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.

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.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Second Amendment.

This poorly written clause has provoked more death and mayhem in this country than any other scrap of the English language. And its homicidal power has only increased in recent decades, as belligerent  dudes insist the right to own an AR-15 is so fundamental, so crucial to liberty, that slaughtered children are just an annoying byproduct of its greatness.

But even though I would like to see the Second Amendment revoked (or at least heavily edited, modified, and clarified), I accept it as the law of the land. You want a gun? Yup, you can get one, no matter how much I personally don’t like it.

So it’s more than a little perplexing to see Second Amendment “absolutists,” the same people who are the first to proclaim how much they love the Constitution, now backtracking, hedging, and wavering in their support for this supposedly sacred right.

These guys believe the Constitution is ala cart, and their belief in any of its principles depends upon how politically inconvenient they are.

Now that their leader — aka Tangerine Palpatine — has mumbled, “You can’t have guns,” many of them are saying, “OK with me, chief! What other theoretically essential values do you want me to abandon?”

Of course, some gun owners have pushed back… meekly and with the respectful tone that they would never adopt if someone were, say, asking them to wear a mask to prevent disease. But it’s a pushback nonetheless.

Our old friends at the NRA felt pressured to say something after a Republican president threatened gun ownership in a way that no Democratic president has ever come close to vocalizing. Remember all that nonsense about Obama taking your guns? The guy never even implied that you can’t have them.

So if you ever needed proof that many Second Amendment advocates are weak-willed hypocrites, here is your proof.

But to be fair, Trump and the most fervent of his hardcore supporters are not hypocrites. That would require them to have principles in the first place.

No, the MAGA faithful think about the Second Amendment the same way they think about all American rights: as something reserved exclusively for them.

In their eyes, the Second Amendment is not for Latinos or liberals or punk rockers who live in cities.

It’s for them — rural and suburban white, straight Christian men who are the God-given owners of this country. They alone receive the benefits of the Constitution, the protection of the government, and the right to say and do whatever the hell they want.

And if you don’t like that, watch out, because they are heavily armed. 

When Trump said gun ownership could be restricted, he clearly wasn’t talking about these guys.

He meant the rest of us.

And that goes for all our rights. They can just be whisked away like they never existed.

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 haven’t said much about Venezuela because I’ve been busy processing the fact that armed government militias are shooting women in the face and getting away with it. And when I’m not dwelling on that grotesquerie, I’m obsessing about the fact that millions of Americans are ok with this development, actively support it in many cases, and insist that a country where governmentalized thugs can murder people who disrespect them is just fine.

Yeah, it’s a lot to ponder.

In any case, the US invaded Venezuela a couple of weeks ago.

This was to stop the flow of drugs, or seize the oil, or end repression, or.. well, who even knows anymore? Certainly not the guy who authorized the incursion. 

Hell, just “a week after the mission to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power, the chief executive of ExxonMobil called the country ‘uninvestable,’ undercutting the economic rationale for the military intervention.”

This shifting of reasons and mess of contradictions was not enough to dissuade an acquaintance of mine, a Latino conservative who plastered my social media with proclamations of how great it was that we bombed Venezuela and captured Maduro.

This acquaintance ended his rhapsodizing with the declaration “I hope we take care of Cuba next.”

I’ve said it before: There is never enough warfare for conservatives.

I wonder if people like this remember the Iraq War, where we overthrew a vicious dictator and then were shocked when the people of that country were not grateful. We were even more surprised when we discovered that rebuilding a country is not as easy as eliminating a second-rate despot.

Even more relevant, I wonder if they know anything about US military intervention in Latin America, which has almost always culminated in violence, death, and suffering for the inhabitants, and never freedom and easy living for the nation we invaded.

Why do they clamor for more of the same, insisting that this time, under the auspices of a volatile ignoramus, it will be different?

Perhaps they would like to know that repression in Venezuela has actually intensified since we kidnapped Maduro, and there is no indication that life will be better for anyone any place where US troops are active.

And speaking of Maduro and how it relates to ICE thugs shooting people in American streets, keep in mind that the “worst thing that Maduro did is just what Trump is beginning to do: killing civilians and blaming them for their own deaths.”

Conservative who agree with Trump that mocking federal officials is grounds for immediate execution should note that the Maduro regime “claimed that the people they murdered were resisting government authority, and that the men who pulled the trigger had been provoked by those whom they murdered.”

