Hispanic Fanatic

When I was in college, my poli-sci professor said that if you’re ever asked about the root cause of any aspect of American culture, you should pinpoint one of three events:

The Civil War 

The New Deal

The Vietnam War

He said the odds were great that you would be right.

I went to college a million years ago, so since then, another event — the September 11 attacks — can safely be added to that list. But there is a fifth epoch-defining catastrophe that is a strong contender for history-altering status.

I’m talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, which as we all know, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this month. Even at the time, many of us realized that the pandemic was not going to be a weird pop-culture snapshot, like lines for gas stations in the 1970s or the OJ trial in the 1990s.

No, this little bug was going to fuck us up permanently.

When we look back at the pandemic, it’s fascinating how so-called alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else, and how many people who foresaw the calamity were dismissed.

The list of how Covid-19 changed America (overwhelmingly in negative ways) is lengthy. We are now unhealthier, angrier, and more socially isolated than before. We drink more, are more distrustful of our institutions, and more likely to be anti-vaxx. The pandemic decimated the economy, set our kids back academically and socially, and destabilized the government. Covid gave us an America more into fascism, social Darwinism, and nutjob conspiracy theories. 

And this is an incomplete accounting of the disaster.

The pandemic left Americans “more alone, detached, and disconnected — changes that have lingered.” Those gray months in 2020 have to be understood “not as a singular event but as a multifaceted crisis that exposed deep-seated fault lines in American society.”

Five years after the start of lockdowns, mass death, and political malfeasance, “America stands fractured yet paradoxically transformed” because “the crisis magnified our deepest divides — urban versus rural, privilege versus poverty, individualism versus collective survival — while stress-testing democracy itself.”

We have never gotten over Covid. The pandemic is a direct cause of our nation’s current state, which is somewhere between “teetering democracy” and “full-blown collapse.” 

Weirdly, the pandemic is a chief reason why Trump lost the 2020 election and why he won in 2024. You see, “in the wake of the pandemic, which [the Trump] administration badly mismanaged, the country grew more skeptical of government.” But rather than blame the incompetent buffoon who suggested guzzling bleach as a cure for the virus, the nation’s “trust in the media, science, medicine, the judicial system, and other mainstay institutions of American life plunged as more voters embraced the doubts Mr. Trump had sown for years.”

Pandemics “tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.” They also push people toward authoritarianism, and alter the very core of a nation’s identity.

No, you will not catch me among the misguided, delusional group of Americans who feel nostalgic for the pandemic.

But I am among the Americans who were forever altered when Covid hit the country. Because that group includes all of us.

The virus has never really gone away.

The following is my one-act play dramatizing DOGE’s foray into healthcare (which, let’s face it, is just a matter of time).

Curtain up.

On a barren stage, we open on a doctor’s office. The office is ramshackle and filthy.

The doctor, about 19 years old, looks at an x-ray. He is dressed in a white lab coat and wears one of those ridiculous head-reflector mirrors from the 1950s.

The patient sits on the examination table. He is a middle-aged man and is quite nervous.

Finally, the doctor turns, and with an overly confident smirk, he addresses the patient.

Doctor: Well, you have cancer. At least, I think you do. Yeah, let’s just assume that.

Patient: This is terrible. What do I do?

Doctor: Don’t worry. We’re going to start treatment immediately. You’ll be better than new by the time I’m done with you.

Patient: Will this involve a through exam? A biopsy? A well-formulated treatment plan?

Doctor: No, we’re just going to start chopping off limbs and yanking out organs. I’m sure we’ll get the cancer that way. If there even is cancer.

Patient: What? Shouldn’t you examine my body and identify the source of the disease?

Doctor: Who has the time or money for a biopsy? Whatever that is. No, we have to move fast and break things.

Patient: Including my body?

Doctor: Yes, if need be. But it will all be worth it.

Patient: When?

Doctor: Sometime. In the future. Down the road. Eventually.

Patient: Wait a minute. Are you even a doctor?

