Hispanic Fanatic

Hey, remember Ronald Reagan?

Sure you do. He was the devil.

Woops, I meant to say that he was the 40th president of the United States whom many people consider the last great Republican leader. Well, it turns out that he was also an unrepentant bigot.

Hey, remember the Tea Party?

Yeah, they were the band of rabid racists who freaked out because America elected a black man.

Sorry, I meant to say they were the highly principled patriots who protested rampant government spending. Well, it turns out that they were actually hate-filled hypocrites who latched onto a convenient excuse to spew irrational, prejudicial nonsense.

In both cases, present-day conservatives shrug and say, “Who could have known?”

Yet all the clues were there, and even at the time, lots of progressives said Reagan was a racist and the Tea Party were lunatics who hated ethnic minorities.

But today’s GOP insists it’s a left-wing lie that racism has had a cozy home within its party’s confines for, oh, the past 50 years or so. Just ignore the Southern Strategy and Nixon’s anti-Semitism and people hanging Obama in effigy and hard data that shows Trump’s win was fueled by xenophobia more than any other factor and… well, what do you have?

OK, there are real-life Nazis in the Republican Party and GOP congressmen praising white supremacists and nationalistic terrorists gunning down Latinos.

But besides that, what do you have?

Yes, I’ll give you the fact that Trump has hurled racial slurs at members of Congress — insults that would get him fired at any normal job. And it’s true that racial resentment correlates with voting Republican. And yeah, hate crimes have increased since Trump was elected, especially in places where he held campaign rallies. And Fox News spotlights white men who demean immigrants and praise white homogeneity. And more than half of all Americans say the president is flat-out racist.

But really, isn’t all that just coincidence?

No? Not even a little bit?

Um, no.

It is clear to everyone in America that plausible deniability is gone.  You simply can’t say that you don’t know.

At this point, if you support Trump, there are only four possibilities:

1. You are a racist
2. You are supportive of a racist in exchange for a bigger tax refund or the achievement of some vague conservative goal (like Supreme Court justices who still think it’s 1959)
3. You put up with a racist because you’re in too deep, and to admit your error in voting for this corrupt fraud opens yourself up to a flurry of “told ya so” by those damn liberals
4. You have suffered a grievous brain injury and don’t know what the fuck is going on

But to say the president is not a bigot, or to dispute the cancer of racism that has a chokehold on the modern Republican Party, is to indulge in fantastical thinking that can only lead to more chaos and, eventually, to a searing rendering of the American nation itself.

Because you know the truth. Let’s all stop denying it.

Part of being American is expecting that on any given day, you will be involved in a shootout.

Hell, most of us just assume that, inevitably, we’ll be crouched under a desk, ducking behind a pew, or sprinting across traffic to flee gunfire. Or maybe we’ll be in active-engagement mode and exchanging shots with a rifle-wielding assailant because there are so many, you know, good guys with guns keeping us safe… yup.

Now, according to our favorite right-wingers, you are most likely to be gunned down by a bloodthirsty Latino “illegal,” or a wild-eyed Muslim immigrant. And if they don’t get you, there are Antifa thugs eager to bash in your head, because we all know that leftists are the most violent people in America.

Oh wait… in truth, only about 3 percent of politically motivated homicides are carried out by leftists. On the other hand, over 70 percent “of U.S. extremist-related murders in the past decade were committed by right-wing extremists, including white supremacists.”

So yeah, a white guy with a gun and an agenda is a lot more dangerous than just about anybody else in this nation. 

In fact, the FBI says that a majority of the domestic-terrorism cases that they’ve investigated “are motivated by some version of what you might call white-supremacist violence.” 

Yeah, we might call it that.

We might also call it a growing threat to the stability of civilization. Because white supremacy is a not just a problem within the United States, but is “part of a global network of white nationalist radicalization and violence.”

Studies show that in many nations, “terrorism does increase with immigration,” just like hardline conservatives insist, but in a murderous irony, this is true only with regard to “homegrown right-wing terrorism.”

And as the shooting in El Paso showed us, there are plenty of homegrown right-wing terrorists eager to enforce their homicidal versions of racial purity. Latinos, in particular, seem to be a popular target at such times.

However, it’s important to note that “recent racist violence in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Europe is linked by the shared conspiracy that white people are being displaced from their home countries.” All around the world, white supremacists who share this paranoid vision believe the only proper response is “to create a violent societal collapse, that will lead to apocalyptic end times, and a race war, and then eventually to restoration and rebirth.”

