Summit County towns have embarked on a social warrior campaign with their Black Lives Matter murals on Main streets, and now they’ve added threatening banners that proclaim “Love This Place? Cover Your Face!”

The towns are pounding nails in their coffin in a self-proclaimed socialist effort to make political statements, when really most visitors and locals just want to get away from the real world and go skiing in our beautiful mountains. If the county was really concerned with its economic longevity and not its social warrior agenda, it would have banners across Main Street that say, “Love This Place? Ski This Place!”

The towns are a little too fat and happy shoving socialism down the throats of locals and visitors. The town councils think they have the right to impose their liberal narrative on the taxpayers and the guests that come here from around the country. They want everyone to fall in line with Black Lives Matter, mandatory mask zones, police departments that threaten noncompliance with punitive consequences and encouragement of Blueshirts to squeal on their neighbors and family members.

This radical agenda feels like Boulder, Austin and Madison, where individual First Amendment civil liberties are sacrificed on the altar of social justice.

Their tacit endorsement of Black Lives Matter misses the difference between the message and the mission. The message, which nobody opposes, is that Black men should not be shot by white police because of the color of their skin. This message is statistically unsubstantiated as more white men are killed by white cops and more Black men are killed by other Black men.

The Black Lives Matter mission is far more dangerous and is why the local towns should remove their murals. The Marxist mission is to replace American capitalism with communism, eliminate the nuclear family that is the basis of our democratic republic and impose government control over the means of American free-enterprise production. This mission rightly offends locals and visitors who believe freedom, not slavery, should define America’s history and character.

Another misguided policy embraced by the town councils is government-imposed mask hysteria. This mind control is the height of coronaphobia. Health bureaucrats and politicians have assigned mask mandates a gravity unsupported by empirical research, as evidenced by the recent 6,000-person Danish study that could not confirm mask deterrent of droplet transmission.

The politicians know that actual mask results are less important than making people feel good about themselves and giving them self-perceived moral high ground to demonize others who don’t abide by their muscle. Masks have the unintended consequence of allowing tyrants to govern by fear.

Business owners and individuals should decide for themselves to let their own personal goodwill and community concern make that mask determination. It should not be an encroachment of our individual First Amendment rights resulting from an arbitrary government mandate. The banner over Main Street should be, “You Ask About the Mask.”

Instead, Summit County and the ski areas would be wise to promote our wonderful mountain community as a cool ski resort that is one of the few remaining places in the world that is safe, pretty and clean. We are the best place in America to get away from all the authoritarian regulations of Orwellian governments plaguing the rest of the world these days. People are craving a fun refuge rather than more social refuse.

Summit County is the last, best hope for sanity in an insane world. We need to let the country know we are the safe place for a family trip, not just another social guilt trip.

Let’s support our resourceful, local business owners and their employees who are champing at the bit to get back to work, especially the undeservedly hard-hit restaurants and bars. Demand from our draconian leaders that we be open for business; take off the governor and get that economic engine revving again.

Kim McGahey’s column “Conservative Common Sense” publishes Tuesdays in the Summit Daily News. McGahey is a real estate broker, tea party activist and Republican candidate. He has lived in Breckenridge since 1978. Contact him at kimmcgahey@gmail.com.