Doctor: Strictly speaking, no. But you don’t need someone with a fancy degree from some left-wing college. Or someone who has devoted years of their life to medicine and healthcare. You need an outsider. A rebel.

Patient: I would prefer an expert trained in this discipline who has professional knowledge and experience.

Doctor: That’s elitist.

Patient: I don’t feel comfortable doing this.

Doctor: Too bad. You’re booked for surgery in five minutes.

Patient: But you’re making decisions that could destroy my life without any considerations of whether I want this or not. And as it turns out, I don’t want it.

Doctor: We told you we would do this.

Patient: No you didn’t.

Doctor: Well, we implied it. And you might not have agreed to let us slice open your body if we told you this up front.

Patient: Of course I wouldn’t have agreed.

Doctor: See? That’s why we didn’t tell you.

The doctor gestures to the wings, and two burley orderlies rush in and strap the patient to the table. The patient screams.

Patient: But you’re just some arrogant teenager who has no idea what he’s doing.

The doctor forces the anesthesia mask on the patient.

Doctor: Just shush. It’s much more efficient this way.

The patient passes out. The burley orderlies step to the side. The doctor picks up a scalpel in one hand, and pulls out his phone with the other. He turns to the anesthetized patient.

Doctor: I’m going to live-tweet this shit.

The doctor makes an incision.

Curtain down. 

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.

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.

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.

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

Don’t you hate when you hit “publish” on your post, and then 4.9 seconds later, you think of another point you wanted to make on the topic, but now you will wait a week to write that insight down, and the subsequent article will become sort of a delayed sequel to the first, because not only would editing the post seem odd to subscribers (thanks for subscribing), but you’re still on deadline for the latest draft of your book (shout out to my publishers), and you don’t have time to redo the post, and you have mild OCD that prevents you from screwing up your weekly writing schedule, even though it gets screwed up plenty due to the vagaries of life and haphazard technological issues and the black rage that overtakes you from time to time, so you just wait another week to offer your point in a new article.

We’ve all been there, right?

Yes, I wrote about the campus protests last week, but there is one more insight I want to present on the subject.

Middle-aged conservatives just love calling protesters snowflakes. They send out mocking missives over social media, deliver fiery speeches, and write lengthy op-eds in mainstream publications about those darn kids today.

Yes, right-wing fiftysomethings feel pretty smug in their mental toughness and steely machismo, especially when compared to those granola-chomping Gen Z liberal-arts majors who expect participation trophies.

But here’s the thing. The college students are enduring discomfort, risking expulsion, facing financial penalties, and occasionally getting beaten up. And they will receive no personal benefit from their actions. They are fighting for their principles—well, the vast majority of them are, excluding the vile antisemites, of course.

Meanwhile, their self-righteous critics are risking nothing more damaging than the occasional accusation of Islamophobia, which as we know, is not frowned upon in American culture and can actually be a source of honor in conservative circles.

More importantly, for all the talk about liberal kids being wimps, it is the old conservatives who are passing laws to prevent hurt feelings. Seriously, one of their proudest moments in recent history is when they banned teaching honest and accurate history because it might cause emotional discomfort to their children (who I suppose aren’t as tough as their steel-skinned parents).

The hypocrisy is glaring. It is so blinding, in fact, that I take no credit for pointing it out, because it should be perfectly obvious to anyone who thinks about the scenario for more than two minutes.

And yet, the old men have gotten away with it again. Once more, they have adopted the mantle of manly, strong dude, when they are exactly the opposite: scared, fearful and insecure.

You think we would have caught on to this fakery by now.

At first, I avoided discussing the war in Gaza because I am not well-versed in Middle Eastern history, culture, or politics. But then I realized that 99% of the people spewing cocksure opinions about the war are even less informed than I am.

I still procrastinated on writing about this catastrophe, however, because there have been so many other debacles to analyze, such as the fact that an angry bigot is literally farting his way through the first criminal trial of a former president in US history.

But the recent protests on college campuses around the nation, and even around the world, have cajoled me into addressing the Israel-Palestinian conflict. And the deeply profound, searingly intellectual analysis that I’ve come up with is “Wow, this shit is fucked up.”

