Hispanic Fanatic

These are magical times.

I don’t mean this is an era of enchantment and wonder.

I mean we are living in a maelstrom of religious extremism, supernatural mumbo-jumbo, and delusional leaps of faith.

For example, you might believe that a sociopathic billionaire is devoting all his energy to eliminating government waste, with no benefit to him personally, out of the goodness of his heart and fierce patriotism. Oh, he will police himself about any conflicts of interest, he will perform most of this work in secret with no accountability (which isn’t suspicious at all), and the average citizen will benefit from his magnanimity.

To trust in this absurd scenario is indeed some powerful hocus pocus.

But it fits with national mood. This is a culture where over a third of people don’t believe in evolution, and the man in charge of the nation’s health thinks vaccines cause your brain to explode.

The truth is that “anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe.”

We’re talking about “health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties … that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well.”

Over the past decade, there has been a lot of talk about America crumbling like the Roman Empire. But some historians believe we are more like 1910s Russia, where Rasputin and various mystics tried to prop up a failing monarchy but only accelerated its downfall. 

Consider that “like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational.” Like those beleaguered Slavs of a century ago, our trusted institutions are floundering, and the entire world is on the verge of widespread global conflict.

Unlike those Russians, however, we “exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time,” with the result that “techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand.” So by some measures, we are even worse off then they were.

The result is that “uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts.” And the loudest and most narcissistic of these walking Dunning-Kruger samples insist that they alone can fix all of our problems with minimal effort.

But eventually, shit gets real, and fast. Refusing a vaccine “might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.” 

People who believe that crystals cure cancer or that Jesus will swoop in and save us are betting the country’s existence on irrational hope and desperate prayers. They will soon learn that America “cannot function without experts in every field,” and that attempts to purge scientists, well-educated leaders, and competent professionals “is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.”

This nationwide decline in logic and the embrace of the supernatural makes me think of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist who was a favorite of hard rocks icons from Led Zeppelin to Ozzy Osbourne.

Crowley’s philosophy was a weird mashup of yoga, astrology, mysticism, and made-up gibberish. He conducted rituals that included pentagrams, sacrificial altars, and something called “sex magick.”

Yes, it’s all very metal. But it’s not the best guide for how to tun a country.

Crowley believed that “magic is will made manifest.” He insisted that when you focus your intention or desire with enough conviction and energy, your willpower can create real, tangible change in the world. 

How is this different from the belief system of hardcore Trump supporters? 

They insist that Trump will solve everything and bring on a new golden age for America, with no more effort than a wave of his hand, or more accurately, the signing of a couple dozen executive orders. They believe he can do it all through sheer willpower and God-given inspiration. Basically, MAGA views Trump as a fucking wizard. 

Consider that almost two-thirds of Christians voted for Trump in November. And this pious demographic is now gleefully rooting on billionaires who are cutting off aid for starving children, cackling at “the kind of brutality made notorious by Abu Ghraib guards,” and exulting “in the repatriation of their fellow believers into the care of regimes poised to kill them.”

Ultimately, their high priest, their orange sorcerer, will go down in flames. But he will drag the whole country down with him, and no magic will repair the nation.

Abracadabra.

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.

I don’t want to be a hater.

But I will now offer the mildest of critiques to everyone’s favorite demographic: the white working class.

Who doesn’t love these guys?

Yes, we know that Trump made gains with every racial demographic, but these “small deviations from long-term minority voting patterns could be a short-term blip that has not truly transformed the GOP’s voter base,” which is “hardly a multiracial coalition.”

In fact, the white working class remains the cornerstone of the Republican Party. Seriously, “if Democrats think they can win back the loyalty of the working class, they likely should think again.” After all,  “under Biden, Democrats adopted one of the most pro-working class policy agendas in recent political memory, enacted much of it — and accrued no electoral benefit.” Meanwhile, the GOP’s “attention to the white working class is overwhelmingly symbolic” in that Trump presented “nothing substantive on policy” that would actually help these voters. Instead, what our president-elect “essentially offered the working class were attacks on undocumented immigrants, which his campaign blamed for much of the nation’s ills.”

