lights, they had a trolley down Main Street.
00:03:00.000It was really quite an advanced place for the time.
00:03:02.000Of course, the silver bus came and they became virtually a ghost town.
00:03:07.000And they went through the quiet years up to the 30s and the early 40s.
00:03:12.000And then something quite amazing happened.
00:03:14.000A prominent, wealthy industrialist out of Chicago called Walter Pepke and his wife Elizabeth got enamored by the place, moved there, and drew with them all these Chicago connections.
00:03:29.000And they got acquainted with veterans of the Tenth Mountain Division, the World War II skiing, outdoorsy mountaineering division, who were familiar with Aspen because they had trained nearby.
00:03:43.000So they saw Aspen, they saw the snow, they saw the beauty.
00:03:49.000And so this industrialist with his money and the Tenth Mountain people with their expertise and their attitude and their ambition started Aspen, re-founded Aspen as a ski resort.
00:04:03.000And it quickly became sort of an intellectual retreat.
00:04:06.000These people were really very intellectual, friends with Morterer Adler, and they started the Aspen Institute in 1949.
00:04:15.000It took off and it was wildly successful a while.
00:04:22.000They had all kinds of terrific stuff going on there.
00:04:25.000They started the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Music Festival, which is still in existence.
00:04:30.000The Ideas Festival came a little bit later.
00:04:32.000The place really became kind of like an Athens of the West or a Chautagua in the Rockies.
00:04:38.000It was tremendously successful and a wonderful place.
00:04:42.000It all kind of went to hell in the 60s when the Hollywood types and the drug types and the Hunter S. Thompson types moved to town and dragged it down.
00:04:53.000But for a while, it was really a fantastic place.
00:04:56.000It's still a fantastic place physically, aesthetically, but the people are all kind of screwed up now.
00:05:03.000So talk about the wokeism, especially the last decade, and also talk about the flagrant income inequality where ownership of property in Aspen is not possible for the working class.
00:05:15.000It's all renters or it's all heavily subsidized.
00:05:19.000And but for the rulers, the oligarchs, they have $100 million mansions, no exaggeration.
00:05:24.000No place is as income or wealth, great wealth disparity as Aspen.
00:05:30.000And that's the incubator of a lot of this woke nonsense that we see permeating the rest of the country.
00:05:38.000Yeah, you know, it's not unique to Aspen.
00:06:31.000And you know what happens when people get on welfare, if they're not already tilted to the left, they're going to get tilted to the left in order to justify their welfare existence.
00:06:40.000So that class is all extreme left, and it's 45% of the voters, at least.
00:06:46.000And then at the other extreme are the billionaire billionaires.
00:06:50.000And they tend to be leftist too for different reasons, for more ideological reasons.
00:06:55.000It's not so much for their selfishness, but for their sociological bent.
00:07:00.000So there they are on the other extreme in terms of wealth, but at the same leftist attitude.
00:07:08.000What's interesting to see is how these two outfits, these two groups war with one another.
00:07:15.000The service people, the lower income people who are on subsidized housing.
00:07:20.000Oh, I have to mention just a parenthetical.
00:07:23.000You would think that subsidized housing is reserved for people who are making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year or whatever.
00:07:34.000You can get in taxpayer subsidized housing where you get slopeside, multi-million dollar places for dimes on the dollar and still make as much as $300,000 a year and have a net worth of $1 million a year.
00:07:48.000So, you know, these aren't people who really need the money.
00:07:51.000These are people who just have their finger in the middle.
00:07:53.000But is that from Pitkin County or what is that?
00:08:31.000And of course, they borrow money too, because no matter how many millions you have, if you're on the left, you want to get more if you can, and you can if you borrow it.
00:08:40.000So you have these two groups at war with one another.
00:08:43.000The service people who are not starving, they're certainly not poor.
00:08:49.000They're better off than far better off than the average American in terms of wealth, are mad at the billionaires because they envy the billionaires and they want more of the billionaires' money.
00:09:02.000So I saw just recently, Aspen decided to double its hotel tax.
00:09:09.000If you say at Aspen, like the week of Christmas, you're looking at a couple thousand dollars a night.
00:09:23.000There's this hatred of the visitors, but at the same time, they need and want the money from the visitors.
00:09:28.000There's a column at my old paper who just wrote a column a couple months ago complaining about the visitors and wishing the visitors would stop coming.
00:09:38.000Well, you know, the visitors are the source of all of Aspen's wealth right now.
00:09:43.000So I think what he was suggesting is maybe they ought to just mail their money in.
