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California was right to pass the Fair Pay to Play Act. Don’t buy into the NCAA’s propaganda.

By JOHN FEINSTEIN | Special to The Washington Post October 3, 2019 at 2:50 pm

There’s a good reason athletic administrators are running around screaming that the sky is falling over a new California law that will allow college athletes in the state to be paid for the use of their names and images, beginning in 2023.

For them, the sky is falling. The Fair Pay to Play Act, signed into law Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, is the beginning of the end for the NCAA’s archaic and patently unfair rules on “amateurism.”

For years, it has been against NCAA rules for a student on an athletic scholarship to be paid by anyone beyond the value of his or her scholarship: not by the school and not by anyone outside the school — whether it be a company that wants help pitching a product, someone who wants to pay for autographs or an appearance, or a company that aims to sell a jersey with a star player’s name on it.

You can pay the school, but not the athlete.

Even before Newsom signed the bill, NCAA President Mark Emmert was wailing about how disastrous this would be for college athletics and making veiled threats about being forced to declare “student-athletes” from California ineligible if they accepted any outside money.

Emmert suggested the lawmakers should mind their own business and let the NCAA’s “rules-making process” work the problem out.

Leaving the issue in the hands of college presidents and administrators is a little bit like accepting the word of the fox who says he’ll protect the henhouse.

No one is buying what Emmert — or anyone else in the NCAA — is selling. The Pac-12 Conference put out a statement Monday claiming the law would have a “very significant negative” effect on college athletics because it would blur the line between college and professional sports.

Seriously? The NCAA sold its soul to TV long ago. It has a $6 billion contract with ESPN for the rights to its football playoff. CBS and Turner will soon be paying the NCAA more than $1 billion a year for the rights to its basketball tournament through 2032. One part of the basketball deal gives TV the right to decide when games will be played — which often means those “student-athletes” are asked to start games after 10 p.m. local time.

For the record: “Student-athlete” is a redundancy. By rule, one has to be a registered student to be a college athlete. It’s like calling someone a “person-man” or “person-woman.” The NCAA has employed the term for years to fool people into thinking big-time college athletes are studying advanced calculus in the locker room. I’ve traveled with college teams often. I can’t count on one hand the number of “student-athletes” I’ve seen working at being students.

Sure, some — mostly non-stars — graduate. But most of the ones who will go on to be professionals are out the door first chance they get: after one year in basketball; three in football. Those are the rules.

They are professionals in every way — except that they get paid nothing while everyone around them cashes in. Emmert is paid north of $2 million by the NCAA. Larry Scott, the commissioner of the Pac-12 whose statement (which Scott didn’t even have the guts to sign) on the new law also wailed about how this would negatively affect nonrevenue athletes, makes more than $5 million annually.

The notion that athletes in the two revenue sports — football and men’s basketball — making outside money might hurt nonrevenue athletes is an Emperor’s New Clothes fabrication. There’s nothing there. Under California’s approach the school will not pay the athletes anything beyond

their scholarship. No swimmers, field hockey players or soccer players will be harmed — at all.

Here’s why the NCAA is in such a state of panic: Other states are already lining up to pass similar legislation. Emmert’s threat to declare athletes ineligible will be pretty empty if he has to suspend star players – the ones who do the most to bring in the TV dollars – across the country. Blessedly, this is the end of the line for the NCAA’s “show me all the money” approach.

One more note to anyone who might buy into the NCAA’s propaganda. In 1975, when an arbitrator overturned baseball’s reserve clause – which tied a player to a team for life – Commissioner Bowie Kuhn said this: “The reserve system . . . is necessary to protect not only the integrity of the game, but the economic viability of the game.” He went on to predict that free agency would mean the loss of teams and “not inconceivably the loss of a major league.”

All professional sports now have free agency. There are more teams than ever and more money than ever. College sports will continue to thrive. It will just do so in a manner that is finally fair and just to the athletes.

No wonder the old men in suits are terrified. Fair and just aren’t terms they’re familiar with.