Yes, we can either believe our own eyes and intuition, or we can embrace the “conspiracy story that Trump and his advisors are telling: that all evil has to do with immigrants and drugs, and that everyone who wants democracy and human rights in the United States is somehow part of a giant invisible immigration/drug/antifa conspiracy directed from abroad.”

Your call.

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.

OK, so we’re not going to starve our citizens to death after all.

Yeah, America!

The richest nation in the history of the universe has deigned to feed its citizens. We will, however, be skyrocketing everyone’s insurance premiums, or forcing them to go without insurance at all, because… wait, why are we inflicting this suffering on so many people again?

Oh, that’s right. So the top 1% can get more money.

In Trump’s first term, his only legislative victory was a tax break for the rich. That was it for four years. So far in round two of nightmare land, his only legislative victory has been a tax break for the rich.

I sense a pattern.

While the administration has done nothing to lower the cost of living or make the life of an average American even remotely better, Republicans have succeeded in priming conditions for the world’s first trillionaire and throwing one hell of a Great Gatsby-themed party.

Yes, it’s an amazing time to be rich. Consider that Trump’s tax law has fueled a surge in the purchases of private jets.

I’m sure you snagged one, right?

Consider also that for many of our uber-wealthy, “one floating villa is not enough,” so they are buying massive yachts and then smaller, “shadow yachts [to carry] the jet skis, helicopter and submarine” as well as the “smaller boat that zips you into Monaco in time for lunch” in what is essentially a yacht for your yacht. 

Wow, if the economy continues at this pace, it’s just a matter of time before all that wealth trickles right down to you. Definitely. 

Except it doesn’t actually work that way. As we all know, decades of research has proven that cutting taxes for millionaires accomplishes exactly one thing: It makes rich people richer.

Supply-side economics does nothing for the general population, and it may be the single most destructive idea in modern American politics.

The truth is that with the wealth gap becoming an insurmountable chasm, we are creating a “vast American underclassincreasingly dependent on the top 1%.” 

And that’s precisely how the richest Americans want it to be. Republicans are fine with this.

Sure, many Americans continue to be whiny babies about some imaginary concept called “affordability.” But they don’t understand how crucial it is to our nation’s well-being for a trust-fund nepo baby to be happy about buying his fifth mansion.

Now, let me regale you with an anecdote that illustrates how topsy-turvy the country’s economic system has become.

A friend who works in corporate American told me that he was at a company event where the top partners in his firm, millionaires all, blew astronomical amounts of cash on food and drink. It was all on the company dime. 

The problem was that when the bill came, the bean counters at the company demanded answers on how a handful of dudes spent that much money on themselves. The excuse, which the company accepted, is that the waiters at the event were irresponsible in serving the partners when they were so clearly inebriated. Those working class bastards took advantage of the tipsy millionaires.

In essence, unbelievably wealthy guys doing $300 shots blamed the waiters for their over-indulgence. And this came across as perfectly valid.

Clearly, to prevent this horrible abuse from ever happening again, there is only one solution: We have to give those rich guys bigger tax cuts.

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.

We have not lost our democracy. That’s the good news.

We are rapidly losing our democracy. That’s the bad news.

Recently, the New York Times assessed how America is doing on 12 key aspects of democracy. They concluded that we have declined in all dozen areas, which is “a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.”

Ok, so we’re 0-12 when it comes to maintaining the guiding principle of our republic. That’s about as bad as it gets, right?

No, it’s even worse. You see, the Times analysis did not get into some of the grayer areas of America’s decline, such as the fact that in the last year, we have witnessed “a parade of rapid-fire knee-bending that has heralded in a new era of American exceptionalism—one in which we prove that no country capitulates to authoritarian tendencies faster than us.”

However, it’s not all bad news. This week’s election results imply that people are getting sick of Trump and his boorish brand of authoritarianism. 

The Democrats “won every race that was in meaningful contention anywhere in the country.” They won governorships, mayoral races, school board seats, “long-held [Republican] dog-catchers,” and “flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club… just everything.”

It is, of course, far too early to launch into a touchdown dance. But the off-year election’s results shows, at the very least, that GOP dominance is not a given.

In fact, it gives credibility to my assertion that the Democratic Party does not need to move to the right to win elections. Maybe Trump’s victory was not a sea change in American politics and harbinger of conservative ascendancy. More likely, the guy won because of “high inflation, Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to try to run for reelection, an underwhelming Kamala Harris campaign, and an anti-incumbent mood.”

If so, the “anti-MAGA majority has reemerged,” and democracy is not dead yet. 

That’s our hope anyway.