Hispanic Fanatic

You know that a triangle has three sides, and birds can fly, and fire is hot.

With that kind of independent thinking, you’ll never be a member of the Trump administration.

You see, our favorite band of charlatans, incompetents, and evil nepo-babies are harmful enough because of their zeal for distorting reality and promoting easily disproven nonsense. But the few sane and logical people who support this band of delusional freaks are so intimidated or fearful of losing their jobs that they are going along with grade-A gobbledygook and hardcore claptrap.

For example, pretty much everyone told our easily befuddled president that it was a horrible idea to attack Iran. And they were right. But at the White House, “so many people are afraid of being on the outs that they are just drinking the Kool-Aid and going along with it.” 

Yes, what could be a more powerful encapsulation of brave leadership and moral courage than the phrase “going along with it”? Perhaps that can be their motto.

But it’s not just obsequious toadies at the White House who deny reality. It’s also most conservatives in general.

For example, “rigorous research [has] demonstrated in place after place, decade after decade, that immigration to the U.S. does not cause crime to go up; it may even push it down.

And yet, 85% of Republicans “believe that migrants bring crime to the U.S.,” an erroneous belief that has held steady among conservatives for the last 20 years of polling. Conservatives insist that immigrants are synonymous with crime waves even though “the data shows otherwise.”

Perhaps conservatives would also like to know that in research that stretches back to the 1990s, the US immigrant population has “generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.” Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be nearly twice as high, and the economic contributions of immigrants may have “already prevented a fiscal crisis.”

That hasn’t stopped “major Trump donors” from complaining about immigrant invasions, right before hiring and exploiting Mexican workers illegally.

There are many reasons why Republicans see the world they want to see rather than acknowledge inconvenient reality.

One particularly disturbing theory is that MAGA is nothing more than right-wing fan fiction, and that the participants in this unhinged movement see themselves as players in “a cinematic epic of universal Good versus Evil.” According to this theory, the Trump administration is “far more steeped in storytelling than governing,” and policy is “presented via pop myths.” 

You could argue that the original Trumpian artifact, QAnon, was nothing more than a “popular mixed-reality fan fiction unfolding in real time” that morphed into a “kludgy, byzantine conspiracy saga.” It quickly became “a collaboration between the one in five Americans who believed its core conspiracies, a cottage industry of QAnon content creators, and even a few government officials.”

Hey, maybe the January 6 riots were merely “a fan fiction IRL meetup, a live action role-playing or alternate reality game that some took more seriously than others.”

Somehow that theory doesn’t make me feel any better.

But this disillusionment is the price we pay for living in the real world.

People keep shooting at, or in the general vicinity, of the president. Yet everyone seems surprised that a random lunatic with access to a firearm might try to become famous by murdering a well-known individual, even though this is literally the dream of thousands of unstable, gun-wielding Americans.

No, there is no way out of our Second Amendment nightmare without even more death or a national catastrophe of some type.

There is also no way out of Iran without American troops getting killed or American credibility, what little of it remains, going up in flames like the Stars and Stripes at a Taliban rally.

Consider that the “costs of Trump’s folly include far more than the thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars the Pentagon has spent on the war.” All that is bad enough, but in the best-case scenario, we will get a shitty deal that will reopen a strait “that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief.” That’s in addition to the hundreds of dead children, with U.S. embassies badly damaged, “U.S. standing in the world obliterated, and U.S. munitions badly depleted.” Also “prices are up everywhere, and more global economic fallout to come.” Furthermore, Putin has been “strengthened and enriched,” while we endure a “profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.”

Again, that is the best-case scenario.

We arrived here because an oblivious megalomanic surrounded himself with cabinet members who exhibit “lickspittling, bootlicking, groveling, kowtowing adulation and unctuously servile toadyism.” And now all of them — every macho-postering moron and reality-denying jingoist — are shocked that the Iran war is breaking Trump and has “significantly damaged American credibility and influence in the region.”

Who could have foreseen this — other than every president before Trump, every Middle East expert, and most of the people who have more than nine brain cells in their heads?

In addition to the inevitable quagmire and/or defeat, what has made the “outcome of the war so embarrassing was Trump’s conduct during it—not only the constant lies and dissimulations about why he had launched the conflict and what he hoped to achieve from it but, even more, the spectacle he presented of unhinged, unaccountable American power.”

But on the plus side, we got some great footage of shit blowing up.

Totally worth it.

You know that phrase “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”?

Our illustrious president has taken this advice to mean, “Piss off your friends and give people who want to destroy your country a big hug.”

You see, it’s bad enough that our butterfly-brained chief executive does pretty much whatever Putin wants him to do. But ever since he reclaimed the White House, this former best friend of Epstein has “gone out of his way to antagonize our allies and partners, warning them that the United States will act alone and working to undermine the international alliances the U.S. has shaped since World War II.” The twist is that ever since instigating “a regional war in the Middle East after ignoring what virtually everyone said would be the result of attacking Iran a second time, Trump is begging other countries to come to his aid.”