We must stop teen use of e-cigarettes in the face of mysterious lung disease By THE DENVER POST EDITORIAL BOARD | PUBLISHED: September 16, 2019 at 8:02 am | UPDATED: September 16, 2019 at 9:52 am Parents, teachers, coaches and mentors need to be talking to kids and teens about the dangers of vaping and helping those already addicted to the nicotine or marijuana-infused products used in e-cigarette devices get the help they need to stop using.

Mysterious lung diseases that officials have linked to vaping devices have killed a handful of users and made hundreds of others seriously ill. That includes an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley who sought medical treatment for a debilitating illness. Her mother issued a plea on social media: “If our agencies aren’t going to protect our kids right now, then we need to educate our kids and ourselves on the dangers of vaping,” Ruby Johnson wrote. “We can’t afford to wait.”

It’s true. Even with federal officials acting quickly to try to determine the exact cause of the illness, the American public cannot afford to wait. Officials have honed in on the possibility that it isn’t commercially sold products causing the harm, but an extracted chemical used in products sold on the street, most likely containing THC from marijuana. There’s no doubt that officials at the nation’s top producers of nicotine cartridges for e-cigarettes are hopeful their product isn’t to blame, but as we wait to find out what is causing this lung-damaging illness, we urge the public to exercise caution.

Colorado suffers one of the highest rate of teen vaping in the U.S. According to a 2017 survey of Colorado students, 27% reported they had used e-cigarette products.

These nicotine-delivery products are highly addictive, and they are trapping our next generation in a cycle of addiction that is difficult to break. Lawmakers must respond. We understand that adults in America are capable of making informed decisions for themselves just as they have for decades with other nicotine products known to cause deadly cancers. Many still choose to smoke.

But the playing field is not equal when it comes to kids and teens. Their decision-making abilities are not fully developed and some evidence indicates they may be more susceptible to addiction. Taking concrete measures to block kids and teens from being able to use nicotine and marijuana products, especially through these popular new vaping devices is essential.

Lawmakers also need to focus on ways to ramp up enforcement of underage smoking laws. Most of that work falls on municipalities and counties and their local law enforcement agencies. More stings to discover what stores are selling to underage kids would make sense and that kind of enforcement requires funding.

President Donald Trump has suggested banning flavored nicotine packages because of the way they appeal to children and teens. This is not uncharted territory. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act in 2009 banned flavored cigarettes, with a few exceptions.

The rationale when President Barack Obama signed the law was that flavored cigarettes disproportionately attracted children and teens to these dangerous products. We supported that law and don’t see any difference between flavored nicotine products delivered by e-cigarettes.

Too many Denver kids are dying from gun violence Denver needs to get serious about youth gun-violence prevention.

Too many of our kids are dying every year at the end of a gun. Far too often that gun is fired by another teen whose life will also be shattered by that bullet.

The Denver Post’s Elise Schmelzer exposed the problem when she uncovered statistics from the Denver Police Department that indicate things might be getting worse. In 2018 and so far in 2019, 15 teenagers and children in Denver have died from gun homicides. Comparatively, in 2015, Schmelzer reported there were two kids under the age of 20 who were shot and killed, five in 2016 and four in 2017. This is a rallying cry for our youths, the general public and our elected officials to start prioritizing this issue, which overlaps with other issues including teen suicides and school shootings. We must protect our kids from guns.

It can be done if we start making stopping gun violence a priority.

Jonathan McMillan has been on the front lines of working with Denver’s youth gang problem, and he says part of the problem is simply awareness.

“One of the things that frustrates me and that I find challenging is that unless it’s a mass shooting a lot of times youth gun violence flies under the radar,” McMillan said. “Those shootings always spark a conversation, one that needs to be had, but last year I had seven or eight kids that I had known … killed or involved in a shooting in some capacity. This is really the daily reality that a lot of families or communities are dealing with.”

So while most readers know the name of a student who was killed this year in a Highlands Ranch school shooting, few will probably recognize the name Darrell Mitchell, a 19-year-old who was shot and killed in Denver last month.

