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The O. Zone: Billionaire publishers scared to endorse, but not RealVail.com
I recently put my Eagle County ballot into a local drop box and a day or two later got a BallotTrax notice from the Colorado Secretary of State’s office letting me know it had been counted.
Earlier this month I promised you RealVail.com endorsements, so let me spare you the suspense: I voted for Democrats across the board (something that should not surprise you if you’re a regular reader), including for highly effective Assistant House Democratic Leader Joe Neguse of Lafayette, whose 2nd Congressional District stretches up here to include most of Eagle County.
But before I dive into the whys, here’s a hot tip for you on the local voting front: Don’t do anything by mail at this point. Monday, Oct. 28, was the deadline for mailing in your Eagle County ballot or updating your voter registration by mail. At this point, drop your ballot in one of the many local drop boxes or go into a vote center to register or make changes to your registration. To find drop box and vote center locations, go to the Clerk & Recorder website.
Now back to those endorsements. In local races I voted for unopposed Tom Boyd (he’s literally the only choice) and incumbent Matt Scherr for Eagle County commissioner. Scherr has helped make real progress in the local housing crisis and is working hard on transit and helping to solve the scarcity of childcare, among many other things. Plus, he is a climate candidate moving us toward environmental sustainability in a place that depends on it for our livelihood.
His opponent, whom I have not interviewed, wants to put local workers in shipping containers Saudi-style. That’s his “big idea”. No thanks. Had I interviewed him, one of the first questions I would have asked was whether he believes former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and then I would have verged into other critical local topics, but that is the kind of story I don’t get paid to write and can’t sell to outside freelance publications (more on that here).
Then I would have asked about climate change, and whether it’s manmade and should be mitigated. That leads me to local Ballot Question 6A, a sales tax of 79 cents on $100, excluding groceries and prescription drugs, to fund the Eagle River Fire Protection District. A recent University of Colorado (CU) study finds fires are burning hotter and faster due to climate change, and as Sylvan Ellefson wrote in a letter to the Vail Daily, ERFPD responds to all sorts of calls and needs a funding source that also captures taxes from our many, many tourists.
I’ll turn to another LTE in the VD to very simply explain my “no” vote against Nathan Butler, and my “yes” vote for incumbent Meghan Lukens – an effective state representative for House District 26 that includes most of Eagle County. Lukens has been successful on transit, climate, housing, health care, education and much more. Butler attended J6. Enough said. I was able to land a couple of freelance stories on the HD26 race, both on J6 and far more issues.
For at-large CU Regent I gave the nod to Democrat Elliott Hood, because the Democratic Party is the only major political party in the United States upholding the U.S. Constitution and standing up for democracy at home and around the world. That may seem irrelevant in a CU Regents race, until you remember the role CU played in funding the election lies of Trump-enabler John Eastman. That can never happen again at the state’s flagship institution.
By now, you no doubt see a pattern. Reject the J6 insurrection, call out the endless lies of the election-denier-in-chief and convicted felon Trump, and maybe I’ll consider voting for you. Until then, you clearly don’t believe in our constitutional democracy, nor do you deserve to serve in a government you deem the deep state for people you consider the enemy within.
That’s why I’m joining the 37% of white men (if you still believe any of the polls that have proven so very wrong in recent years) proudly backing Vice President Kamala Harris for president and Tim Walz for vice president.
So there you have it, while billionaire publishers are running away from endorsements out of fear of Trump reprisals if he’s reelected – don’t forget our local paper that scrapped them a couple of years ago is owned by the billionaire Nutting family – Real Vail shows neither fear nor favor … nor a billion-dollar bank account.
I’m not a one-issue voter, though, as I voted yes on Amendment 79, which establishes in the state constitution the right to abortion – something Trump ripped away by stacking the U.S. Supreme Court with out-of-touch, right-wing justices who removed that 50-year protection nationally.
On education, I voted “no” on Amendment 80, which would make school choice a constitutional right and further dilute the already pathetic level of public education funding in Colorado. Beyond that, I’m not going to go down the entire list of ballot questions but will say it is far too easy to get something on the ballot, and many of these issues should be decided by the legislature and not an electorate that can’t be expected to research veterinary issues, for example.
Nationally, as the final days of the Nov. 5 general election wind down, with Trump holding pro-Nazi-style rallies replete with racist warm-up acts at Madison Square Garden, the race has devolved into the sort of name-calling tussle in the mud Trump loves and revels in.
On Sunday, Trump’s unfunny comic warm-up act equated immigration to sex with “no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” He also called the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, with 3.2 million American-citizen residents, “a floating island of garbage.” Trump, the control-freak reality star, pretended to know nothing about the comic.
Instead, Trump and his minions feigned outrage when President Joe Biden appeared to call Trump supporters garbage in response. Biden, the 81-year-old gaff-master, undercut the consistent unity message and relentless Republican and Independent outreach of Harris, except for one big thing: Biden isn’t on the ballot on Tuesday. And, in fact, he was kind of forced to step down because he was viewed as too old and unable to effectively communicate.
Biden deserves credit for beating Trump by more than 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes in 2020, and for accomplishing a great deal of his agenda – from a bipartisan infrastructure bill to a landmark climate and healthcare bill – with razor-thin majorities in Congress. But it was clear the office had taken its toll and it was time for him to go.