To the surprise of absolutely no one (except the Trump Administration, which is constantly surprised when their moronic plans explode into chaos), our allies are saying, “Not my problem.”

The president of the United States has been reduced to the status of a blubbering nine-year-old upset that nobody came to his party. 

“Fine, I didn’t want them to come anyway. It was just a test.”

Sure it was.

There is one key difference, however. The dysregulated kid can be given cake to soothe the pain. 

But a power-hungry narcissist with a bottomless pit of a black heart will not be happy until everybody suffers.

And the suffering is coming.

This botched excursion, unique in American history in that nobody can say exactly why we’re at war, has already killed thousands of people. Here in the well-insulated United States, this idiotic campaign could raise the price of food, gas, plane tickets, and those cheap toys you get your kids as stocking stuffers for Christmas.

Yeah, pretty much everything. But I guess inflation is patriotic now.

In any case, the “window for Donald Trump to end the Iran war by simply declaring victory and walking away is rapidly closing.” Soon, the man who cannot be bothered to read anything and rarely stays on one topic for more than a minute will have to “face a stark choice: He can take greater risks in pursuit of a decisive tactical success, prepare the country for a prolonged conflict that could last for many months, or seek a negotiated settlement that involves a real compromise with Tehran.”

It should be perfectly obvious to all but the most delusional that America’s reckless, childish leader “does not think strategically… historically, geographically, or even rationally.” The man “does not consider the wider implications of his decisions [or] take responsibility when these decisions go wrong.” This wildly unpopular president “acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.”

We are at the tipping point where the US will either get dragged into yet another horrific ground war in the Middle East, or we will slink away in embarrassment after unleashing death and destruction for no discernable reason.

How’s that for winning?

Now that we have it on good authority that the Iran War will be over in about 19 minutes, we can move on to other issues.

Hey, who knew conquering a nation of 90 million people would be so quick, easy, and pain-free? Those adjectives, incidentally, describe the main goals of American life and are the only criterion for assessing if we’re willing to get up off the couch.

In any case, I’m going to return my attention to the ostensible focus of this site, which is Latino culture.

So here’s an uplifting stat for you: More Latinas are pursuing a bachelor’s degree or higher than ever before.

This is great news. Considering education is the best equalizer for inequality, it’s just a matter of time before… what’s that? Despite these significant strides in educational attainment, “Latinas who have a bachelor’s degree or higher still earned lower wages on average compared to white men”?

Well, damn.

Are there any other areas in which Latinas have shown huge increases? Yes, the fertility rate for teens in Texas rose for the first time in over a decade, “a shift driven by disproportionately high rates among Hispanic teens” after the state’s six-week state abortion ban took effect.

So congrats, Texas. You are tops in Latina teen mothers.

Those two stats do not balance out. In truth, the status of Latinos in America is as dire as it has ever been. This may be why a disturbingly high number of Latinos are giving up and joining the lunatics who would just as soon imprison or shoot us.

You see, there are “people within nearly every community who can respond to misogynistic, aggressive, conspiratorial rhetoric, and then become radicalized fairly quickly,” and Latinos are no exception. This explains why so many Latinos are joining white supremacist movements. 

As many political commentators have noted, “anyone who denies that a Latino man could also be a white supremacist is probably ignorant about the way race works, and destroys, in our country.”

Hell, “far-right militias are increasingly recruiting Latino members,” and even the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer “has started publishing a Spanish-language version.”

I’m not sure what the Spanish translation is for “master race,” but I’m sure it’s loathsome in any dialect.

Among our nation’s most persistent, poisonous traits is our “long history of enmity towards various ethnic groups — Italians, Irish, and Greeks — that eventually subsided as those groups came to be considered white.”

This is because “white supremacy’s ability to adapt” is astonishing, so “racism will likely be just as entrenched in a browner America as it is now,” creating a version of “white supremacy, with a tan.”

OK, that is not so appealing. It seems that America possesses “not only the desire to rid the nation of Black and brown people, but aims to banish us and the issue of race from the nation’s moral conscience.”

All this is fairly depressing, which is a phrase I have been using a lot since 2016.

So if you hear any statistics that are uplifting, hopeful, or just not worrisome (I will settle for that at this point), let me know.

But if you uncover a Spanish-language version of Deutschland Uber Alles, keep it to yourself.

There is something mathematically pure about the Republican Party. For the past 30 years, they have insisted that once they have the presidency, everything will be great, but the exact opposite — i.e., massive chaos — always occurs.

This predictable political formula of A plus B equals C would be charming enough. But it’s the specifics that amaze and astound.

Consider that the last three GOP presidents (Bush Sr., Bush Jr., and Trump) all began their terms with solid economies and ended their terms with recessions. Although Jr.’s was the worst, Trump 2.0 has the potential to create a definite trend of economic downturns intensifying with each Republican administration.

