Hispanic Fanatic

I recently wrote about being a member of Generation X, and how our youth (those damn 1980s) is the cultural touchstone and promised land for much of the MAGA movement. Yeah, it creeps me out.

One thing I didn’t mention is how, despite our inherent coolness, my fellow Gen Xers and I are getting older. I know — it all seems so impossible. But trust me, it’s happening.

In fact, an early year of my generation, 1972 to be precise, was the peak time for youth in America. By that, I mean the average age for an American has risen every year since then, to the point that the nation’s median age has reached 38.9, which is “the highest it has ever been.”

Yikes. America is one old-ass country.

What does it mean that our nation is rapidly filling up with cranky senior citizens while there are fewer young people to offset them?

Well, for starters, our population growth “has slowed significantly with an increase of only 0.5%.” There is some concern that within the next few years, America will actually lose population, which is not the sign of a vibrant country.

An aging population that has fewer young people to do all the work and keep society moving forward is a sociocultural red flag that economists call “a truly fucked-up situation,” to use the official term.

This demographic cliff is looming so large, in fact, that conservatives are shrieking nonstop that Americans need to have more babies. They mean white Christian babies of course, but even if the hyper-religious get to banging nonstop, it is unlikely to slow our nation’s slide into decrepitude.

Most political scientists believe the best way to increase the number of young people in America is to increase immigration.

Ha — that’s a good one, right?

Actually, it’s no joke.

If America is to avoid becoming one big nursing home, we need more immigrants. Unfortunately, due to right-wing lunacy and xenophobia on a massive scale, “after more than 50 years of rapid growth, the nation’s immigrant population is now in decline.”

This is good news for the racists, but bad news for just about everyone else.

Just the economic toil of decreased immigration is likely to be grim. You see, Republicans who wanted to kick immigrants out ignored “a big hole in the seductively simple argument that Mr. Trump’s policy will push employers to hire Americans: For many jobs, the cheaper and more likely replacement is a robot.” And those jobs that can’t be done by robots “will simply leave the country.”

So much for a job boom for those angry, native-born Americans who thought their high school diplomas were good enough. They believed they could have a strong economy and mass deportations, but both are turning out to be pathetic delusions.

And speaking of robots, keep in mind that artificial intelligence is poised to trigger “a rapid reorganization of work—compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, [and] the consequences will not stop at the economy,” testing political institutions “that have already shown how brittle they can be.”

These factors are combining to create a picture of the future that is, well, not so very bright. To be honest, it’s fairly horrifying. 

So what are the ultimate consequences of an aging population, fewer immigrants to take care of old people, and AI taking over?

Well, for one thing, Gen X will need lots of robots to keep us alive.

Knowing my generation’s luck, our robotic caregivers will be on glitchy beta test and fry us.

This would all be much simpler if we weren’t so bigoted. But that’s not the American way. 

Just ask the next furious old man you see. He will be easy to find, because soon, the country will be nothing but the elderly, tumbleweeds, and reminiscing about the good old days.

There’s a fair amount of Latino pride surging through my household lately — the result, as you can imagine, of a certain malevolent rodent taking over the Super Bowl. 

This is despite the fact that I am not Puerto Rican, and I’m more of a grunge rock guy than a reggaeton fan. 

But I love seeing Latinos excel. And I also love a good party. Hey, who doesn’t?

Ha — you know the answer to that.

No sooner was the halftime show over than angry white conservatives proclaimed how very, very oppressed they were because for the first time in the history of the universe, a major event was not focused on them. The indignity of hearing Spanish, and seeing all that joy, has launched a million apocalyptic fits among Republicans, who are now threatening to unleash the power of governmental investigations upon those radicals who dare to twerk.

I guess they wrapped up that whole Epstein investigation and now have lots of free time to focus on other equally pressing matters.

Yup.

In any case, I have to wonder if doubt ever creeps into the right-wing mind. It is painfully obvious that the Super Bowl halftime show was a tremendous success, while the hastily conceived alternative concert was, to be diplomatic, not so well regarded. And yet conservatives continue to die on that hill, buried under ever-increasing piles of ludicrous and straight-up racist arguments.

Does it ever cross their minds that most Americans do not share their terror over hearing Spanish? Do they ever say, “I don’t know much about this music or culture, so maybe I can learn more” instead of reflexively lashing out at the unknown and clinging to the familiar and the pedestrian? Do they see people dancing and proclaiming the power of love and welcoming all types of individuals, and feel, just for a moment, that their posture of fury and self-righteous rage is misplaced and kind of, sort of, a little bit pathetic?