No one can deny that Hamas are bloodthirsty lunatics who exist to murder Jews and don’t even care if their own people are killed in the crossfire.

No one can deny that the Israeli government is massacring civilians in zealous, depraved indifference while failing miserably at its stated goals (i.e., freeing the hostages and eliminating Hamas)

On college campuses, it’s inspiring to see young people politically involved and putting themselves at risk for a higher cause. But it’s repulsive that some of the protesters “have cheered on murderous terrorist groups or recast even those who slaughtered innocent civilians as ‘resistance’ fighters.” 

Meanwhile, Jewish students are facing “serious threats of violence” or hearing “their classmates argue they should be killed.” And Muslim students are being harassed or threatened.

Even with all that tension, most of the protests have been peaceful. Well, that is until “the police have been brought in,” in which case “protesters have been arrested with varying degrees of force, with some thrown to the ground, tackled, tear-gassed, fired upon with rubber bullets, or otherwise manhandled by law enforcement called in by the universities.”

Yes, conservatives who claim to be fierce defenders of free speech on campus are delighted if cops billy-club progressives quiet. These same conservatives also insist that they are standing up for Jewish culture, even if they were strangely silent when mobs of torch-wielding Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” I guess that wasn’t anti-Semitic.

And speaking of mobs, we recently witnessed a crowd of white frat boys threatening a lone black female protester on campus. Conservatives loved the imagery, although I’m unsure if they were more taken with the idea of dozens of men cornering a single woman, white people making monkey noises at a black person, or the combination of both that flashed back to the good ole’ days of Deep South racism and misogyny. Really, conservatives were positively giddy at this grotesquery.

Now, when right-wingers aren’t cheering on violence or bigotry, they are “mocking student protesters” as a “fun and easy pastime.”

Yes, it was all pretty hilarious here in Los Angeles, at least until thugs invaded UCLA and started “beating people with batons and poles and screaming racial epithets.” These zealots “dragged, kicked and pummeled” protesters “while police and campus security stood by for three hours before responding.”

Yeah, not so funny anymore. Is it?

I stand by my original assessment. Wow, this shit is fucked up.

I was unable to post last week, which always feels like a knife to the heart and a shot to the groin to me. Yeah, I don’t like missing a week.

Who is to blame for my lapsed work ethic? Well, it was those sneaky Canadians.

You see, I took a brief vacation to the Pacific Northwest, and while I was at it, I left the country for the first time in almost 20 years. My international destination was Vancouver. 

I was so busy hiking through the Canadian woods, conversing with ridiculously polite Canadians, and contemplating how much our northern neighbors love syrup (apparently, they like it a lot) that I couldn’t get to the computer.

Also, my laptop was 1,000 miles away, which is a whole other story.

So that’s my excuse.

However, I see now why so many liberals threaten to ditch America for Vancouver or Toronto. The country is beautiful, the people are friendly, and you can get just about everything there that you can get in the USA — plus even more varieties of syrup.

As one Canadian explained to me, the nation is a social democracy, which means that the government works for the people, rather than for major corporations. He then invited me to immigrate to his fair country if Trump wins the election in November.

With hope, it will not come to that. 

I do wonder, however, why so many Americans insist that we live in “the greatest nation in the world,” when that is clearly not true. I also wonder why progressives like me are pilloried for pointing out America’s shortcomings, while a certain megalomaniacal presidential candidate sees his approval rating go up every time he insists that the United States is a failing state.

Also, I wonder why so many conservatives insist that limited government is the best system, when in reality, social democracies like Canada are kicking our ass on just about every sociocultural indicator. These nations are the very antithesis of limited government, and their citizens are thriving. Related to that, if small government is so majestic, why is no other nation even remotely interested in trying it out?

I wanted to ask a Canadian about all this, but they were too busy being productive and happy and enjoying free healthcare and being polite to an absurd degree.

So I came back to America, where people chant “USA! USA!” from their trailer parks and drop dead of preventable conditions at age 39.

It’s enough to make me want to move to Vancouver.