Hispanic Fanatic

Last week, I focused on the latest statistics, trends, and calamities regarding Latinos. This was an obvious topic. After all, just check out the name of this website. 

But now we will continue this series by focusing on our ethnic minority brethren, African Americans. Here’s some positive news about Black Americans that you may have missed:

The wage gap between Black and White workers has shrunk over the past five years. It is “still enormous,” according to economists, but the discrepancy has undergone “a pretty meaningful reversal.”

Hey, that’s good, right? Well, I’m glad you’re happy with that little nugget of mildly upbeat news.

Because everything else kind of sucks for Black people.

I’m not just talking about systemic racism (which is, you know, a real thing). Nor am I talking about the perennially bleak stats that show how poorly Black Americans are doing. Hey, I’m not even talking about the overt racism that the Trump years provoked and that still festers over American life.

All that horrible shit is a given.

I’m talking about confirmation that “Black homeowners are having to ‘whitewash’ their homes or conceal their race to get a higher appraisal.”

I’m referring to the fact that “people of color in the US face heightened risks of harm from climate-induced disasters,” and that “Black people are 40% more likely … to live in areas with the highest projected increases in mortality rates due to changes in extreme temperatures.”

There is also the news that Black neighborhoods are increasingly becoming surveillance states (I mean, even more than the surveillance state that most of us live in). And don’t forget that the U.S. maternal mortality has “more than doubled since 1999, and most deaths were among Black women.”

Finally, as if trigger-happy cops and angry Karens aren’t enough to make Black people fear for their lives, many studies indicate that those “stand your ground” laws — which conservatives absolutely love — are linked to “rising deaths and racist violence.”

OK, this is getting pretty grim. Surely, the protests of 2020 and the societal changes that arose from that are poised to have an impact soon, right?

Well, to the surprise of pretty much no one, America’s enthusiasm to address racial injustice, while still higher than it was a couple of decades ago, has cooled recently.

For example, many diversity, equity and inclusion leaders who were “hired in waves to help companies achieve an ethnically balanced workforce after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, are being phased out, leaving experts in the field concerned that corporations’ talk of affecting change was just empty words.”

I know we’re all shocked that corporations are even capable of empty words. I mean, they just seem so sincere and concerned with our well-being otherwise.

Schools are not faring much better. We are all too aware of Florida’s efforts to ensure that racism is never discussed, but perhaps you didn’t know that nationwide, White Americans “are just as likely to favor as to oppose a ban on teaching Advanced Placement courses in African American studies in public schools.” In other words, White people are divided over whether schoolkids should even hear the words “Jim Crow.”

So it appears that we have to put our faith in technology to improve the situation. Hey, what about artificial intelligence? It’s really cool for creating images like this one:

Unfortunately, researchers believe that “AI has embedded our cultural biases and threatens to perpetuate discriminatory human behavior.”

So once again, this is all very bleak. It apparently sucks to be either Latino or Black.

But just wait, because in my next post, I will explain how being White in America isn’t so great either. 

Yeah, that’s a cliffhanger.

It’s time for our semi-annual look at the state of Latinos in America. Actually, this is not a regular feature, because I don’t write regular features. But it’s either this or try to catch up on the latest Trump travesty, attempt to decipher once again what Republicans mean by “woke,” or analyze the latest celebrity breakup.

Trust me, this is a much better option. 

So what news?

First, my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will now offer its first bachelor’s degree dedicated solely to Chicano and Latino studies. This means that “Hispanic students will be able to get a degree in the study of their collective history and culture.”

Yes, it’s about time, and good news from my home state. When I went to UW-Madison, I was one of about 200 Latino students on a campus of 40,000. This degree would have been a great option for me, although I likely would have stuck with my BA in journalism, because otherwise I would not be able to bring you fast-breaking news stories like the following:

“For the first time in modern American history, most white people live in mixed-race neighborhoods” which “marks a tectonic shift from just a generation ago.”