And while a disturbing number of black and Latino voters were down with demonizing immigrants, who do you think really responded to this campaign strategy? 

Yeah, take your time analyzing that one.

White working class voters made it clear that they were far more interested in outlawing trans people and keeping Muslims out than in preserving democracy, but every conservative, most of the media, and a lot of progressives still excused this hate-voting with the same tired excuses: economy anxiety, cruelly left behind, felt talked down to, and blah blah blah.

We were told — lectured really — that we needed to respect and listen to white working class voters. They had no choice (none at all!) but to vote for the guy who boasted that he would be a dictator.

But these voters “aren’t five-year-olds who have to be cajoled into behaving themselves.” For all the talk about respecting the white working class, there was little acknowledgement that when “you respect people, you also hold them responsible for the choices they make.” It’s maddening, hypocritical, and “infantilizing to assume” that white working class voters  “aren’t or shouldn’t be interested in things like America’s democratic traditions.”

So which is it? Should we respect them and pay attention to their opinions? Or should we coddle them and excuse their ignorance?

And it is ignorance, because their hero is already backtracking on his absurd promise to bring down grocery prices. Every progressive in the country said that the incompetent buffoon wouldn’t follow through on this pledge, but we were told to shut up and stop being elitist.

And speaking of being elitist, we’ve learned that progressives are far too woke for the white working class, and we need to knock that nonsense off. However, this is yet another way in which the fawning of the white working class for authoritarianism has been excused.

You see, “anti-woke” voters basically said, “Those leftists claimed that white men have done some terrible shit throughout history. This has enraged me so much that I have no choice but to vote for a white man who will do some terrible shit today.” 

Of course, people will say that I am being simplistic by blaming the white working class for its parochialism and lack of education. That’s possible. 

But it’s also possible that media figures are overcomplicating things and becoming apologists for horrific choices. Perhaps it is too disturbing to admit that bigotry and misogyny are prevalent in every demographic and especially strong in the white working class. It is more comforting to say it’s the pompous college-educated progressives and hypersensitive minorities that are exaggerating and out of touch. This viewpoint, which its practitioners love to portray as insightful and contrarian, is in fact the prevailing opinion and a strong reinforcement of the status quo. It’s also a lazy excuse.

But hey, what do I know? I’m not a member of the white working class, so my opinion is null and void.

I hope you guys know something that I don’t know, because we are all in this together.

I really don’t know why all of you are freaking out.

Our tariff-loving, immigrant-hating president has picked only the most qualified, most intelligent, most principled people for his cabinet. Yeah, one of them is probably a Russian asset, another is determined to destroy the agency he is poised to lead, and another thinks vaccines are witchcraft. 

But they are all likely to be confirmed for their posts, so the Senate must know what it’s doing, right?

OK, if that doesn’t reassure you, this fact should help you sleep at night: A bunch of guys who are just a few years removed from getting drunk on prom night now have access to all your personal information, and they (and their oligarch overlord) will decide who actually gets Social Security checks.

Damn you seem nervous.

Well, that is understandable, because our seething cauldron of president and his zealot followers are frantically trying to “punch their way to a first-round knockout” by shocking and awing the hell out of the rest of us. The good news is that if we are able to withstand all this sound and fury, we may find that these right-wing lunatics are “utterly unprepared for a 15-round grueling slog” and ultimately give up, resigning themselves to endless rounds of golf and the hero worship of red-state yokels. But the “pessimistic take is that the first-round knockout might happen.”

For a metaphor that doesn’t involve boxing, let’s turn to the professor of the moment, Timothy Snyder, who writes the following:

“Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.”

In truth, it doesn’t matter if it’s cars or boxing. Or both.

