Hispanic Fanatic

Recently, I discussed how doomsday preppers — often white men who hate the government — frequently view an apocalyptic meltdown of society as a good thing.

Many of these heavily armed guys dream of hanging out in their fortified complexes, free to do whatever they want and immune to the threat of immigrants and drag queens and vaccination campaigns. It’s their fantasy.

But let’s be clear. There are other types of people who are also prepping for the end of the world.

For starters, you have your classic evil billionaire. These oligarchs are “buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create.”

Sure, some of them are living out their dream of becoming a Bond villain, but for many of these money-hungry sociopaths, Armageddon is the predictable endgame of their “selfish and isolationist outlooks.”

This is a new worldview for the uber-wealthy, who traditionally have focused on indulging in extravagances and procuring status symbols. Never before “have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unlivable for everyone else,” and neither have they ever had “the technologies through which to program their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society.”

Basically, for these tech bros and crypto schemers, it is no longer about living in a mansion with a fleet of expensive cars and weekends on the mega-yacht. It’s about surviving civilization’s destruction in relative comfort and “exercising control over the rest of us.”

The good news is that the “probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim.” So all those smug rich dudes who think they’re going to ride out the chaos and destruction that they have instigated? Yeah, if society implodes, they’re probably going to die miserable deaths in those bunkers.

So we’ll have a happy ending after all.

In any case, there is another type of prepper, one not nearly as loathsome as the people whom we’ve discussed so far. And that is the ethnic minority and/or liberal who is “waking up to the reality of needing to be prepared.”

Some experts say the number of preppers has doubled in the last decade, with “much of that growth from minorities and people considered left-of-center politically, whose sense of insecurity was heightened by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, the pandemic, more frequent extreme weather, and the 2020 racial justice protests.”

To the surprise of right-wingers, “a new breed of Americans is getting ready to survive political upheaval and natural catastrophes, a pursuit that until recently was largely associated with far-right movements such as white nationalists.” 

As I said, I’m not a prepper. But if one of my fellow Latinos is gathering supplies and firearms because he believes America is going to crumple into an authoritarian hellhole, well, I get it.

Lots of progressives and ethnic minorities are taking courses in survival tactics, picking up guns, and preparing for the worst. As a result, prepper culture (if that is the correct term for it) is diversifying “amid fear of disaster and political unrest.”

So for all those white supremacists who thought DEI was over, and that the future belonged to Aryan thugs in camouflage, the joke’s on you.

Even in an apocalypse, you can’t stop diversity.

An acquaintance of mine recently suffered the loss of her husband. The man collapsed of a sudden heart attack, and then he was gone.

In the aftermath of this crushing, unexpected calamity, my acquaintance scrambled to get her late husband’s affairs in order, and her digging into bank accounts and recent activities delivered another shocker: She discovered that her husband had a secret life.

No, he didn’t have a mistress, work as a double agent, fight crime superhero-style at night, or anything sexy like that. It turned out that the guy was a prepper.

He had spent about a hundred grand of their retirement money on a bunker, guns, provisions, and the necessities of a Mad Max existence.

And the man never told his wife about this, for reasons that he quite obviously can never provide (you know, because he’s dead). All my acquaintance knows is that she has $100,000 less in her retirement fund because her deceased hubby was convinced society would soon collapse and wild-eyed marauders would be on the hunt.

I’ve written before about preppers, those incredibly paranoid and/or prescient doomsayers who spend a huge chunk of time and money getting ready for the day when a nuclear holocaust, unstoppable virus, or zombie uprising destroys this pathetic façade we call civilization.

As I stated then, and still believe, these hardcore preppers aren’t just getting ready for Armageddon. They are actively rooting for it, because if it doesn’t happen, they have wasted an enormous portion of their lives on crazy nonsense.

But there is more to this disturbing mindset than a subconscious wish for complete chaos.

Preppers are overwhelmingly male and white. This is not just because white men have the most money to spend on underground vaults and piles of freeze-dried lasagna that can last 25 years (eww). It is because a societal collapse appeals to the white male fantasy of freedom.

Keep in mind that Americans “have been urged and trained to prep as children in various scouting organizations, as homesteaders given a plot of land by the federal government in the colonial project of ‘taming’ the West, and as steady, patriotic citizens prepared to survive nuclear attack to keep the US alive in their bunkers.”

In all of those scenarios (or mythologies if you prefer), the hero is a white man protecting his family. The image that we have been sold about these lone cowboys of ruggedness never includes women or Muslims or Latinos.