It’s time we make the conversation surrounding the violent gun deaths of all teens equally as robust and loud.

The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. McMillan knows there are dozens of groups doing good work in this field.

Denver Public Health released a report this month that said between 2012 and 2017 there were a total of 74 deaths due to gun violence among Denver youth who are under 25 years old. Of those 27 were suicides and 47 were homicides. And over that same six-year period there were 175 hospitalizations due to gun-related injuries. The report estimates that gun violence impacts about 700 young people every year either directly or indirectly.

“These are stable and unacceptable rates,” said Denver Public Health director, Dr. Bill Burman. “We should not as a community have to have 13 deaths a year and 700 youths affected by gun violence. Those are unacceptable.”

Burman said Denver Health’s Mile High Youth Thrive coalition, which has been around for years, is working on recommendations right now that focus on efforts to approach this issue from an incremental public health

standpoint which have proven effective in other communities. We look forward to that work.

But we’d like to see the city of Denver and Denver Public Schools using their collective might to get behind such an effort too: their police, social workers, teachers and other employees are after all at the forefront of this issue and already doing good work. They are the ones who can bring our youth into the fold before tragedy strikes and patients arrive at Denver Health or teens arrive at the county jail. They are the ones who can take this fight to the neighborhoods and make this city’s children safer. They can engage non-profits so everyone is pulling in the same direction, and they can push for funding for community interventions and develop the political will for gun safety legislation.

Burman said some cities have developed a goal of not losing a single kid to guns in a year.

That should be Denver’s goal.

To understand the legacy of slavery, look no further than the fragile white

folks who can’t handle the truth PUBLISHED ON OCT 6, 2019 5:05AM MDT, Colorado Sun By Diane Carman

It’s been weeks since the New York Times Magazine published its intense, sprawling 1619 Project and the shock waves continue.

Listen carefully and you’ll notice that white people overwhelmingly express two very different reactions when the topic arises over the pinot grigio and dry martinis. It’s either, “Why haven’t I ever heard this stuff?” or “The whole project is a lie.”

And then there’s Rush Limbaugh’s blustering appraisal: “The New York Times has moved on to a new hoax.”

Greg Moore has heard it all and remains awestruck by the depth, the factual rigor and the remarkable impact the powerful collection of essays has had on our collective consciousness.

“The 1619 Project is one of the most significant journalistic endeavors by a news outlet in my lifetime,” said Moore, who is editor-in-chief of Deke Digital, was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board for more than a decade and served as editor of The Denver Post for 14 years.

“Most of the information is new to the American public,” he said. “It’s been researched by scholars and published in books, but bringing this important part of American history to the public in this way is critically important, especially at this time in our history.”

The 1619 Project reveals the enduring impact that slavery has had on American institutions and our culture, history and economy. For all of us white people who were taught, among other outright falsehoods, that the Civil War was not about slavery, this sprawling, intense exploration of the legacy of our original sin is powerful and enlightening.

Moore remembers one of the first times he realized just how flawed his own education was.

“When I learned that Crispus Attucks was the first person to die in the Revolutionary War, I was shocked that no one had ever talked about that in school,” he said. “To think that a former slave was willing to die to challenge the oppression of all the people in this country, that’s amazing. And we never heard about that.”

It’s one of many buried facts that is so unsettling to those who were indoctrinated in — and still prefer — the blue-eyed version of history.

Professor Joanne Belknap calls this panicky communal anxiety “white fragility.”

“For white people living in North America, almost all of us live in a social environment that protects us from race-based stress,” said Belknap, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We almost never have the experience where we stick out because we’re white or are treated differently because of our race.”

As a result, “we aren’t good at tolerating racial stress,” she said, “so even a minimal amount is intolerable. We quickly move to restore our white privilege and comfort.”

Sometimes that means clinging to lies.

Like the one that so many embrace that suggests the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College for a reason other than to perpetuate slavery. Once again, revisionist historians use the tired code for legitimizing white supremacy — states’ rights — which has always meant that people in some states have a lot more rights than people in others in order to protect the status quo.