Any comparison you can make is terrifying.

It might shock you to know that this site is not a big money maker. Considering that I run no ads, don’t charge a subscription fee, and don’t hawk anything other than my books, it would indeed be mystifying if I were pulling in the big bucks.

It’s also no surprise to find out that that I do not come from money. I was raised by a single mom, an immigrant from El Salvador, and I grew up in a blue-collar town in America’s heartland. No, there were not a lot of trust-fund kids in my crowd.

So I make my living by writing economic content and business analysis. This week, I was called into an emergency meeting to discuss Trump’s plan to pause all federal funding. 

Nobody, including people who work in the White House, seemed to know what this latest dashed-off order actually meant. What functions and organizations were getting their funding cut off? Was this effective immediately? How long of a pause are we talking about here? Are Republicans trying to kill people or are they just morons indifferent to the consequences of their ill-conceived actions? OK, that last question was mine, and I kept it to myself, but I’m sure other people were thinking it.

And please note that this meeting didn’t even cover Trump’s sociopathic attack on immigrants, belligerent threats to allies, bellicose threats of revenge, and bizarre indifference to people dying in plane crashes.

Yes, we are not even two weeks into the Trumpian Era’s encore, but we are overwhelmed. We are subsumed under a nonstop deluge of hatred, ignorance, childish foot stomping, and random cruelty. Any attempt to keep up with the cascading imbecility is both nauseating and futile. The sludge is rising and threatening to drown us.

During this business meeting, a friend of mine muttered an aside. She was likely talking about the crushing amount of work being flung at us. Or perhaps she was assessing the frazzled state of America under Trump. Or maybe she was just summing up what we all feel about our 21^st-century existences.

“This is no way to live,” she said.

I can’t say that she was wrong.

I gave the following prompt to an AI image generator:

“A flag for the new nation that has turned from democracy to authoritarian kakistocracy.”

This is what it came up with:

In honor of our new administration, allow me to quote from the historian Heather Cox Richardson at length:

The vision of the U.S. as a hellscape that can only be fixed by purging the government of Democrats does not reflect reality.

The country that President Joe Biden and his Democratic administration will leave behind when they leave office is in the best shape it’s been in since at least 2000.

No U.S. troops are fighting in foreign wars, murders have plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses have dropped sharply, undocumented immigration is below where it was when Trump left office, stocks have just had their best two years since the last century. The economy is growing, real wages are rising, inflation has fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment is at near-historic lows, and energy production is at historic highs. The economy has added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.

The chief economist of Moody’s Analytics says, “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”

Let’s see what Trump does with all this.

As I mentioned last week, I reside in Los Angeles, and we are currently living through a full-on cataclysm. 

Last week, my family and I checked into a hotel near Disneyland (the ultimate indignity) because the air quality in our neighborhood was so bad. It was also a precaution to avoid waking up to a house on fire.

We’re back home now, and our place is intact. But we know people who were not so fortunate.

One of my friends lost her house to the Altadena fire. When I asked how she was holding up, she responded, “All I know is that dry January can fuck right off.”

Indeed, this is a time for heavy drinking in LA.

It is not, however, a time to play politics, but we’re Americans, so of course that is exactly what we will do.

Our good friends in the GOP are threatening to withhold federal aid unless we all agree to become Republicans. They also want to teach us a lesson, and are openly questioning whether we “deserve” assistance.

This is what debauched inhumanity looks like.

It also hypocritical, because the federal government has never placed conditions on disaster aid for red states. And let’s not forget that for decades now, California has been “literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.”

We can also question the religious bone fides of those Christians who revel in the death and destruction afflicting America’s second-largest city. Hey, it’s what Jesus would have done, right?

There is also the fact that our president-elect and his unelected billionaire sidekick are spewing conspiracy theories, blatant lies, and idiotic proposals at a speed faster than any wildfire. That always helps.