Now there’s just one old white guy speaking incoherently out on the campaign trail — except the babbling 78-year-old Trump is also spewing pure vitriolic hatred aimed at women, minorities and anyone else he thinks he can score points marginalizing. And he’s been doing it for decades.
Trump, the grandson of a German immigrant who was barred from his own country for dodging military service (it apparently runs in the family), says he admires Adolf Hitler for the loyalty of his generals. In 2016, when Trump first won the White House, I wrote:
“So, this may be what it felt like to live in Bavaria during the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in the 1920s, if not Berlin in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler abolished all opposition, consolidated the power of the Nazi Party and took over as chancellor, riding a wave of extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism to the dictatorship of a Depression-wracked nation.”
That statement feels even less hyperbolic eight years later, and Trump’s Project 2025 – with its plans for concentration camps — shows us that, in fact, it wasn’t hyperbolic in the slightest.
So if you vote for Trump now, you know what you’re getting, and you’ve known for a long time. Unless he wins on Tuesday, Trump will try to steal my vote and the votes of tens of millions of other Democrats with an army of lawyers, a tsunami of lies and quite possibly calls for violence, just like he did in 2020.
As Harris campaigns with Liz Cheney and promises to put a Republican in her cabinet (I pray it’s not Cheney), I’m openly wondering what it would take for me to ever vote for a Republican again – something I did in the past before Trump turned the party into a democracy-denying cult. [On Friday, Nov. 1, there was widespread backlash to Donald Trump’s threat in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Thursday that we should see how Liz Cheney “feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”]
In fact, in 2022, I endorsed the only Republican elected official in Eagle County, Sheriff James van Beek. While he isn’t on the ballot on Tuesday, the sheriff isn’t likely to earn a Real Vail endorsement again if he chooses to seek reelection in a couple of years.
When he pulled out of reading a book by “Pizzagate” alt-right conspiracy theorist and 2020 election-denier Jack Posobiec over the summer, van Beek explained, “Storytime for young children should not be controversial, even if the topic is worthy.”
If you’re the sheriff of an idyllic resort county that has been rocked this year by a shocking case of youth violence locals naively thought was reserved for big cities, it is not enough to simply pull out of a children’s story hour by an author linked to violent anti-government campaigns and a conspiracy falsely targeting Democrats for a fake child sex ring.
The sheriff needed to both pull out of the book reading to young, impressionable kids and condemn the author whose tweets in part led to a follower shooting up a restaurant during the “Pizzagate” conspiracy.
The local sheriff, a U.S. Army veteran who has gained national attention on discredited Fox News and in the right-wing Washington Times, should also condemn Posobiec’s ties to “Stop the Steal” and the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that resulted in the deaths of numerous Trump supporters and police officers in Washington, D.C.
Obviously, if van Beek fully supports the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution he swore an oath to, he should never have been on the schedule of the Eagle County Republican Party to read a book by Posobiec to young children in the first place. Van Beek says he simply didn’t know who the author was, but that’s a very tough argument to swallow.
Maybe if he called me back when I asked him about it – copying via email his publicly funded communication staff that could be described by some as “socialistic” – he would have realized that reading Posobiec’s anti-socialism “Island of Free Ice Cream” was akin to reading a book on the left entitled “The Island of the Violent, Heavily Armed Internet Trolls”, and he would have pulled the plug without me ever writing a story.
Instead, he ignored my email questions as I went forward with a story on the left-leaning Colorado Times Recorder website, when maybe we could have solved the whole issue over a cup of coffee.
Layer in the context of how the sheriff’s department was handling a series of social media threats at Battle Mountain High School and other local schools this fall, the political violence aimed at Trump that his camp now falsely tries to blame on Democrats, and the overall refusal of Republicans to acknowledge the need for limitations to the Second Amendment that I support – in the form of universal background checks, waiting periods, safe storage and red flag laws – and you’ll understand my reluctance to ever again back the only locally elected Republican.
The Trump assassination attempts should have triggered a robust and meaningful national conversation about the seemingly easy availability of semiautomatic, military-style assault weapons to mostly young, angry white men and boys in the country who have been fed a constant stream of lies and racial grievances by a deeply flawed one-term president and see political violence and mass shootings as a ticket to fame.
Condemn that trend, call out the lies, truly help lower the temperature, and perhaps one day Republicans can earn my trust again. Instead, I woke this morning to an email from a group calling itself “Proud Patriots” advertising the “MAGA Patriot AR-15 … a Trump-inspired commemorative masterpiece.”
Decry that kind of grievance-soaked masculinity and blatant, very loud dog whistling for political violence, stop labeling me a “Demoncrat” who eats babies, and we can all start having sane policy discussions once again. Until then, vote Democrat until, hopefully, the national fever fueled by Trump Disease finally breaks.
Editor’s note 1: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please read how you can help support this site by considering a donation or signing up for news alerts … or both.
Editor’s note 2: Full disclosure, Tom Boyd is a former founder of RealVail.com but is no longer involved with the site.
Editor’s note 3: This opinion column has been updated to reflect Donald Trump’s threat in an interview with Tucker Carlson that we should see how Liz Cheney “feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
David O. Williams
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