This is not so much good news for Latinos as much as it is good news because of Latinos. You see, diverse neighborhoods, which are beneficial for society, “have expanded from urban cores into suburbs that once were colored by a steady stream of White flight from inner cities.” And the main reason is that “a soaring Hispanic population powered the diversification.”

You’re welcome, America.

Racially mixed neighborhoods “are increasing the most in the suburbs” and introduce “new groups of often left-leaning voters into typically conservative White-dominated enclaves.”

And speaking of voters, and Hispanics, please note that researchers believe that “young Latino voters will be vital to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.”

That’s also good news, because there is no way that Latinos, so long demonized by the Republican Party, would ever vote GOP.

Um, wait. A recent poll implies that many Hispanic voters are “drifting toward the GOP.”

Apparently, many Latinos, especially older Hispanic men, “preferred the way Trump handled the economy when he was in office to Biden’s performance so far.” I guess they really like that economic collapse and the fact that Trump left office with fewer jobs than when he started, the worst presidential job record since the Great Depression. 

The poll also showed that Latinos often line up with the GOP on “issues ranging from the funding of police departments to the ‘greatness of America’ to the continued use of fossil fuels.” This just goes to show that you can punch people around, blame them for every problem, and even threaten to kick them out of the country, and many of them will say, “I’m going to ignore all that because gay people make me uncomfortable.”

Hell, even Republican Latinos in Congress struggle to keep their GOP colleagues from going full-on xenophobic. So do these old Latino male voters really think the Republican Party is going to give a damn about them?

Sorry, this post started as a compendium of good news but quickly morphed into a list of travesties. So let’s end on a high note.

OK, here’s something:

“While the face of the opioid crisis has predominantly been considered white and rural, overdose deaths among Latinos have skyrocketed in recent years,” nearly tripling over the last decade.

Damn, forget I said anything. Bad news has carried the day.

Better luck next week.

OK, here’s the good news:

I have signed a contract with a publishing house, and my next book should be coming out in early 2024.

Here’s the bad news:

I have just a few months to finish the manuscript, which thus far consists of one page and a truly killer sentence to start the second page.

So this is going to take some work.

As such, I may have to take periodic breaks from this site to devote more time to writing my book. This is one of those occasions.

I will be back in a couple of weeks with a full-fledged post (assuming that I can make it further into my manuscript — say, to page 3).

In the meantime, I will rely on my new good friend, artificial intelligence, to dazzle you with random images of bizarre providence, like this:

See you soon.

People are constantly bitching that the world is getting crazier every day.

OK, they may be right.

But the good news is that the world is not getting any more complex. Because at this point in American culture, we all know exactly where we stand.

Is it a surprise that an unrepentant conman, pathological liar, overt bigot, and fledgling dictator would endanger national security, and then complain that he is the one being oppressed? And yet pundits still express shock at this.

Is it an unexpected twist that the followers of this corrupt megalomaniac would enthusiastically support him and dismiss damning evidence that they can see with their own eyes? It should not be, but we have perfectly rational adults who still think this latest grotesquery will somehow convince the Republican Party to abandon their lunatic messiah. I mean, really, who can possibly believe that?

However, perhaps the most straightforward, most uncomplicated aspect of modern politics is the philosophy of the GOP. This principle can be expressed as the following:

Any allegation against a liberal or a Democrat is sufficient to lock ‘em up. There doesn’t need to be a trail, or formal charges, or any evidence at all. Just a deranged conspiracy theory is proof that the liberal should be imprisoned, or even executed.

In contrast, conservatives are allowed to commit whatever crimes they want, including treason and murder. But any attempt to hold them accountable is a witch hunt. It doesn’t matter if there is overwhelming evidence, or formal procedures that were strictly followed. If you try to prosecute a conservative for anything, they have every right to shoot you.

If you don’t believe me, just ask that guy who marches around with a pig’s head on a stick.

He knows the deal.