Or that our country was conceived as a democracy, of, by and for the people when it was plainly a plutocracy in which only white Protestant, land- owning males had the right to vote.

Or that the GI Bill boosted the lives of World War II veterans, when its benefits were not available to 1.2 million African American veterans when they came home from the war.

Or …

“Talking about this aspect of American history makes a lot of white people uncomfortable,” Moore said. “They feel they lead integrated lives, and they don’t want to hear about that part of our past. It’s hard to talk about, hard to believe that people could do those things.”

Belknap said in 30 years of teaching, she’s heard all manner of arguments from her students, who often insist that they couldn’t possibly be racist because they’ve always lived in white communities and never did anything to hurt people of color. Therefore, how could they possibly have any racist attitudes?

“They tend to get very defensive, saying things like, ‘I can’t help that slavery happened,’ and ‘If I had been alive then, I know I would have been against it.’ ”

But Belknap said we can’t have a healthy relationship with our history or our future if we can’t confront these uncomfortable truths.

“We need to acknowledge this country for what it is,” she said. “It’s not just a history of innovative, hardworking people and rapid industrialization. We did all that on the backs and the lives of slaves and indigenous people by stealing things from them — their labor and their land — and, incidentally, it included a lot of murder.”

That legacy continues to have a huge impact on all of us.

“We have to find a way to talk about this,” Moore said. “When white people say they didn’t have anything to do with slavery, that’s not a way to start a conversation. They may have had nothing to do with slavery, but they benefitted from it. Advantages were passed on for generations.

“With my white friends we have some of the best conversations about race when we read a book together and sit down and talk about it,” he said. “It opens their eyes.”

Just like the buried stories unearthed in the 1619 Project, Moore said his white friends say, “Why didn’t I know this?” And, “What should I do with this information?”

The answer?

“Share it,” the lifelong journalist said. “After all this time, we all have to find a way to talk about it.”

William Perry Pendley is exactly the opposite of who we need to lead the

BLM OCT 6, 2019 5:00AM MDT

Colorado Sun Aaron Kindle

Last week, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt quietly re-upped the appointment of William Perry Pendley as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management.

By skirting Congress and not officially nominating Pendley to serve as the actual director, the administration may be trying to avoid the appropriate scrutiny that has always been required by those seeking to run agencies with the incredible responsibilities of the BLM.

It may also be trying to avoid getting the attention of hunters, anglers and other outdoor recreationists who are directly impacted.

Mr. Pendley can fairly be considered public lands enemy No. 1. He is the most powerful federal employee that has openly advocated for transfer and privatization of public lands.

And as the head of the BLM, the agency that manages the largest portfolio of public lands, he is in the position to take his advocacy for transfer and sell off to another level.

Even though he now says he will not attempt to dismantle the BLM or divest of our public lands, Mr. Pendley has a long history of working against the public’s interests on public lands and for oil and gas interests of deregulation, extraction, and privatization.

He served as the president for the Mountain States Legal Foundation for nearly three decades, an organization infamously known for supporting the idea that public lands should be sold off and regulations protecting our clean air and water should be rolled back.

Many of the cases his foundation has taken on aim squarely at removing public input and access to these lands. His record makes it extremely difficult to trust.

Mr. Pendley is exactly the opposite of who we need to lead the BLM. At a time when we finally, collectively understand that public lands are the backbone of a huge recreation economy and our national spirit, the BLM is

being led by a zealot hell-bent on ruining this legacy and throwing us back into the dark ages of the Sagebrush Rebellion.

Now during hunting season here in the West, when we should be giddy in anticipation of our most cherished time of year, it will instead be sobering to set out into the forests and prairies knowing that these lands we cherish so much may be at risk. Indeed, our very sporting traditions are at risk.

So, my fellow hunters, anglers, hikers, campers and anyone who enjoys our public lands: it’s time to speak up. We cannot take our incredible public lands for granted.

If Mr. Pendley has his druthers, he’ll crumble the very foundation of public lands while he has the chance. Mr. Pendley has been at work on that vision for decades. It’s time to redouble our efforts to make sure there’s no way that vision ever sees the light of day.