However, the most amazing mathematical formula, too precise to be coincidence, is that the last three GOP presidents have waged an unnecessary war in the Middle East, with the rationale for each one becoming more ludicrous than the last.

We’ve gone from defending Kuwait to imaginary WMDs to… well, nobody really knows why we’re bombing Iran. It could be one of a dozen vague, contradictory reasons or no reason at all.

This latest round of GOP warmongering in the Middle East looks to end the trilogy with a full-blown scene of total Armageddon. Seriously, we have religious zealots who are eager to kill us all for the glory of Jesus (which theologians would tell you is not something Christ would actually want). But hey, if the apocalypse comes, at least we would be spared another GOP president.

In any case, I have long wondered about voters who insist that Republicans are better for the economy, despite a century of evidence that this is not true. However, now I have to ponder why any sane adult would look at Trump during the 2024 election, listen to the GOP’s shrieked bloodlust, and think “They are the party of peace.”

Yeah, Trump said he wouldn’t start any wars, but it was a minor miracle that he didn’t launch one during his first term. He was too busy golfing and denying Covid to attack anybody. Only a child would believe that our luck would last. Trump and his right-wing acolytes are happy only when Americans are dropping bombs on people.

Invading Venezuela was just too easy and didn’t deliver the carnage that conservatives love and the distraction that Trump needed. And that is why “the most powerful man on Earth is cavalierly bombing and reshaping one of the most geopolitically explosive regions in the world — and has offered nothing even approaching a coherent explanation for why he’s doing it or what he’s aiming to achieve.” We all know that it was horrific enough “for America to have a mad king, [but] now the world is seeing the rise of a mad emperor.”

Our lunatic president — who has really shot to hell his chances of winning that elusive Nobel Peace Prize — “is telling liesabout the war that not only contradict one another, but contradict themselves internally.” We have to ask if this misbegotten war is “about a nuclear program that doesn’t exist” or a regime change “that we haven’t thought through” or “an imaginary Iranian threat to elections.” Our befuddled commander in chief “has claimed both that he already destroyed Iran’s nuclear program and that he is now destroying it,” which makes it a Schrodinger’s cat of atomic weaponry.

This conflict — which has yet to gain a catchy name, so we will likely go with the Iran War — has been launched “without explanation, without Congress, without even an attempt to build public support, [and] without a coherent strategy.”

Of course, that’s not entirely true. Because according to the GOP ideology, “the dominance itself is the point; there is no other endgame.”

As for the war itself, at some point, America “may be forced to choose between an escalation or an embarrassing climbdown.”

Assuming that this campaign doesn’t end in a disaster that makes the Iraq War look like a mighty victory, our best hope is that our easily distracted president just gets bored with the war and impulsively calls it off. That would not be the first time he creates a cataclysm, leaves a mess for others to clean up, and declares victory.

If we tell him that America has won the war already, will he tweet himself congratulations and go back to ranting about paper straws?

Sounds like a coherent strategy to me.

I try to avoid the whole WWJD game.

And I don’t apply this rule solely to Jesus. I also avoid asking what would Gandhi do, or Abraham Lincoln do, or Jimi Hendrix do.

The reason is that we can’t possibly know what these individuals would think of modern problems because they are so very, very dead. And whenever someone asks that question, the answer is inevitably, “Well, Jesus would agree with my exact political views, of course.”

However, I am going to break my personal rule by asking what would MLK think of last week’s Trump rally in Chicago, where fistfights erupted, some crazy old lady flashed a Nazi salute, and the frontrunner to be the Republican nominee for president cancelled his speech.

As I understand it, Martin Luther King was in his fair share of tense situations. And yet I don’t recall hearing of a single time when he shouted down someone who disagreed with him, or reveled in acts of violence. He simply didn’t do that.

And yet, I see plenty of liberals out there who insist that we “won” in Chicago. What kind of odd reasoning is this?

Shutting down one bigot for one night is hardly a victory for tolerance and respect. Because “even the most ardent anti-Trump among us should lament that a political speech was canceled due to fears of violence.”

Yes, I know that Trump is loathsome and would happily take away your freedom of speech if he could. That’s not the point. The issue is that “no matter how right you think you are, you are never so clearly right, never so without fault, never so pure, that you have any moral authority to shut down the other side with violence.”

So preventing Trump from speaking in Chicago was not a bold cultural statement. It is also not going to change anyone’s vote in November.

All is did was make leftists feel good about themselves for a couple of hours.

Now, I understand the frustration. And I don’t know why apparently rational Americans are supporting a man who loudly proclaims his bigotry and misogyny.

Maybe it’s what the late, brilliant monologist Spaulding Gray believed, which is that there are times and places where malevolence just appears. As Gray said, there is “perhaps an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia… and America.”