Let’s say you were a member of a political party that increased the national debt to astronomical levels. And you did this not by investing in the country’s development or funding programs that benefitted Americans. You did this by cutting taxes for rich people who already have more money than they will ever need.

I assume that you would then scream that the other political party has a spending problem. Furthermore, even though the other party has cut the debt more than you ever have — not just recently but over the course of decades — you would threaten to destroy the economy unless they cut it more.

Yes, you would be a Republican.

Now, this level of hypocrisy is not just galling. It’s pathological. It’s also dangerous and potentially catastrophic, but that’s merely a bonus for the GOP.

Conservatives are way into projection — that is, accusing others of behavior that they themselves indulge in.

For example, studies have shown that white people with a high degree of racial resentment are more likely to be Trump supporters. Despite the fact that racist attitudes permeate the GOP, a majority of Republicans still insist that white people are the ones being discriminated against. Yes, white conservatives who despise minorities say it’s actually the minorities who are racist.

Or consider that “all the threats and violence against Pride in stores is exactly what evangelicals think is happening with their wholly imagined ‘War on Christmas.’” No, crowds of atheists are not lighting Christmas trees on fire in stores. 

But conservatives are too busy smashing up Pride displays to acknowledge that.

Even more disturbingly, we all know that conservatives are spending virtually all their time trying to outlaw drag queens, under the guise that men who dress like women will inevitably rape children. But to my knowledge, no drag queen story hour ever ended in child abuse. Plenty of church services have ended that way, however, and it seems like another youth pastor is arrested every week for molesting kids. And of course, the Catholic Church — which is perfectly happy to lecture everyone on morality and “normal” sexual behavior — covered up reports of “hundreds of clergy members who were accused of sexual abuse … of almost 2,000 children who were harmed over seven decades.”

And that’s just in the state of Illinois.

Meanwhile, the leader of the party of Law and Order is currently facing his second indictment and was recently found liable for sexual assault and defamation, which is interesting for a guy whose catchphrase was “lock her up.”

So why do conservatives project so much? Why do they act in reprehensible ways, and then shriek that it is everybody else who committed those horrible acts?

We need a political psychologist to decipher the Freudian rationales. But until then, we will simply have to endure their constant lecturing, and repeated threats, and loud shrieks about the vile behavior of others.

And we will have to wonder exactly what they are trying to hide.

Well, it appears that the United States has narrowly avoided its first-ever debt default, which would have unleashed an economic cataclysm upon the country and thrown us into an instant recession, as well as destroyed what little remains of our international reputation.

It bears repeating that this crisis was entirely manufactured by right-wing zealots who careened from hypocrisy (for their past willingness to drive up the debt) to insanity (for their willingness to torch the economy) to stupidity (for their inability to grasp how the economy actually works).

Now, you might believe it is a little bit of a problem that the world economy was essentially held hostage by a small group of wild-eyed conspiracy mongers, high school dropouts, and statutory rapists.

But remember, we have to respect the GOP as a serious political party.

Please ignore the fact that just 30 years ago, Republican ideas could be broken down in the following manner:

25%—debatable policy point

25%—selfish nonsense that Republicans convinced themselves into believing

25%—dog whistles and grotesque appeals to the lunatic base

25%—the lunatic base

That’s not the best proportion. In my lifetime, the conservative movement has never had a solid foundation of goals that would actually help most Americans. 

But the percentage has gotten even worse over the years. Today, Republican ideas could be broken down in the following manner:

1%—debatable policy point

9%—selfish nonsense that Republicans convinced themselves into believing

30%—dog whistles and grotesque appeals to the lunatic base

60%—the lunatic base

But hey, at least we didn’t default. This time.

The jargon changes every few years. Over the decades, it’s gone from “bleeding-heart” to “politically correct” to “social justice warrior” to “woke.”

We have no shortage of derogatory terms for people who exhibit compassion toward others.

In contrast, we don’t alter our terminology to describe hardcore right-wingers. The word “sociopath” works just fine.