Take some time right now to contact decision makers — your congressional delegation, county commissioners and the BLM.

And then tell your friends that William Perry Pendley is no friend of public lands and is an imminent threat to our sporting traditions and our Western way of life.

Want to solve the climate crisis? Stop widening roads

SEP 20, 2019 4:50AM MDT Colorado Sun Andy Bosselman

Today, children around the world will walk out of their schools to demand adults act now to keep from making their world uninhabitable.

To honor this second Global Climate Strike, Gov. Jared Polis and Mayor Michael Hancock must commit to stop building new roads and expanding the ones we have.

Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions in the nation, and it’s growing. Despite more efficient vehicles, auto emissions increased 21 percent between 1990 and 2016 because the total number of miles people drive has gone up 50 percent on average.

Banning new road capacity may worsen traffic in the short-term, and the public will complain. But their outcry should be channeled into changing the way we get around at a pace and scale equal to the immensity of the problems posed by congestion and the climate crisis.

Officials should lay the ground so that neighborhoods can soon provide more of the things residents need while driving less. They must also vastly improve sustainable forms of transportation, like walking, biking and transit.

This may sound crazy to people who can’t imagine driving less. But many Coloradans have proved they will get out of their cars when they have better options.

Downtown Denver is the most transit-rich place in the state and already more workers take transit than drive there, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership’s last commuter survey. Bustang, the Colorado Department of Transportation’s new regional motor coach service, is a hit. And the Regional Transportation District’s Flatiron Flyer and A-Line airport train have shattered ridership expectations.

But these high-quality transit experiences are not the norm. Many of RTD’s buses and trains come infrequently. After crawling through traffic-clogged streets, they often show up late. And the overall rider experience is not as good as it should be.

We could make every transit line dramatically better, and such transformative changes are possible with transportation dollars we already have.

The federal government guarantees states can access more than $40 billion per year for highways, according to Transportation for America. But just $2.6 billion is available for new or expanded public transit. The feds also pay for up to 80 percent of the cost of a highway, versus up to 50 percent for a transit project.

Gov. Polis and Mayor Hancock must demand that our leaders in Washington fix this imbalance. Because when more people hop on buses and trains, it would reduce traffic congestion while having a huge impact on carbon emissions.

Heavy rail transit, like RTD’s A, B and G commuter lines, generate 76 percent lower carbon emissions per passenger mile than someone driving alone, according to the Federal Transit Administration. Light rail produces 62 percent fewer emissions, while buses belch 33 percent less.

No direct emissions come from walking and biking, and Denverites are doing more of both. Downtown, where the city has the fastest-improving bike infrastructure, 9% of workers arrive by bike, a 36% increase since 2016. And of all downtown commuters, 6.9% walk.

But as more people walk and bike around the city, quickly rising traffic fatalitieshighlight the inadequate investments Denver is making toward safer streets.

As Colorado leaders aim to reduce transportation emissions, they must be wary of emerging technologies. Hyperloop, self-driving cars and electric vehicles will not be our climate savior.

in January, Gov. Polis signed an executive order to promote electric vehicles, which remains his only major transportation initiative so far. But it’s likely to have minimal impact on the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Colorado will require more zero-emission vehicles under a standard adopted last month. But of all the vehicles an automaker sells, just 6.23% must be a ZEV by 2030. That leaves 93% of vehicles spewing greenhouse gases a decade from now.

If we continue on our current path, Front Range vehicle emissions are estimated to decline by just 8.8% between 2020 and 2040, according to the 2018 Greenhouse Gas Emissions estimate from Denver Regional Council of Governments.

We also need larger numbers of people to live in walkable neighborhoods along transit lines. That translates to more duplexes, fourplexes and taller buildings.

These measures may seem extreme, and some may revolt.

But to those who fear development will bring displacement and gentrification, they must acknowledge that increasing the supply of housing will help keep prices down and avoid pushing people out of their communities.