Probably not.

But more and more, Americans are seeing conservatives for what they are. And all we can do is shake our heads and say, “Que triste.”

Yeah, that was Spanish. Get used to it.

I’ve mentioned before that I am a proud member of Gen X.

Well, make that usually or perhaps occasionally proud. We have our flaws.

In any case, I remember the 1980s, and they weren’t that rad… excuse me… they weren’t that great.

As such, it is disconcerting that so many members of my generation glamorize a time that was loud, shallow, and ugly. And holy fucking hell, did the music ever suck.

But 1980s nostalgia isn’t just for middle-aged Gen Xers who remember a time when their knees didn’t hurt and a person could be entertained for a whole afternoon with just five dollars in quarters at the arcade.

No, this yearning for 40 years ago is especially acute for Trump and his devoted fans.

I know, we all think of the “again” in the MAGA slogan as referring to the 1950s. And indeed, the desire for that simpler world of milkshakes and segregation is strong among the baby boomers. Damn, they rhapsodize about the Eisenhower years.

But attitudinally, the conservative movement is all about the 1980s. That was the last era in which white men were the unquestioned leaders of America, and it was still ok to make racist jokes in public. Sure, there were ladies in the workplace, because of that damn women’s lib movement of the 1970s, but men could still grab a female ass in the office without everybody getting all uptight about it. Best of all, rich guys were heroes, and nobody — I mean, nobody — was stressed about the environment collapsing, Muslims moving in next door, or gay people doing anything other than hiding and cowering in fear.

For white male conservatives, this was the last good time.

Yes, in the 1980s we were under constant threat that the USSR would bomb us into oblivion at any time. But that’s not a concern because the Republican Party of the 2020s loves Russia. They don’t even mind when the US president kowtows to a Russian dictator whose propaganda machine gleefully proclaims that corrupt Republicans will destroy America.

I suppose that’s the new version of winning one for the Gipper.

In any case, Republicans — especially white, male, straight Christian ones — will continue to pine away for the 1980s. They want a nation where ethnic minorities are never the lead in movies, women stop getting nominated for president, and rich guys can yell, “retard” again.

As if all that weren’t vile enough, they will likely indulge in their retrograde fantasies while blaring Starship’s We Built This City.

Totally gnarly.

As I’ve mentioned, I lived in the great city of Minneapolis for seven years. During my time there, I became friends with a guy I will call Jordan. I’m not using his real name for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Jordan and I spent a lot of time together, sipping our Surly Furious beers, pondering if winter would ever end, and being all open-minded and tolerant of others. You know — radical insurgent stuff.

In any case, Jordan recently texted me about what’s happening in Minneapolis, a city where heavily armed thugs are assaulting people, stomping on the Constitution, and unleashing terror on a populace best known for politeness.

With his permission, I am excerpting some of Jordan’s texts here:

This is simple retribution and punishment against the people of MN for not falling in line and helping this asshole become a king. It’s clear anyone undocumented is scared, but I know a scientist with a green card who is scared to leave her home. I’ve got work colleagues who are US citizens scared shitless and not coming into work. It’s literally affecting everyone. The damage they are doing here is absolutely crazy. They are not following laws and intentionally roughing people up.no matter what you’re doing.

They are here to send a message. Detain people for hours and release them without charges. Smashing car windows when people don’t move fast enough. They’re on the freeway pulling people over. Schools are in chaos. 

Restaurants are closed due to fear of staffing and customer safety. Because if ICE shows up, they mess with everybody no matter who you are. They rammed into a guy’s car because they said he was not a citizen but then drove away, leaving him with a damaged car. It’s all tactics to put the fear into everyone that anyone at any time can be harmed, detained, or have property damaged.

Also, we’ve got right-wing extremists calling in pipe bomb threats at Hennepin County buildings. ICE doesn’t care. 

One good and sad story is that a Mexican restaurant had workers too scared to come in, so the owner asked for volunteers to cook in the kitchen before all the food spoiled to make for their workers, and over 100 people signed up, and they had to turn away volunteers. 

I don’t know, we’re sad, we’re angry and we’re scared.

Yes, it’s a lot to take in.

Also, Jordan is probably pissed at me because he’s a Vikings fan, and the pseudonym I choose for him is inspired by Jordan Love, the Green Bay Packers quarterback. Ha, that was a good one.