Of course, there are numerous reasons why conservatives mock those who express concern for others. There is sadism, self-loathing, selfishness, and a few other motivations that don’t begin with the letter S.

But one of the oddest is the bizarre fear of conservatives that any attempt to display basic decency will inevitably lead to widescale cultural weakness and, therefore, societal collapse. Republicans are constantly shrieking that Americans are lazy snowflakes dependent on government handouts, so we need to whip ‘em to keep them tough. In the GOP worldview, businesses that grant paternity leave are turning American men into effeminate wimps and emasculating the entire country in the process.

I’m pretty sure, however, that being too meek is not one of the American populace’s big problems. Look at our political discourse, social interaction, and rate of gun violence.

Does anyone seriously believe that the main issue with Americans is that we are too nice? Really?

But if you insist that keeping one’s nose to grindstone, feet to the fire, and balls to the wall is the only way to ensure Americans behave, you might be interested in a few statistics that show how well that hard-driving philosophy actually works.

For example, red states are less likely to offer government support to their citizens. This keeps their citizens honest and creates a thriving population of happy, prosperous… oh wait.

Red states are pretty much a hellhole when compared to blue states, evidenced by the fact that liberal areas outperform conservative areas in just about every economic or sociological category. 

Even the Republican argument that a red-state existence is better because of the lower cost of living is not entirely accurate. Yes, it is cheaper to live in Mississippi than in Minnesota. But wages are usually lower as well, so it’s at best a tie, or even a slight advantagefor blue states. 

OK, so rugged individualism isn’t such a winner in those cases. 

But surely our approach to healthcare is tops in the world. After all, we don’t have socialized medicine and all the government dependency it fosters, so our citizens must be the healthiest on the planet.

Yeah, you saw that setup coming, didn’t you?

As everyone knows, the United States spends far more on healthcare and gets worse results than every industrialized nation in the world (and several non-industrialized ones), simply because we refuse to accept universal healthcare.

Studies show that just during the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Americans died because we don’t have a system like Japan, Australia, or Finland.

But don’t worry, because “nationwide, many hospitals have grown wealthy, spending lavishly on advertising, team sponsorships, and even spas, while patients are squeezed by skyrocketing medical prices and rising deductibles.”

Still, at least all those sick, destitute people aren’t dependent on big government.

And speaking of poverty, America stands alone when it comes to our high rate of homelessness. Other industrialized countries have homeless citizens, of course. But those nations, big governments all, don’t just have a lot fewer homeless people. They actually try to solve the problem.

In America, we believe that giving people housing will make them soft, even though research has shown that providing free or inexpensive housing with no strings attached is an effective way to reduce homelessness.

No, we won’t be having any of that commie crap here. We would rather have a half-million Americans live on the street, even while there are “hundreds of thousands of vacant properties owned by city and state governments” that just sit there empty.

But at least we’re tough.

In fact, we’re so tough that we are committing suicide in record numbers. Yes, while the rate of suicide has declined in every industrialized nation, America is the “one high-income country [that] is a particular exception to the downward trend.”

And that’s part of a larger development brought on by “years of widening economic inequality, compounded by the pandemic and political storm and stress.” And this development is that “life expectancies have been falling” for Americans, which is odd for a nation that takes such great pride in being exceptional.

Yes, we can’t even keep our own residents alive, but we’re number one!

Our declining life expectancy has opened “a window on a set of pathologies unique to America among developed countries.”

And a root cause of this pathology is the belief that trying to help one another is wrong. In truth, however, this demented credo is only making us weaker.

OK, I totally meant to write about the fact that CNN asked a racist insurrectionist to hold a campaign rally on their network, and then pathetically justified it by saying progressives, and pretty much every decent American, were crybabies who needed to get out of their silos. But it’s just too sad to pile on a network that scraped the lowest point in its history.

So instead I was going to write about how conservative white guys freak out when they feel one second of discomfort and use that icky sensation to justify murdering people who annoy them, and how they panic when facing a sliver of the constant threats that ethnic minorities, women, and gay people endure every day. But then 50,000 commentators made that exact point.