In America, that has led to a cavalcade of xenophobic freaks who are“part of a larger ecosystem,” but are united in their desire “to outdo Timothy McVeigh.” And as some experts on white nationalism have proclaimed, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Wow, that’s all pretty grim. But fortunately, our nation’s leaders are determined to fight this growing scourge.

Actually, what I meant to say is “determined to deny that the problem even exists.” Yes, I get those concepts confused sometimes.

It just so happens that “a leaked memo reveals the GOP’s strategy” for fighting militant racism, which is to “point the finger at the left and minimize the role of white supremacy at all costs.”

OK, that’s not quite what we had in mind. 

But you see, it is simply not politically beneficial for Republicans to admit that some of their most enthusiastic followers — white people with a high degree of racial anxiety — may be plotting to shoot up the place. In addition, a long history of “racially inflammatory views blurs the line between conservatism and outright white supremacy, making it very difficult for conservatives to police the boundaries between the two.”

Maybe that’s one reason a conservative can get on television and proclaim that “white supremacy is a hoax,” and “actually not a real problem in America.”

How’s that for bravely confronting a problem head-on?

In summary, let me leave you with this little anecdote. 

Recently, a neo-Nazi was arrested for threatening to murder a Latina and her family, stating in completely unambiguous language that he would “stop at nothing” until the “entire worthless Latin race is racially exterminated.” After pledging allegiance to Hitler, the man declared, “Spanish and all Spanish speaking people illegal.”

He ended his threat by saying, “I thank God every day that President Donald Trump is president and that he will launch a racial war and crusade to keep all the n—–s, spics, and Muslims and any dangerous non-white or ethnically or culturally foreign group in line.”

Now imagine thousands, perhaps millions, of this guy.

Just imagine it.

I’ve been a lot of things in my life. Among them are the following: 

A son

A quiet kid

An opinionated adult

A husband

A father

A bad guitarist

An aspiring writer

A published author

A sullen Gen Xer

A Monty Python fan

A Latino

And now, thanks to our current president, I can add the following: 

A target

You see, there can be no doubt — if there ever was — that Hispanics are not just objects of derision and scapegoats for America’s problems. In conservative circles, we’ve had those roles covered for decades now.

But in Trump’s America, we are also human bullseyes for paranoid racists with access to heavy firearms. And considering that there are thousands (perhaps millions) of paranoid racists storing up millions (perhaps tens of millions) of guns… well, it is not a time to sit back and get comfortable if your last name ends in Z or if you bare even a slight resemblance to Salma Hayek.

We all know that the El Paso gunman who murdered 22 people carried out the “deadliest attack targeting Latinos in recent American history.”

The gunman “drove more than 10 hours … specifically to find and kill Latinx people.” He wrote a racist, xenophobic manifesto “posted online minutes before the massacre, in which he warned about a ‘Hispanic invasion’ of Texas.”The document also bemoaned the increasing Latino population and included “a decision by its writer to target Hispanics after reading a right-wing conspiracy theory asserting Europe’s white population is being replaced with non-Europeans.”

And, oh yeah, the El Paso shooter came right out and told a detective after his arrest “that he was targeting Mexicans when he opened fire at a Walmart.”

But according to conservatives, this is just total coincidence. And also, Trump and Fox News have nothing to do with this despite their constant screeching about immigration and labeling Mexicans as “rapists” and throwing around the exact terms the gunman used and demonizing Latinos every single chance they get. And another thing, I am the real racist for pointing out these facts and why can’t we all just be nice to the president, so there.

However, back in reality, it is clear that right-wing hostility toward Latinos has moved beyond insults and physical assault and threats to deport everyone who is just a little too tan.

No, we now have white supramicists gunning us down while doing back-to-school shopping.

Indeed, it is “quite a transition from being invisible to being visible in a lethal way,” and hurtling past “the basic darkness of racism” into homicidal rage.

Yes, I know there are those Latino conservatives out there who will insist that this incident does not reflect upon the xenophobia of their cherished GOP. However, their self-loathing fidelity to bigots is no safety net. El Paso shows that in the eyes of rabid nationalists, “it doesn’t have to be you who crossed the border. It just has to be you who are not Anglo.”

Of course, our fumbling, incoherent president — who cannot even fake his way through a display of basic empathy— addressed the shooting by blaming “the internet, news media, mental health and video games, among others.” But at no point did he “take responsibility for the xenophobic rhetoric that he has frequently used to demonize and dehumanize Hispanic Americans and immigrants over the past four years.”

Hey, it’s not his problem. And his main supporters, the fabled Trump base, will likely never feel the existential stress of being targeted for extermination, for no other reason than the way one looks or speaks.

But for Latinos, “it’s really hard to be alive right now and to not be sick and exhausted.” 

It feels like being hunted.