Aspen Skiing Company joins “The Resistance”

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.