My related topic was that “all strands of the Right—leading Republicans, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base, the donor class—are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence,” and that the GOP “encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to ‘fight back’ against anything and anyone associated with ‘the Left’ by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence” in what can only be called the Rittenhouse effect. But that’s pretty much what a lot of people said, so I left it at that.

As such, I moved on to the fact that “masked members of a white supremacist group” marched toward the U.S. Capitol, even while conservatives got all sad that Biden correctly pointed out that white supremacy is the biggest threat this nation faces. But then I found out that members of Congress have staff members who are members of a group that “expresses Holocaust denialism, white supremacy, white nationalism, pretty strong anti-women bigotry [and] a return to 12-century Catholicism.” And I thought, “Who wants to return to the 12^th century? I thought they were obsessed with the 1950s and maybe the Civil War, but this shit goes back even further.”

In any case, that got me thinking about the statistic that “20% of those who sympathize with Christian nationalism agreed they were ‘willing to fight’ to take the nation back to what they incorrectly believe it always was.” And I wondered how that lined up with the stat that “the importance of religion in the lives of Americans is on the decline,” and that we “are becoming increasingly likely to become religiously unaffiliated” or straight-up atheists.

But just then, I found out that Rudy Giuliani has been accused of rape and may have been selling presidential pardons for $2 million a pop, splitting the profits with that other bigoted ex-politician who was just found liable for sexual assault, and I wondered about those conservatives who insist their movement isn’t misogynistic. And related to that, I wondered why they even bother to say they are against corruption, as they support selling pardons, bribing Supreme Court justices, and engaging in comically overt criminal behavior.

However, I realized that Republicans aren’t so good at uncovering crimes. I mean, the people who could never “lock her up” are unable to even keep track of their own informants. How embarrassing.

So I looked to the border, where conservatives insisted that 489 billion immigrants were massing to surge into the country, and I discovered that the “number of migrants at the southern border has dropped 50% since the end of the pandemic restriction known as Title 42 on May 11.” Talk about a letdown.

Perhaps I should have addressed how Republicans are hypocrites, fine with destroying the economy, and how they appear even gleeful about the idea. 

But it’s more important to note how billionaires are secretly using their vast wealth to set up an oligarchy. The problem with that, however, is that it’s too unbelievable—even if it’s the absolute truth.

At last, I settled on the perfect topic, and it is this:

Scientists have analyzed the odds of a massive asteroid (i.e., the size of the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs) hitting the Earth and killing us all. 

The lead scientist, Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz of the University of Colorado, says that such an event is highly unlikely to happen within the next 1,000 years.

So that’s good news, right?

Ha, we’re not falling for that.

Nice try, Fuentes-Muñoz. But we all know that you’re in the pocket of Big Asteroid, and you’re just covering up the plot by deep-space debris to steal our freedoms.

How’s that for a post?

I won’t say that I’ve told you a million times.

But I will say that I’ve told you a thousand times.

Yes, this is my 1,000^th post on this website. It’s a milestone that I could not have predicted in 2008, when I grabbed the domain name, set up the site, and began my ceaseless, unending quest to scream into the void of the internet.

To give you an idea of how long ago I started this site, one of my first posts was about a young upstart named Barack Obama and how he was poised to win the Latino vote decisively.

And thus my track record of always being right began.

OK, maybe I haven’t always been correct, but my batting average is pretty good. Then again, I am often ranting about bigotry, conservative lunacy, and Trump. So it’s fairly easy to be proven right over and over again.

By the way, the all-time most popular of my 1,000 articles is this piece I wrote for the Huffington Post. It’s about the difference between Día de los Muertos and Halloween. I’m not sure why it went semi-viral, but it got shared a lot, and I still see it pop up in October. Hell if I know why it resonated, but if you write 1,000 articles, one of them is bound to hit.

As for my least popular post, well, it’s probably this one.

