Hispanic Fanatic

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.

I live in Los Angeles. Right now, all my time is spent watching the sky for embers and making sure we have plenty of masks left over from the pandemic to ensure going outside doesn’t mean inhaling acrid carcinogens.

So consider this an unplanned break from posting. With luck, my house will not burn down, and I will write something next week.

Thanks

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’m taking another holiday break this week, and I will likely not post anything until the new year.

But before I sign off on 2024 (which if we’re being honest, was a pretty sucky year), let me leave you with this fact.

The Voyager spacecrafts are the only man-made objects that have left our solar system. They are hurtling through the interstellar void, destination unknown. 

It’s possible that billions of years from now, after travelling an unfathomable distance, one of the Voyagers may finally encounter an advanced alien civilization. These beings, impossible to imagine, haul in this relic of humanity, which has long ago gone extinct. They marvel at this last remanent of homo sapiens. 

The Voyager spacecraft will be the only proof that humans were ever here.

Or something unforeseen happens way out there, and Voyager plummets into a distant sun, obliterating any proof that people ever existed.

Happy holidays!

America has strange taste in folk heroes. For example, let’s say some random guy shoots a businessman in the back. We might call this first-degree homicide.

Or we might rejoice in this killing because the victim was an oligarch. Hell, we might sell merch that celebrates the assassination. 

Some leftists might call this the first shot in a revolution. Others might find the killer’s smile charming.

And yet others (ok, just about every American) might point out that the victim was emblematic of a diabolical, soul-crushing, life-endangering, shockingly corrupt, highly destructive, and straight-up evil scheme called the health care system.

So I guess that makes it ok to kill him, right?

Of course, it’s a good thing you told me the shooter was a hero. Otherwise, I might think that this nutjob was yet another white guy raised in extreme privilege who encountered some pain in his life and therefore felt entitled to unleash suffering on those he felt were responsible.

I might think how odd it is that a black man who is being a nuisance can get choked to death on the subway, and we say he had it coming. But a good-looking white guy can literally murder someone in the street, and we’re all like, “Hell, yeah!” 

I might think it’s bizarre that we are so inured to gun violence that we shrug at bullets slicing through the air of America’s largest city in broad daylight, with the assumption that “another day, another shooting” has become our national mantra.

Finally, I might think the Trumpian era has so warped everyone’s minds that even liberals are deliriously happy about political violence, and thousands of people revel in murder over social media, and hypocrisy mixed with sociopathic disdain has become a mindset to be admired rather than rejected.

I might think all that, but what do I know?

I’m not even a folk hero.

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.

I didn’t always take breaks for the holidays. In past years, you would find me posting furious missives whether it was the week of Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, or the anniversary of the first pickleball court opening up. All are national holidays.

However, fatigue has set in as I contemplate each fresh outrage and witness the slow destruction of the country’s foundations, ethics, and standing in the world. I’m not giving up, but damn it, I just want a little time to eat pumpkin pie and drink a big old glass of wine in peace.

There will be plenty of time to assess the latest travesty, which will inevitably both follow and precede more cataclysms.

What will happen next? Will Trump give Alaska to Putin? Will the GOP ban all books written above a third-grade level? Will Ted Nugent be named Secretary of Agriculture? Each of these is a distinct possibility.

So I’m taking the rest of this week off. I will see you next week, when the country is hopefully still intact.

Thanks

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.