00:09:47.000Yeah, and these are the same people that want to open borders in our country, but don't come here.
00:09:52.000You know, let's keep ask the Aspen pristine, but we want 5,000 people a day coming across the border.
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00:10:57.000$140 gives five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies.
00:11:01.000$280 can save 10 babies, and just $28 a month can save a baby a month for less than a dollar a day.
00:11:07.000And $15,000 gift will provide an ultrasound machine that will save lives for years to come.
00:11:46.000High attitude, not high altitude, high attitude, how woke liberals ruined Aspen, Glenn K. Beaton.
00:11:53.000So, Glenn, I think Aspen has more, let's just say, miserable liberals visit than any other city in America between the months of June and August.
00:12:03.000Aspen Institute Ideas Festival, Aspen Food and Wine.
00:12:06.000I mean, it's so incredibly beautiful there.
00:12:08.000And I think the beauty is actually the magnet of why a lot of these people come there.
00:12:13.000But tell us, what do you think is the lesson for the rest of the country from Aspen?
00:12:17.000What can we learn of what they've done to Aspen that they are either applying or will apply to the rest of the country?
00:12:24.000Well, there's a couple of things that come to mind.
00:12:26.000One is this obsession with race, I think, is very unfortunate for the country.
00:12:31.000And you see that to some extent in Aspen.
00:12:33.000It's not like there's racial strife in Aspen, but as far as I know, there's not a black person living in Aspen right now.
00:12:40.000The only one I know of in the valley is a friend of mine from Down Valley.
00:12:44.000But to give you an idea of the wokeness and the virtue signaling that goes on, the president of Aspen Skiing Company, Aspen Skiing Company is, you know, it's not a huge company, but they employ a thousand people.
00:12:57.000They're a big deal in the valley anyway.
00:12:59.000He wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal a few years ago where he decried President Trump's clamping down on illegal immigration.
00:13:10.000And the rationale he gave for why this was such a bad thing was that it was costing him visitors in the form of rich Mexican skiers.
00:13:20.000And I thought, well, come on now, how many rich Mexican skiers are out there?
00:13:25.000And certainly they're not being barred from coming across the border.
00:13:28.000But his point was, oh, but they sympathize with these poor, illegal Mexican immigrants.
00:13:34.000But I don't think to the extent there are any rich Mexican skiers that they sympathize with the poor illegal immigrants.
00:13:42.000I thought about it for a while, and it dawned on me that what's really going on here is the clampdown is interfering with the pool of low-priced labor that they rely on in the valley.
00:13:54.000So in the guise of complaining about the loss of rich Mexican skiers, which interfered with his profits, and calling the president a racist or implying that the president is a racist as a result, what he was really doing was complaining about the interference with his source of cheap Mexican labor.
00:14:16.000Another thing from the same guy, he wrote another piece.
00:14:21.000Well, he wrote a memo to his employees and sent it to all thousand employees.
00:14:26.000He was dismayed that they don't have enough black skiers in Aspen.
00:14:30.000Of course, there's not very many black skiers anywhere.
00:14:34.000You know, it's not racist to say, but it's not.
00:15:09.000Some of the things from the memo were unbelievable.
00:15:11.000He said, you don't want to do anything that might set them off and make them think they're being discriminated against.
00:15:18.000For example, if the restaurant doesn't open until 5 o'clock and they show up at 4 o'clock, you can't tell them, sorry, the restaurant's closed and we don't open till 5 because they might think that you're being racially discriminatory.
00:16:30.000But I will say, Tucker Carlson, who's been in the news lately, suggested on a program last fall, I think, that they ought to, they, being Governor Abbott in Texas and Governor DeSantis in Florida, ought to start shipping the illegal Mexican immigrants to Aspen and see how they like them there.
00:16:48.000As soon as they start clogging up the ski lift in Aspen, you will have a revolt of the wine moms that you couldn't even imagine.
00:16:57.000Very important book: High Attitude, Glenn K. Beaton, How a Beautiful Place Aspen has been ruined by the Wokies.
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00:17:33.000In fact, they helped solve a very tough issue for me, something very complex, very rare, very unique.
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00:18:59.000So, as you know, Charlie, of somebody who moved here from South America as a kid, you know, basically lived the American dream, came to Cleveland 18 years ago, built a small little dealership, and turned into a really great company.
00:19:13.000And I would never have imagined that would be in political office.
00:19:21.000And the reason it's broken is because we have politicians from both parties that go down there for their own benefit, sell our country out, don't keep any of their promises.
00:19:29.000And if we don't send outsiders, business people, people who've done something in their lives, will never fix DC.