In any case, I thank you for reading. Whether you’ve perused all 1,000 of my articles, scanned through a couple of dozen, or are reading for the first time, I appreciate it.

Just know that I intend to keep going as long as I can.

Of course, the chief difference between today and those naïve days of 2008 is that I can now pepper my posts with random AI-generated images to capture your attention—like this one, which I call “Ethereal Eternal Phantasm Number 3.”

Happy 1,000 indeed.

Thanks again for reading.

What is the scariest three-letter combination in the English language?

I would vote for “GOP.” But maybe it’s “CIA.” Or perhaps you would say “MSG” or “NFL,” or for some emotionally complicated reason, “TLC.”

But if you are an easily triggered Republican, the diabolical combo is “ESG.”

That phrase stands for environmental, social, and governance, and it refers to a set of standards for a corporation’s behavior. Socially conscious investors look at an organization’s ESG initiatives — things like carbon footprint, diversity programs, ethics guidelines, and so on — to gauge if it is a business that they want to work with.

This seems pretty straightforward, and it makes sense that, for example, an environmentalist might not want to invest his money with a corporation that’s destroying the planet.

But where you see a principled stand, conservatives see the hideous creep of wokeness.

ESG has become “a lightning rod for the GOP, as the party turns the investing form into an emblem of left-wing politics.”

Republicans believe that anything that promotes racial diversity or combats climate change must be an insidious communist plot to round up all the white Christians and execute them. So they spew “hysterical rhetoric about ‘wokeness’ in response to everything from school shootings to police violence to the Pentagon budget, all while the party struggles to even define what they think the word means.”

Yes, the people who live for culture wars now believe that their old ally — big business — is a fifth column of social justice warriors who are selling out American values and making it impossible for straight guys to buy their products.

As a result, red states are “passing laws blacklisting state investment funds from doing business” with those companies that they claim are pushing “liberal agendas.”

Conservatives are trying to use “their own market influence to try to steer the larger project of American culture-building back in their direction.”

But it’s not going so well.

You see, despite “the increasing pushback against ESG by Republican politicians, including some potential presidential aspirants, and their fossil-fuel industry donors,” many companies view the “the ESG backlash [to] be a bump in the road” that won’t have a real impact. 

Hell, even some CEOs say the ESG “trend is just going to continue growing.”

There’s a good reason for this, and it’s not because Wall Street suits are secret progressives clamoring for Scandinavian-inspired utopias.

No, it’s because ESG is good business. 

This approach to investing “examines a company’s social or environmental impact precisely because it considers non-financial information useful for determining whether the company would deliver strong investor returns.”

Corporate ESG initiatives are designed to help companies operate more sustainably and to create long-term value for stakeholders. And studies have shown that younger consumers take a company’s ESG policies into account before buying their goods or products. 

So in yet another display of spectacular hypocrisy and backwards thinking, it turns out that conservatives are the ones jeopardizing companies’ returns by demanding everyone adhere to their agenda.

Consider that “muzzling ESG activity is causing financial losses – again, which should be contrary to conservative financial principles.” For example, Texas “banned cities from having their funds managed by companies whose policies restricted investment in fossil fuels and weapons.” Because so many banks left the market, and Texas officials “had fewer choices of investment management,” the law wound up costing the state “between $303 million and $532 million extra in interest.”

Wow — owning the libs is not cheap.

Or consider that many experts believe “failing to consider ESG risks and opportunities would more
likely result in a breach of fiduciary duty,” meaning that company leaders are actually being negligent and sabotaging their organizations if they are anti-ESG.

Finally, keep in mind that companies “that get ‘woke’ aren’t going broke — they’re more profitable than ever.”

Even though conservatives will continue to rant against ESG, and blame business failures on leaders who “may have been distracted by diversity demands,” there is no real evidence for the harmful effects of this approach.

Again, the exact opposite is true.

And that’s why the letters “GOP” are far more terrifying than “ESG” will ever be.