And if anyone wonders whether conservatives are making even the slightest attempt to distance themselves from the bigotry that has long defined the Republican Party, we have right-wingers shrieking about lesbians, black people, and DEI all causing the fires. Apparently, these are more foundational causes for a natural disaster than climate change, which as we all know, doesn’t even exist. Nope.

Now, there have been legitimate questions about how prepared California’s leaders were for this inevitability. Because I’m not in a cult, I’m willing to criticize Democrats if they indeed messed up (we need more information to be sure about that). 

But I find it ironic that conservatives are questioning the competence of Democratic leaders. After all, Trump’s response to the Covid pandemic was so abysmal, clownishly inept, and homicidal that whole libraries could be devoted to the books that will inevitably be written about his administration’s incompetence. This is a glaringly obvious glass-houses situation.

But then again, nobody even remembers Covid. It’s like the January 6 attacks on the Capitol. Neither one of them ever happened.

In any case, LA’s firefighters — yes, even the gay and black ones — will continue to battle the inferno. After the fires are extinguished, the city will rebuild.

And I’m sure Republicans will be focused on recovery, solutions, and moving forward.

Or they’ll continue complaining about, I don’t know, people communicating in sign language or something equally insane.

Yes, you can count on the GOP to keep things in perspective.

In the wake of the right-wing takeover of America, we have learned from astute members of the media that voters hate wokeness, despise the Democratic Party, and demand that liberals listen — for just one goddamn minute! — to real Americans and their concerns.

All of this is grimly hilarious, in that these media figures are being paid real-life dollars to hammer out think pieces that regurgitate each other’s lazy ideas and baseless assumptions.

If Kamala Harris had persuaded an additional 1% of the electorate to vote for her, she would have won the popular vote, possibly won the electoral college, and earned the respect of these same pundits who would be praising her for bringing Beyonce on stage instead of snarling that progressives live in blue bubbles.

The fact is that “the overwhelming evidence we have from years of pre-election polling, issue priority surveys, international trends, and focus groups is that the Democrats, like incumbents across the democratic world, lost the trust of voters on the economy, mostly due to inflation.”

The idea that Americans were so enraged by DEI that they voted for Trump is based on “a fictional account of the past, a handful of indefensible analytic leaps, and easily debunked scapegoating.”

Of course, there were definitely Americans who voted for Trump based on his hatred for anyone or anything that doesn’t place the white Christian straight male at the center of the universe, and I will write about those types of voters next week.

But the thesis that the Democrats would have won if only they were more like Republicans is highly suspect. And while I am no expert on campaigning or political strategy, I have to wonder if it is the wisest approach for Democrats to sell out their few remaining principles and become more like the GOP in a futile attempt to convince white blue-collar men to not hate them, when in truth, Harris lost swing voters because of the motherfucking price of eggs and not because trans people can pick their own bathrooms in certain states.

One could argue that Democrats should double down “on what produced such significant political gains for the party,” which are college-educated voters and young people who haven’t completely given up on the future. In fact, given that the last four presidential elections “have gone Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican — which hasn’t happened in America since the late 19th century — maybe they should just wait for an inevitable anti-Trump backlash.”

Yeah, maybe it’s best to chill on throwing the progressive base under the bus, which wouldn’t be the electoral bonanza that the Democratic establishment imagines.

One final thought: Studies have shown that our sense of morality shifts with the seasons. People are more likely to align with conservative ideals during the spring and fall, which is when anxiety levels peak. During these times, people “tend to be more distrustful, more xenophobic and more likely to conform,” all of which are traits of the Trumpian mindset.

So that explains it. We just need to move our elections to July.

Economic anxiety sure justifies a fuck of a lot, doesn’t it?

According to exit polls, the chief reason we have a convicted felon for president is because so many Americans were tense about their grocery bills, rent payments, and cost of gas.