Sports rivalries aside, I want Jordan to know that we support Minneapolis — and by “we” I mean the majority of Americans who are aghast at the Gestapo-lite marching through uptown. 

The city is taking a hit on behalf of the entire country right now, and for their perseverance, we own them our gratitude and respect.

I had hoped that my first post of 2026 would be full of joy and chockablock with optimism.

Yeah, not so much.

What should we focus on first? How about the fact that ICE thugs are now shooting people in the face for not complying with their shrieked, random, contradictory orders fast enough? Or that the government demands that we reject evidence we see with our own eyes? Or that poorly trained neo-fascists have proven that they are willing to murder white women in broad daylight, so we can just imagine what they are capable of when they drag Latino men off to some dark cell?

Well, we can address all of that, plus the fact that even under the most extreme version of devil’s advocate, the trigger-happy ICE goon in Minneapolis was reckless and incompetent, and more likely guilty of at least manslaughter, if not outright murder.

Keep in mind that the gunfire in Minneapolis, a city I lived in for seven years, is not some stray occurrence or freak accident. Rather it is “the logical result of Trumpism and MAGA extremism, both in theory and in practice” because “a fatal encounter was all but inevitable” once you unleash armed hoodlums under the auspices of authority who serve no purpose other than to terrorize and provoke.

And the guy who Republicans insist will unite this nation is displaying an “indifference to facts, to due process, to the dignity of the deceased, and to basic human decency” that is beyond grotesque. The White House has made “ostentatiously dishonest statements that they knew would be contradicted by the video evidence available to anyone with eyes to see it,” proving once more that the “federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest, and devoted to vilifying Trump’s perceived enemies rather than informing the public.” 

And all this has happened in the first week of what will likely be another miserable year.

But wait, I haven’t even gotten to the invasion of Venezuela yet. I suppose that will have to wait until next week’s post… unless something even more horrific happens before then, which let’s face it, is always possible.

Damn, this is an abysmal start to 2026.

We have definitive proof, as if any were needed, that our president is a depraved sociopath.

The most chilling aspect of this homunculus of hatred’s response to a beloved director and his wife getting murdered is not the gloating, the mocking, or the praising of himself. It is the implication that if the murderer turned out to be a right-wing goon, that was fine, because the couple had it coming. Even MAGA fans (well, some of them, at least) were disgusted at this rejection of basic decency and the grotesque wallowing in violence.

Don’t conservatives ever get tired of defending this repulsive behavior? At what point are they no longer owning the libs and instead cackling over pure evil? Do they even know anymore?

In any case, I will wrap up this final post of 2025 by celebrating the great Rob Reiner, who was responsible for one of my favorite films of all time, the insanely underrated road-trip comedy The Sure Thing.

I saw this movie when I was 16, and to this day, I have never related to any onscreen character more than Gib. Maybe it’s because Gib was a funny guy who was awkward with women. Perhaps it is because Gib tried to go with the flow but still got moody and morose. Or maybe it is because to this day, there are very few Midwestern-raised Latino characters in movies, so I don’t have a lot of options.

In any case, The Sure Thing is hilarious, which is a big reason I love it. But another reason for my admiration developed only later, when I rewatched the movie as an adult. 

It’s clear that Alison takes life too seriously, and she learns to lighten up through her relationship with Gib. But as Reiner himself pointed out, Gib takes life too frivolously, and he learns much from Alison. That nuance took me a while to figure out.

Yes, this director was so good, even his 1980s teen comedies were deep.

See you in 2026.

I know. We had the audacity to celebrate Thanksgiving, treating ourselves to the briefest of respites from the nonstop clown-car shitshow that now makes up American government. And what happens?

Well, for starters, our possibly ailing, possible senile president openly admits to committing war crimes (but then tries to jettison the blame to someone else). 

Hey, remember that “controversial” video of Democratic leaders reminding military personnel that they should refuse to carry out illegal orders? Yeah, it looks like that was sound advice that has unfortunately gone unheeded. 

In other disturbing news, our nation’s centuries-long reputation as a beacon of freedom for oppressed people has been stomped into oblivion. We are kicking out refugees who helped us in a botched war because one of them is a homicidal lunatic. This is because we now judge whole groups of people based on their worst members, unless of course, they are white Americans who tried to overthrow the government, in which case we do not even judge the worst of them at all.