It’s always a white guy who believes making plans for “survival in the absence of state support is not being a doomsday prepper but simply being a reasonable, prepared citizen.”

And that brave individualist, who just needs the government to get off his damn back, doesn’t care if 911 goes offline or the streetlights stop working or the hospitals are overrun. When and if America implodes, he will finally be free to do whatever the hell he wants. 

Think of it. No stupid job with a stupid boss. No stealing of their hard-earned tax dollars (that are just going to lazy welfare cheats anyway). Not even any complaints to turn down the music, because the neighbors will be too scared (or too dead) to argue with the heavily armed king in his castle.

That sounds like paradise to many strong, gun-toting white men.

And there has never been a better time to embrace the fantasy. Our incompetent, corrupt government is not exactly reassuring its citizens that America will persevere. I’m not just talking about the shaky economy, unraveling international relationships, and botched wars that have become the hallmarks of this flailing administration.

The conservative mindset encourages “a bunkerized society [in] a permanent state of readiness … as a condition of living in the hollowed-out shell of a state that does not take infrastructural stability and basic need satisfaction as a right but as a good one must supply for oneself.”

It’s the ultimate libertarian endgame. The only thing better than small government is no government at all.

The American Dream, whatever that was, now costs far more than most people will ever earn. To many Americans, the odds of raising kids, buying a home, and achieving other traditional milestones are equivalent to the chances that the nation will fall into cannibalistic anarchy. So why not invest in a concrete alcove with a steel door that will be your personal kingdom, free of governmental interference and ethnic minorities?

And it certainly has felt like end times ever since November 2024, when the US chose fascism over boring competence.

To a large segment of America, the coming apocalypse is not something to be feared. It is an opportunity to start over, and to live one’s best life, and to shoot off as many guns as you damn well desire. These guys are looking forward to the collapse. 

So always remember: Your dystopia is someone else’s utopia.

So I was listening to a podcast on nihilism (no, it cannot get any geekier and more depressing, at least not simultaneously).

In any case, a number of scholars talked about the history of pessimism and the belief that life is meaningless and Nietzsche’s horse and all that fun stuff. The scholars agreed that periods of nihilism are cyclical, just like all components of history, and that the doom and gloom that pervade our culture is not unusual… however…

A few of them believed that our era is subtly different — a bit more intense than your typical Armageddon of the past. This is because our society’s constant barrage of horrific news, and the proliferation of social media, have combined to create a hyper-awareness of just how shitty the entire planet is and the knowledge of every little thing that is going wrong anywhere at any time.

The experts are correct. Fifty years ago, you might have felt despair over the Vietnam War, but there wasn’t a constant stream of Facebook videos explaining just how hopeless it was, and maybe you still had faith that things were ok in Paris or Helsinki or Rio de Janiero or wherever. Today, we hear constantly that everyplace is fucked up, and you’re a bad person if you ignore it.

Isis wants to chop off all our heads, and undocumented immigrants are raping at will, and gay men are stalking kids in bathrooms — hey, irrational fear multiples and feeds upon itself.

However, I think there is even more to it.

You might expect me to mention that the recent election of the worst-qualified president in history, who is also an egotistical sociopathic, might have increased the perception that the end is nigh, or at least nigh-er. You would be correct.

However, there is yet more to it than that.

You see, a hundred years ago, you may have been overwhelmed at the carnage of World War I, but you didn’t seriously think all of civilization would be destroyed.

And then the nuclear era changed all that, and you had to accept that everyone and everything could go up in flames one day just because the Russians got all pushy. But even then, total annihilation required action (i.e., the launching of thermonuclear warheads). Therefore, as long as everybody kept his cool, it was going to be fine.

Well, we have now morphed into a new era — a period of intense, unique nihilism — where all the old fears about the end of the world persist. However, now it is inaction — in the form of denying climate change — that is dooming us.

In other words, for the first time in our history, we actually have to work to prevent our extinction. In the past, we just had to keep our collective heads down and avoid doing anything too spectacularly stupid. But now, we have to come up with answers.

And it is this knowledge — that we have to fight for our survival — that has caused so many people to embrace nihilism. If we can’t even keep our leaders from tweeting idiotic, made-up bullshit about climate change, what hope does the Earth have?

Of course, we Latinos are especially prone to Catholic fatalism, which has the whiplash effect of making us weirdly optimistic about the future. But that is a whole other story.

In any case, all this is rather bleak, so I’m going to end this article with an uplifting story.

Recently, a “Christian computer programmer” (emphasis on the “Christian”) crunched the biblical numbers and come to the conclusion that the apocalypse will occur on New Year’s Eve.