00:19:35.000So, Bernie, you've built a beautiful business.
00:19:37.000It's very impressive, and you're a rock star conservative.
00:19:39.000Tell us about the business you've built.
00:19:49.000Our first month in business, we sold 80 cars, turned into one of the largest dealers in the central United States.
00:19:55.000I built 14 more dealerships for a total of 15.
00:19:59.000We did almost a billion dollars in sales, had thousands of people employed, and sold that business four years ago to start a technology company using blockchain technology to make car titles digital.
00:20:10.000That company has done very, very well.
00:20:12.000I've just sold my shares in that company to focus on this, which is really my way of serving our country because, you know, again, if we don't step in, if we don't do something, we're going to lose our country.
00:20:23.000And I'm not prepared to allow that to happen without at least giving it all I've got.
00:20:27.000So Ohio has changed a lot politically, actually, favorably.
00:20:31.000A lot of other states have gone the wrong direction.
00:20:42.000I mean, this is a guy who's been in elected office his entire life, literally has done nothing else other than collect a taxpayer-funded salary.
00:20:51.000No matter whether he succeeded or failed, and obviously he's failed.
00:20:54.000Ohio's lost tons of manufacturing jobs.
00:20:56.000We lost the Lordstown plant to Mexico and China.
00:21:19.000And when we do, we're going to turn the seat from blue to red and recapture the Senate majority, which is the only way we get our country back on track.
00:21:26.000And so let's talk about some of the big issues that are happening right now.
00:21:30.000For example, what's happening on the border: 5,000 people a day invading our country.
00:21:38.000And yet, it must be an insult to you to see just these lawbreakers, these vigilantes, 5,000 a day coming into the border across the border.
00:22:44.000President Trump put us on a path to prosperity.
00:22:48.000But today, China is buying our land, drugs pour through our borders, while our tax dollars flow to foreign countries and our jobs stream overseas.
00:22:58.000The country we love is being ruined by insider politicians.
00:24:54.000So, Bernie, your life story is amazing.
00:24:56.000I mean, so you've come here, you built something from nothing.
00:24:58.000And so, Bernie, it must drive you nuts when you hear some of these activists at, you know, Ohio State University or any of these schools say that we're racist, we're an awful country, CRT.
00:25:08.000I mean, you came here, you had to build something from absolute nothing.
00:25:12.000Talk about this cancer, this virus of anti-American ism that is spreading throughout our country.
00:25:19.000It's the most dangerous thing we're facing, Charlie, because the reality is everybody in America has the incredible privilege of being in this country.
00:25:27.000This is the true privilege is being American.
00:25:30.000And this is the greatest country on earth.
00:25:32.000Even with our problems today, we're better than the next five countries combined.
00:25:36.000And we've always been a great country.
00:25:38.000We've been a beacon of hope for the whole world.
00:25:40.000And what the left, the radical left and the media, especially in universities, is teaching our kids that there's something fundamentally wrong with the country when the reality, there's fundamentally something wrong with them.
00:26:15.000Well, and Sherrod Brown, who allegedly represents the working class voter, is doing the opposite.
00:26:21.000Perfectly fine with open borders, perfectly fine with all this nonsense.
00:26:25.000And he needs to be held accountable to it.
00:26:27.000And so JD Vance is doing a fabulous job in the U.S. Senate.
00:26:31.000And I think you would be a great one-two combo.
00:26:34.000Talk about how you are going to represent Ohio values as Ohio has really become one of the more conservative states, not just in the Midwest, but in the country.
00:26:45.000JD and I are good friends, and we both agree on the foundational principle that we have to get our own house in order.
00:26:52.000We have to make certain that we're putting America first.
00:26:54.000East Palestine being a great example, right?
00:26:57.000Our president is out there giving billions of dollars to foreign countries on President's Day, while President Trump is in East Palestine caring for the people, showing empathy, making certain that they knew they weren't left behind.
00:27:10.000You know, when JD went there and showed people what was really going on, that's what got the attention to finally happen on East Palestine.
00:32:36.000One of the things that's now prevalent on the American right is sort of anti-government extremism, this idea that the deep state and the government is colluding against the American people.
00:32:44.000This is part of a sort of an extremist ideology that says that the government is out to get the little guy, out to get the right-wingers, the conservatives, and will do anything, including setting them up at the Capitol to do so.
00:32:56.000Yeah, it's a right-wing conspiracy to believe that there were federal agents there, even though Christopher Wray and documents have said that there are federal agents.
00:33:03.000There were federal agents, and we don't know how many involved on January 6th.