And while we’re at it, we’re expelling other immigrant groups because… well, there really is no good reason. Hell, even the most ardent Trump defender has to admit that referring to communities of black people as “garbage” and harassing them for a crime that they are not even remotely responsible for is not, as the kids say, a good look.

But don’t worry. Our government has made it clear that Afrikaners can get going on rebuilding their whites-only homeland right here. So we still love certain immigrants, and the reasons why are not glaring or obvious in the least. Nope.

Oh, one more thing. It is more than a little odd for a guy to threaten war (despite his boasting that he would never start a war) because he is so angry about the illegal drug trade, but then turn around and pardon a man who flooded America with those same illegal drugs.

Yes, it’s all very depressing, infuriating, and perplexing. So basically, it is another day in Trump’s America.

And we just can’t get a fucking break.

One of the problems America faces is the incredulity of our citizens. Even a year into round two of Dystopia Kingdom, many of us still refuse to believe Trump is as bad as he seems. There is no way the country elected a corrupt, bigoted madman for the second time, right? He’s just playing 3D chess when he blubbers incoherently, institutes overtly racist policies, and threatens to invade allies. Yup.

But the truth is that the insanity and neo-fascism are on full display, all the time. You don’t have to dig for this.

Even when disturbing facts are pointed out, however, Americans launch into denial. Before the last presidential election, voters in focus groups were informed about the Republican agenda. When they heard “accurate descriptions of real GOP proposals, the truth struck those voters as so cartoonishly evil that they found the charge implausible.”

For example, it might strike you as unbelievable that that “with increasing momentum, voices on the Christian right are preaching that empathy has become a vice.” This is indeed confusing, because as many theologians have pointed out, empathy is “the whole message of Jesus.”

And if conservative Christians no longer agree with Christ, who are they following?

More and more, it looks like Hitler.

I know, it’s bad form to compare one’s political opponent to der fuhrer, and certainly most Christians, even the right-wing ones, are not fond of the guy.

But “a growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II,” and MAGA influencers are actively working to rehabilitate Hitler as a misunderstood dude who may have been correct about a few things.

Consider also that “neo-Nazi voices are becoming more obvious in the MAGA party.” We’re talking about “hardline pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups” that text each other witticisms about “slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents” while expressing “admiration for Adolf Hitler.” We’re also talking about White House nominees for high-ranking positions who proudly say they have “a Nazi streak.”

That can’t be true, right?

Yeah, it is.

But one can argue that the infiltration of sociopathic Christians and self-proclaimed Nazis is a relatively minor contingent of the MAGA base. I’ll grant that the Republican Party is not awash in Hitler-loving goose-steppers (even though anything above zero percent should be cause for alarm). I will insist, however, that the people at the top are, how to say this politely… fucking morons.

You see, Trump “has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics” or dissed by so-called elitists, who tend to value absurd concepts like experience, intelligence, creativity, competence, and basic decency.

The Trump Administration is an obnoxious gaggle of “crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified.” They are “people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States,” and have provoked the “collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys.” 

You might ask why Americans keep “electing a class of public officials who seem to be all id” and who are “driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury.”

It’s because hardcore Trump supporters are angry Americans who “want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined.” These furious conservatives “see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle,” but the “juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters” doesn’t translate into meaningful change or innovative solutions. You won’t get that from cackling jerks who “treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes.”

Indeed, it remains “wildly ironic that MAGAs now have control of the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, and yet they still manage to feel themselves oppressed, still picture the world as unfair, still rage against a machine they’ve made and are part of.”

As touchy-feely liberals have pointed out, MAGA is a perpetually torch-wielding mob, and “the only time they do show anything resembling joy is to reflect the arrogant, self-satisfied sneer of their leader; almost always in the face of someone else’s heartache or misfortune, almost always when someone else loses something,” and the “only happiness they seem capable of manufacturing is in response to pain.”

And since they are striving only to inflict punishment on others, and not make anyone’s lives better or improve America is any significant way, there is no end goal. There is no point where they can claim success, because there will always be another freak to attack, another culture war to ignite, another deviant who just doesn’t conform. 

They have found out, and the rest of us now realize, that getting all that power doesn’t make their misery go away.

A friend of mine from college recently texted me a cryptic sentence:

“We did it.”

Except it wasn’t that mysterious, because I had a fairly good idea of what she had done. 

My friend (let’s call her Mary) is married to a guy from Europe. They have talked for years about relocating to his homeland. Well, that idle chit-chat turned into active planning once a certain xenophobic blabbermouth reentered the White House.