The economy is booming, but many of our fellow citizens think the Trump era was better. This is incorrect, and it’s also a bizarre form of nostalgia mixed with repression (i.e., “that pandemic never happened!”).

However, it is undeniable that many Americans are struggling. Of course, the main cause of that is a wealth gap so massive that it boggles the mind. It’s ironic that people are finally catching on to the fact that the uber-rich are the only ones who have benefitted from the wealth redistribution that started under Reagan, but their solution is to vote for the guys who want to exacerbate that inequality even further.

Yes, the day after Trump won the election, “the wealth of the world’s 10 richest people soared by a record amount.” In less than 24 hours. these oligarchs became “a record $64 billion richer from Trump’s reelection.”

I’m sure that is a source of great comfort to those voters who complained that they can’t cover their underwater mortgage. Speaking of which, what will happen to those people who sold out their principles for the promise of cheaper gas? How will they react when prices do not go down, but skyrocket (which will happen if Republicans implement their hairbrained economic policies)?

You see, the Trump has “no policy plan for cheaper gas or cheaper eggs.” His goal “is to let an unelected Elon Musk run roughshod over the government, along with every other crazy radical Project 2025 right-wing fever dream, all while Trump pursues his own personal grievances.”

Of course, the economy will likely hum along for another year, maybe two, during which Trump will take credit for the second straight good economy that he has inherited from a Democratic president. Then all bets are off.

And all those voters who bemoaned the high cost of eggs will be forced to answer the question of whether they even like eggs all that much, or if they just wanted a white guy who would promise them the world, rather than a black woman who had an annoying cackle.

Indeed, progressives have “received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs,” but for those of us attuned to history, we cannot help but think of earlier eras “when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.” 

It’s disturbing, so unsightly, to discover how easily Americans are bought off.

And soon, they will discover that they have made a truly horrendous deal. There will be no lower prices or inexpensive goods or affordable housing.

There will be “a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.” And there will be the sound of billionaires lighting hundred-dollar bills and laughing, laughing, laughing.

I believe it was the philosopher Loki of Asgard who said, “It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation…. You were made to be ruled.”

Well said, Loki, well said.

There is a reason that we create stories about heroes. Our natural tendency is to cave in to fear, run away from trouble, and let someone else take charge. Heroes are rare, and as such, they are inherently more interesting than the vast majority of people who let their anxiety rule their actions. Heroes are inspirations to us, the cowering majority.

Fear is powerful and innate. It is difficult to overcome, and even more difficult to reason with. 

Our recent debacle of an election proved, as if there was any real doubt, that if you scare people enough, they will turn to you for help. They will let you rule.

Trump said Haitians were eating cats and dogs, and this resonated far more than Harris’ proposals to help people buy a house. This is fear in action (it’s also hatred, ignorance, stupidity, racism, and other assorted vile behaviors, but that’s a topic for another post).

People who are honest about Trump’s victory know that “anger and fear were going to work in this election, whether you’re afraid of immigrants or afraid of people who are trans.” Yes, maybe progressives believed that “everyone’s better angels would prevail,” but “the better angels went on vacation when Donald Trump came down the escalator, and they haven’t returned.”

It’s a fearful country, a terrified nation.

Trump’s “promises of fixing what he called a broken country — even if it means abandoning long-held principles — was the whole point.” Conservatives believe it is better to let an addled lunatic do whatever he wants if it makes their fear subside, even temporarily. And Trump has gotten millions of Americans and his entire political party to fall into line, evidenced by the fact that “moderate Republicans used to occasionally criticize Trump’s most outlandish behavior, [but] fealty to Trump is now almost uniform among the GOP.”

These are some seriously petrified motherfuckers.

Well, the nation’s voters are going to get what they asked for. Of course, they probably won’t like what comes next. Indeed, vast swaths “of the Trump majority will soon have cause for second thoughts,” because if GOP’s plans are implemented, the “resulting pain is likely to be felt throughout American society.”

But Americans voted for fear. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get.