Hispanic Fanatic

In the off chance that you are a MAGA supporter reading this, let me assure you of this:

None of the chaos engulfing America is your fault.

Just because you voted for a felonious rapist who is dragging the country toward autocracy while enriching himself and unleashing misery on the entire world, well, you are not to be held responsible for your choice to return a demented old racist to the White House.

How do I know this?

Well, as far back as Trump’s first election, commentors were falling over themselves insisting that liberals created this mess. The general argument was because progressives dislike racist jokes, all the salt-of-the-earth Americans had no option but to embrace fascism. It really was that simple.

This assumption — that millions of decent Americans were pushed into supporting right-wing insanity because of the woke mob— is still a popular viewpoint.

And it’s not just conservatives who are saying that.

Our old friends the moderate Democrats are insisting that Trump never would have won except for that meddling Bernie Sanders. If only the crazy old man had shut up about wealth inequality and oligarchs crushing us, everything would be great.

Just great. Yup.

The latest form of blaming the left for all things Trumpian presupposes that liberals are wrong to protest or advocate for progressive causes because we come across as too self-righteous or shrill. But we are also wrong to appease or normalizeMAGA demands, because that just encourages them to become more extreme.

OK, got it.

What about using humor to point out the absurdity of this disastrous authoritarian regime? No, we shouldn’t joke either, because that undermines how serious the situation is. But don’t be so serious either because of that first point about coming across as self-righteous.

So don’t say anything. But also reach out to MAGA types to educate them because they deserve our total respect no matter how much they would love to punch us in the face. How we reach out without saying anything is unclear to me.

In any case, the important principle is that progressives are always wrong. Whether we’re using facts to support our case, pointing out the consequences of the GOP agenda, or just asking for police to not shoot unarmed citizens, it’s our fault.

MAGA supporters are not responsible for their own actions, or for the often-sadistic behaviors they gleefully embrace.

It’s those darn leftists who keep pushing conservatives to be more extreme.

Of course, it’s strange that this argument doesn’t work the other way. The many excess of Trump (far more egregious and harmful than anything a liberal politician has proposed) are not carted out as an excuse for progressives moving farther left. Apparently, those liberals who are dabbling with democratic socialism are just whiny babies, and by the way, they are making millionaires feel unloved.

Now, it’s true that no other demographic of adults are ever given this sort of free pass on bad behavior. It’s similar to how struggling white men are never told to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and instead are reassured constantly that the nation will do whatever it can for them (while at the same time telling everybody else to fuck off).

But MAGA is special. Because no matter how much they cheer for the destruction of democracy and the establishment of a fascistic theocracy, it’s an understandable reaction to those real villains: college-educated people who advocate for universal healthcare.

Trump supporters simply have no choice.

No doubt, you’ve heard a lot lately about democratic socialism. That’s when you’re not hearing about communism, which hasn’t been a threat to America since 1989. But don’t tell paranoid old men who perpetually live in the past about that.

In any case, conservatives are playing the linguistic game, which consists of harping on the “socialism” part of that two-word term and insisting this approach to government, which is the system used in the most peaceful, prosperous, and happiest nations on Earth, is synonymous with the crushing tyranny of the USSR and China.

Right-wingers do this all the time. They yell that “Nazi” is short for National Socialist German Workers’ Party, implying that Hitler’s minions were leftists. They point out that the Ku Klux Klan was originally affiliated with the Democratic Party, insinuating that the KKK was a bunch of woke dudes.

This is the equivalent of the grade-school teacher snidely asking, “Can you go to the bathroom? Don’t you mean ‘May I go to the bathroom?’”

And just like that annoying teacher (who clearly hates children), this linguistic pedantry is embarrassing to even acknowledge. I would ask conservatives if their superficial, trite arguments — based on nitpicky grammar, deliberate ignorance, and a delusional view of history — have ever convinced anyone to vote Republican.

I picture a fledgling progressive slapping his forehead in disbelief and shrieking, “I had no idea Goebbels was in a political movement whose German translation includes the word ‘socialism.’ Now I must support ICE shooting people in the street.”

To the conservative mind, it’s just that convincing.

However, this belabored tactic of guilt by association doesn’t seem to be working. Recent surveys show that voters don’t find the term “democratic socialist” nearly as repugnant as the word “MAGA.”

And they are correct to think that.

So here’s some friendly advice for my conservative friends: Stop trying to demonize a phrase that younger people increasingly find appealing, while proving that you have nothing to offer other than fear, anger, and a flop-sweat twisting of words that fools nobody.

Every time you insist “democratic socialism” is synonymous with Mao, it just seems like you also don’t understand the difference between steak and hamburger, or the ocean and a lake, or the Brewers and the Rockies.

The rest of us comprehend reality. Join us here. 

I promise it’s not a communist plot.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that if we had installed a sock puppet as president in 2025, we would be in better shape today.