Mary and her husband have now moved, most likely permanently, to a European country where they have universal healthcare, almost no gun violence, and higher standards of living than just about anywhere in America.

It’s one of those hellholes of “socialism,” foreign languages, and fancy pastries.

Mary is a well-educated, high-income professional. And now she will take that education and spending money to Europe. But don’t worry, she is easily replaced. Trump’s legions of the poorly educated and massively angry will crank out dozens of babies to take the place of libtards who create most of the nation’s GDP.

I know this sounds like the plot of liberals’ favorite movie, Idiocracy, but I now have first-hand evidence (albeit anecdotal) that it is actually taking place.

But don’t take my word for it.

Data for 2025 indicates that more Americans are leaving the United States. The number of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship has also risen. In the first quarter of 2025 (i.e., when Trump took office), expatriations more than doubled compared to the last quarter of 2024. If this rate continues, 2025 could see a record number of Americans moving overseas, exceeding the previous peak seen in 2020, when the pandemic provoked many Americans to seek out a country where people don’t spit in doctors’ faces or punch someone out for wearing a facemask.

This time, political polarization is a chief motivator. You would think this would make conservatives happy.

After all, right wingers have been screaming at liberals for decades to leave America if they don’t like it. Curiously, they never aim this advice at Trump, who hates America far more than any liberal ever could. Seriously, look at the guy’s rants about how horrible this country is. They are the assembled quotes of a rambling lunatic, yes, but they are also the diatribes of someone who truly despises the United States as it actually exists.

And that’s one reason he and his acolytes want to change it. They don’t want an America that bares any semblance to those European nations where people are happier, believe in democracy, and avoid working themselves to death.

The conservative vision of America is a country that “is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know.” Republicans see the USA as 3,000 miles of a theocratic fiefdom where they are permanently in charge.

They would be shocked to realize that not every America shares this vision, and some of them — ok, a lot of us — are talking about leaving once and for all.

As of this writing, they still have not captured the person who murdered that fascist guy.

You may have noticed that I referred to the victim as a fascist because, well, that’s the truth. Getting assassinated does not convey sainthood.

This fact seems to have confused many Americans. We are being told to grieve for a man whose history of bigotry is undisputed. We are being ordered to show respect to a right-wing extremist who damaged many people’s lives and gloated about it. 

The media coverage refers to him as a conservative voice, as if he had the gravitas of a George Will rather than the calamitous impact of a smug racist whose views are straight out of the 1950s but with more animosity.

Listen, you can say he was wretched person without rejoicing in his death. You can denounce this killing, as all sane people should, without wallowing in crocodile tears.

The implication is that all Americans must refrain from badmouthing a man who despised everyone who was not a straight, white Christian male and who worked tirelessly to demean and dehumanize whole segments of American society. 

This demand for compassion is all the more jarring considering that much of it comes from conservatives, who have taken great delight in insisting that empathy is bad and kindness is for losers.

Yes, the modern conservative movement has nothing but contempt for empathy, unless they want it for themselves, in which case it must be given without delay or pause, and in huge heaping piles.

So what happens when all the eulogies from conservatives and weak-willed liberals fade away? Most  likely, there will be more political violence. It is obviously unavoidable at this point, and the fact that the Republican Party has amplified and intensified calls for political violence is something the GOP wants you to forget at the moment. But threats and bullying are the Republican brand now. The only surprise is that conservatives are shocked that their hyper-aggressive behavior and sociopathic mocking of victims has infected society. I mean, who could have called that?

Speaking of violence, it is indeed ironic that the victim in this case regarded gun deaths as no big deal because of, you know, freedom and stuff. Most likely, when he was rationalizing the deaths of thousands as necessary for the Second Amendment’s functioning, he was assuming that all that death would happen to someone else — probably some pagan immigrant who had it coming. Nobody who loves guns ever assumes that they will be the one who gets shot, the person who has to pay the price for this God-given right that is so essential that school kids have to wear bulletproof backpacks. Nope, it won’t them — until it is.

I also find it interesting that so many people assume that the killer had military training to make such a complicated shot. That’s certainly possible.

But it’s also possible that with millions of guns in the hands of millions of people, and with thousands of those gun owners spending lots of time at shooting ranges, at least one highly motivated lunatic would devote the effort to becoming an ace sniper.

Hell, there are probably hundreds of Americans who have never served in the military who could have fired that rifle. 

Does that make you feel safer?