Hispanic Fanatic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But at least we’re tough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that’s good news, right?

Ha, we’re not falling for that.

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

How’s that for a post?

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

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

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

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

And thus my track record of always being right began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy 1,000 indeed.

Thanks again for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it’s not going so well.

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

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

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

No, it’s because ESG is good business. 

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

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

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

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

Wow — owning the libs is not cheap.

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

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

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

Again, the exact opposite is true.

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