So humanity will be wiped out, and none of us will live to see 2017.

You may ask, “What’s so cheery about that?”

Well, duh, it means that Trump will never be inaugurated.

Happy days are here again.

I’ve edited over 100 books, from thriller novels to dense histories to self-help diatribes. Only a few of those books have lodged in my memory.

Among them was a manual written by a prepper. If you don’t know this term, it refers to someone who makes active plans to survive a catastrophic disaster, typically by stockpiling food, ammunition, and other supplies, and/or by creating some kind of well-protected shelter.

Preppers anticipate calamities ranging from a worldwide economic collapse to a military coup d’état to a Katrina-style cataclysm to, well, just about anything big and scary.

The book was well-written, and the author was intelligent and polite. And even if I found his worldview to be a bit, shall we say, paranoid, it would be incorrect to write him and his peers off as lunatics.

After all, if there’s ever an extinction-level asteroid impact or a zombie attack, then preppers will have the last laugh.

But what struck me about the author’s mindset wasn’t his fear-based attention to detail and insistence that sooner or later, all the shit will hit all the fans.

No, it was my realization that at a certain point, he was no longer preparing for a worst-case disaster. He was actively hoping for it.

You see, if his doomsday predictions never materialize, he has wasted a great deal of time, money, and effort for absolutely nothing. Indeed, he will have squandered a solid chunk of his life, while pinning his very self-identity on nonsense.

So a lot of preppers aren’t just waiting for end times. They are counting on catastrophe to justify their life’s work, even if this wish is subconscious.

How does this relate to the current political climate?

Well, look no further than the renewed demonization of immigrants and, by extension, all Latinos.

We have major political candidates (who shall not be named) who imply hordes of Hispanics are swarming into this country for the express purpose of raping and murdering Americans — that is, when they’re not pumping out “anchor babies” and stealing jobs.

Of course, fear-based campaigning — especially among conservatives — has a long and effective history.

And it’s tempting to dismiss GOP shrieking as a side effect of the party’s reliance on religious fervor and apocalyptic thinking. Keep in mind that about 20 percent of Republicans honestly believe that Obama is the antichrist.

But while building upon those ignoble foundations, this new conservative mindset amounts to something else.

You see, those on the right wing who despise Latinos (and there are many) aren’t just motivated by personal gain. They are true believers, who sincerely think America is doomed if Hispanics continue to increase their political, cultural, and demographic influence. To this contingent, the “browning” of America is the beginning of its end.

But what if this never happens? What if recent Latino immigrants become an integral and beneficial part of American society, just as so many other immigrant classes have?

In that case, a lot of conservative leaders have wasted a great deal of energy on nothing. Their predictions have failed to come true. And all that screaming and ranting and raving added up to nada.

Nobody wants to see his or her life’s work rendered irrelevant, or worse, dismissed as histrionic, wrong-headed idiocy.

To prevent that, many conservatives have morphed into extreme preppers, warning everyone of the coming Armageddon, while secretly hoping that it will arrive right on time to prove them correct.

The good news for right-wing preppers is that they have an inexplicable degree of influence in this country. So instead of working to prevent the coming apocalypse, they can help to usher it in, via self-fulfilling prophecies and overt policy decisions.

For example, Latinos have lower graduation rates than other ethnicities, so rather than improve public education, right-wing preppers try to gut it.

Hispanics have higher rates of poverty, so rather than balance the playing field, right-wing preppers reinforce an economic system that is rigged for the upper classes.

Latinos have limited socioeconomic power, so rather then look at institutional barriers, right-wing preppers deny that racism even exists.

Yes, there’s lots of ways to ensure that we get the America that some conservatives envision — the future that they supposedly fear but are weirdly attracted to at the same time.

Fortunately for me, I’ve made back-up plans. You see, I’ve recently built this secret bunker stocked with guns and water, and when the time comes…

Never mind, I’ve said too much.

OK, so my Mayan ancestors pulled a fast one.

But for if you’re disappointed that the world didn’t end today, keep this in mind: In just five billion years, the sun will deplete its energy, and the Earth will become a barren husk devoid of all life.

So you’ve got that to look forward to.

In the meantime, let me just say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and all that good stuff.

There’s a new horrifying sign that America is on the decline.

I’m not talking about the chaotic state of our politics, or the struggling economy, or even the fact that half of us refuse to acknowledge basic scientific facts.

I’m referring to the recent implication that white conservative guys can’t casually throw around racial slurs anymore. Truly, it’s a sign of the apocalypse.

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