A sock puppet, or any inanimate object that made no decisions, would never have implemented idiotic tariffs that ravaged the economy, 

A sock puppet would never have launched a war with Iran for vague, confounding, contradictory, arbitrary, and imbecilic reasons, resulting in widespread death and destruction.

Would a sock puppet steal $1.8 billion dollars from the US Treasury and plan to hand it out to thugs and flunkies beholden only to him? Possibly, but not necessarily.

A president who did nothing would be an improvement on a president who willfully makes mystifying, moronic decisions that seem designed to hurt America.

Unfortunately, we do not have a sock puppet for a chief executive. We have a careening, decaying narcissist who “is not good at wars, economics, or geopolitics” but is “amazingly good at corruption.”

Americans are starting to catch on — about 18 months too late, but they are catching on, nevertheless.

The vilest person to ever be president has an approval rating that is sinking faster than a Tesla dropped into a black hole. The only people who still believe in his insanity are the hardcore base.

But that’s a new problem. You see “Trump’s strategy for power has a tighter and tighter hold on fewer and fewer people.” As MAGA withers and dies, it will become even more toxic, without the nominal need to appeal to anyone but zealots who are quite literally willing to die for this repulsive bigot.

As the right-wing “base of support shrinks, the concentration of primary-voting diehards and Cabinet-level dead-enders in the president’s party will only increase.” This means that the flailing despot’s “threats to upend democracy will only grow more intenseas Trump’s faction of MAGA diehards keeps shrinking.”

Basically, these fascistic fucks will try to take the whole damn country down with them.

I know of no solution to their whiplashing destruction. 

Hell, maybe we can talk them into voting for a sock puppet.

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.

Let’s continue the nonstop fun ride that has been 2025 by hyperanalyzing how our country got so fucked up that we clamor for oligarchs to rule us while simultaneously cheering the murder of those same oligarchs.

There’s some deeply Freudian shit going on there. And it’s not just me saying this.

Political experts believe that the MAGA movement “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.”

Basically, giving half a damn about your neighbors is a sucker’s move, and voting Republican means you can embrace all your “libidinous instincts” and allow “malign energies to express themselves in action.” In this way, conservatives gain a “kind of psychic relief—to lose oneself in a radical movement and to express feelings normally prohibited by society.” 

Damn, that is a lot of psychological baggage to process. So here is a simpler way to break down Trump’s appeal to a certain type of voter: These guys want chaos.

Many Trump fans “may not feel horribly mistreated so much as they resent what they perceive as the better treatment accorded to people they don’t think deserve it.” These voters love the guy who has “run three times as the candidate of rage and grievance,” and they aren’t “turned off by Trump’s aggression and his threats because his brash rhetoric is part of the appeal.”

For those seeking madness and the obliteration of binding societal norms, “the GOP has become the party of anti-establishment rulers—swashbuckling outsiders who pledge to use their power to burn down the system.”

The insecure, the aggrieved, and the perpetually pissed off see Trump’s incoherence and boorish behavior as a plus, because “showing off flaws has become a way to reassure those voters—and there are many of them—who hate criticism.” These lovers of discord believe that “he who misbehaves is popular; those who dare to preach become unbearable.” Hence, all the bubbling rageat the self-righteous liberals who can’t take a joke, are hypersensitive, or say trans people aren’t freaks.

Of course, this “right-wing populist movement so animated by its opposition to left-wing ‘snowflake culture’ is itself a collective of self-avowed victims” who bitch and whine nonstop about how they are horribly oppressed and constantly disrespected.

Meanwhile, true believers of right-wing Christian nationalism are openly laughing at the angry rubes who voted for Project 2025, which turns out to have been the agenda all along.

So what will happen to these furious, intolerant voters when Trump fails to improve their lives in any way? Well, I’m sure they will blame liberals for not warning them, and then proceed angrily on their way, oblivious to their desire to destroy America, torches in hand, always ready to burn it all down to the ground.

If only there were some kind of image that served as an instant metaphor for 2025.

Oh well, maybe something will lend itself.

In any case, this year has started with two political developments that were completely predictable to anyone who has paid the smallest bit of attention to America over this past hellish decade.

First, there is the bitchy, snippy caterwauling erupting between MAGA extremists and smug billionaires. When your political party consists of factions that have nothing in common other than a hatred of liberals, it is inevitable that disagreements will arise. But when those factions are led by power-hungry lunatics who default to hostility and anger, it is even more inevitable that they will turn on one another. These are people who kamikaze anyone who is not in lockstep with their narcissistic vision, and whose main method of communication is threatening violence.

Did anybody seriously think they were going to play well with one another?

The second predictable development is that our beloved president-elect, who was born into excessive privilege and despises the lower classes that worship him, would side with his wealthy peers over the riff raff. Come on, the guy doesn’t need their votes anymore. And he is always going to support those who can help him secure power. 