And to the many wealthy liberals who fight everything from bike lanes to new housing, it’s time they stop refusing to live by their values. They must end their often hysterical opposition to progressive transportation and housing policies now.

But politicians, too, must brace themselves and push forward changes that may be unpopular. And that is exactly why people who support addressing the climate crisis should reach out to Gov. Polis (GovernorPolis@state.co.us) and Mayor Hancock now.

Tell them that you support courageous transportation and housing measures to address the climate crisis today. Because to keep the current climate disaster from reaching apocalyptic proportions for future generations, we must act audaciously and immediately.

It’s a point echoed by Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old who inspired more than a million protesters in 125 countries to join the first Climate Strike last March.

“The politics needed to fix this, doesn’t exist today,” she said. “We should do as individuals and use the power of democracy to make our voices heard, and to make sure that the people in power cannot continue to ignore this.”

Gardner’s exit from Trumpland is already blocked

By IAN SILVERII | Columnist for The Denver Post October 4, 2019 at 9:00 am

On August 7, 1974, a delegation of Republicans led by Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona went to the Oval Office to tell President Richard Nixon that his support had evaporated in the U.S. Senate and that his impeachment and conviction was a certainty. The meeting was the culmination of months of escalating revelations about Nixon’s role in the Watergate coverup, the last of which was the infamous “smoking gun” tape revealing the president had ordered the CIA and FBI to help obstruct the investigation. Nixon resigned the very next day.

With the whistleblower story quickly unfolding, we are watching a two-year Watergate-esque saga unfold in about two weeks. There is a growing realization that President Donald Trump likely leveraged the power of his office and possibly the threat of withholding military aid to attempt to discredit a domestic political opponent. Only this time, the smoking gun is a call readout that is already all over the internet, and the president himself, as well as, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, have both essentially admitted the underlying facts of the scandal on television more than once.

If Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner intends to play the role of Barry Goldwater to our modern-day Nixon, he apparently skipped the part about speaking truth to power and focused instead on being the last one in the room with the president when the end comes. Or maybe he’ll be on Air Force One, again.

But if you’re Gardner, carrying a voting record in line with Donald Trump in a state he lost, what options do you really have at this point? Unless Gardner made a bet that a majority of Coloradans either don’t care about unbridled presidential abuse of power or somehow approve of it, he has to address the scandal in some way.

Gardner could keep his head down, offer no comment, or buy more time by calling for more investigations. This approach is more or less what he’s been doing so far, with some additional jabs at congressional Democrats for launching an impeachment inquiry in the first place. He has not gone as far as some of his colleagues like Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina or Martha McSally of Arizona by minimizing Trump’s conduct or asserting that the details of the whistleblower complaint are not impeachable offenses.

Gardner could possibly try to deflect the story to the Democrats and carry Donald Trump’s “witch hunt” banner. Already Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana has introduced showcase legislation to call for investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden, much the same way Gardner himself introduced a very-serious bill trying to strip Secretary Hillary Clinton’s security clearance during the 2016 presidential election. However, any partisan gamesmanship at this stage of the Ukraine debacle would leave voters with an unmistakable impression that Gardner is running cover for Trump, because, well, he would be. Then there are some politically riskier moves — or what some might call “honorable ways out.” Gardner could follow former Sen. Jeff Flake’s lead and call for Republicans to nominate another candidate for president in 2020. Or going further, Gardner could call on Trump to resign, and not wait until the bitter end like Barry Goldwater when the writing was already on the wall.

The trouble with these last two choices is that Gardner has so thoroughly chained himself to Trump’s political fortunes. He was one of the first senators out the gate to endorse Trump’s re-election and he twice supported Trump’s so-called emergency declaration that siphoned military money to fund the preposterous border wall.

Finally, and most bewildering, we learned that Gardner still plans to headline a Trump campaign fundraiser this weekend in New York City. That Gardner would participate in this fundraiser with the full knowledge of the whistleblower scandal probably tells us that he understands that there will be no political exit for him. If new facts emerge from the impeachment inquiry or if public opinion continues to move against him, calling for Trump’s resignation will also be an indictment against Gardner for supporting him this far. Afterward, if Gardner tries to pull the ripcord, Trump-brand forks and knives will come out of the bag instead of his parachute.