So did anyone believe he would diss the world’s richest man, who bankrolled his campaign and holds an absurd amount of political and social power, in favor of a horde of random xenophobes who have little money and even less influence?

Of course, the dawning realization of the MAGA faithful that their messianic leader will do nothing to help them is likely to be a slow ordeal. But at some point, they will see him golfing with his rich buddies, leading his cabinet of billionaires (the wealthiest presidential administration of all time) in discussions of how to enrich themselves, and hording even more of the country’s resources for the one-tenth of one percent.

And they will wonder, “Hey, when is he finally going to help me afford health care?”

Who wants to tell them the answer?

I recently wrote about the women who believe supporting the Republican Party will somehow protect them from the wrath of angry right-wing men.

But now let me discuss an issue closer to home: the rise of the MAGA Latino.

Seriously—what the fuck is wrong with those guys?

Ponder the cognitive dissonance (a phrase that comes up a lot when discussing contemporary politics) that is necessary to justify voting for a man who has repeatedly, gleefully said that he wants to throw anyone who looks like you into a concentration camp. It’s majestic.

Of course, studies have pinpointed three main reasons why someone named Hernandez or Rodriguez would vote for xenophobic bigots.

These include the fact that Latinos still lag in educational achievement, and the diploma gap has become perhaps the chief indicator of whether someone votes Democrat or Republican. Basically, people who go to college are more liberal, and people who stop with high school are more conservative, regardless of race or ethnicity.

Also, male Latinos are more likely to be drawn to GOP misogyny because “if you’re a man in a low-status group, masculinity may become more important to claiming high status.” In essence, a lot of Latino men like the false machismo of Republican blowhards.

Latinas are far less likely to fall for this nonsense, and “like female voters across ethnic categories [they] were repelled by Trump’s disrespect toward women and his bragging about sexual assault.”

Yes, many pundits are still offering “the tortured and narrow analysis that Latino votes for Donald Trump correlate with ‘economic anxiety,’ but reactionary sexual politics and religiosity are usually missing from media commentary on this political shift.” 

The final reason is that many Latinos believe that if they go along with white supremacy, they will soon be allowed into the powerful majority. About a third of Latinos “see themselves as a group similar to European American immigrants who can join the mainstream.” A lot of Latinos think that if Italians and Greeks were eventually considered white, maybe they will be too.

Yes, that’s a sad motivator, but it’s a very real one.

The Republican Party knows this, which is why they employ “language that is designed to trigger racist stereotypes associated with whiteness.” Conservatives are well aware that “this status anxiety is inseparable from this racist hierarchy.” 

And how has appeasing white conservatives worked out for Latinos? Well, the Trump campaign has threatened to create the largest deportation program in history, end birthright citizenship, and install neo-Nazis in positions of power. So they are clearly interested in the needs of the Latino community. 

No, the Republican Party doesn’t care that a record number of immigrants have become citizens, or that young Latinos hate the GOP, or that most Latinos still vote for Democrats.

They know that they just need to chip away at the Latino vote to ensure victory. So they can go right on blaming Latino immigrantsfor mass shootings, shrieking about the “great replacement” theory, hanging out with militant white supremacists, and encouraging white Americans to fear everyone with brown skin.

Because their approach is working. The bigotry and “radicalization of the GOP on the issue of race isn’t sending it down some entirely new, irreversible path of stigma among communities of color.”

They are doing just well enough with Latinos to hang in there. And many Latinos are just fine with MAGA.

Sin vergüenza.

So it’s October, and in the spirit of Halloween, I’m going to write something scary.

Ha—you thought I was going to shout, “GOP!” or “MAGA agenda!”

That crossed my mind. But aside from the fact that it’s an obvious setup, I don’t have the time or energy to list all the terrifying ways that Republicans are trying to destroy this country. Also, some of their horrifying ideas are so ludicrous that they veer into black comedy or parody. And believe me, these guys are no laughing matter. 

But the chief reason is because I have to take my monthly break from writing posts to focus on my book, which has a deadline of mere weeks from now.

So instead I present you with this real-life horror show. 

South America is home to the ghost bird, a predator that looks like this:

Again, this is a real animal.

Sleep easy knowing that this flies through the air at night.

I will be back next week with a full post.

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?

There’s a lot that progressives don’t understand about conservatives.

Why the screaming rage? Why the celebration of ignorance? Why the disdain for all non-fetal life? Why the virulent racism, misogyny, and homophobia? Why the hypocrisy, corruption, and… ok, this list is getting way too long.

In contrast, conservatives seem to have just one aspect of liberalism that perplexes them.

Why don’t progressives wave huge Biden flags and paint their trucks with images of the president’s face?

After all, if you don’t fly a massive MAGA banner and drive a pick-up adorned with images of Trump and Jesus playing golf, are you really a Republican?

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