Maybe then, Gardner’s last remaining honorable option will be to follow another example set by Jeff Flake almost two years ago this month: he could throw in the towel for 2020 and let another Republican take the fall with Trump next November.

Gardner is standing up to the enduring lie of peace and freedom in communist China By KRISTA KAFER | Columnist for The Denver Post PUBLISHED: October 3, 2019 at 2:08 pm | UPDATED: October 3, 2019 at 6:38 pm “Communism is a failed ideology that was imposed on the Chinese people against their will and against their celebrated history and traditions,” said Sen. Cory Gardner in a statement earlier this week. “As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the 70th anniversary of its totalitarian rule, over a million Uighurs are imprisoned in labor camps, millions are repressed in Tibet, and millions are on the streets of Hong Kong marching for autonomy and human rights. The United States will always stand with the people of China to have the freedom to choose their destiny.”

The senator’s unambiguous denunciation of the despotic regime contrasts with President Donald Trump’s celebratory tweet: “Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!” While the president has spoken out on behalf of Hong Kong, most recently at the United Nations, and other human rights abuses in China, his criticism of Xi on these issues has been infrequent. His reluctance to criticize Xi on human rights may be part of the art of the deal in ongoing trade negotiations. Trump supporters would say tariffs speak louder than words. Still, it makes one nostalgic for President Ronald Reagan’s bold defense of human rights and condemnation of the evils of communism.

In the 19th Century, communism claimed the lives of 100 million people through genocide, government-created famines, forced labor, and executions. The People’s Republic of China gets credit for 65 million of the dead. In Albania, where I just spent two weeks, communist dictator Enver Hoxha orchestrated the deaths of 100,000 people over his four-decade

reign, a significant number given that the Vermont-sized nation only has 3 million people.

The committed Marxist leader closed off Albania to the world. Foreigners were not allowed in and Albanians were forbidden to leave. Only party leaders had cars and enjoyed free movement throughout the country. Dissenters were executed, imprisoned, interred in forced labor camps, or exiled. Private property was confiscated. The officially atheist regime destroyed churches and mosques and imprisoned and murdered religious leaders. Practicing one’s faith was illegal. Secret police kept dossiers on families and made family members pay a price if a relative stepped out of line. An act of rebellion could send family members to labor camps or blacklist the next generation from attending a university.

Part propaganda, part defense, Hoxha ordered the production of hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers. The eerie mushroom cap structures can be found on mountaintops and on shorelines, in cities and in fields. Some are small enough to house a single person with a rifle while others house a warren of underground rooms. Made to withstand war, the bunkers are a lasting monument to Hoxha’s paranoia and his desire to induce fear of the omnipresent state in his subjects.

These are not the only scars on the landscape. In the countryside, I drove past derelict buildings once political prisons and explored the dank halls of an 80 room fallout shelter built to house the party faithful during a nuclear war. In Tirana, behind the art museum, languish the deposed statues of Lenin, Stalin, and Hoxha. Lenin is armless and Hoxha is missing his nose. The Albanian dictator’s lovely house remains standing among the poorly aging concrete apartment buildings where everyone else was consigned to live.

I hope these reminders remain. It’s too easy to forget the horrors of an all- powerful state. There is no communism without political prisons, labor camps, bunkers, propaganda, and secret police. Slavery requires a whip.

An Albanian friend asked me why some Americans are flirting with socialism. Pernicious ideas have the durability of concrete bunkers. The collapse of communism in the early 1990s didn’t stop the later ascent of Hugo Chavez and his heir from destroying the once-prosperous nation of

Venezuela in the name of socialism. The idea of a powerful, beneficent state able to provide for everyone’s needs is compelling and can find fertile soil anywhere.

That’s why we need more leaders like Sen. Gardner who speak with moral clarity. It’s too easy to be taken in by an enduring lie.