Hispanic Fanatic

Now that this grueling, era-defining election is over, let’s take a moment to reminisce.

No, not about the Trump presidency. We will be reliving that in our nightmares for the rest of our lives.

Instead, let’s fondly recall the myriad ways that the GOP tried to steal this election. Oh, I know that most Republicans are convinced that it was the Democrats who cast illegal ballots, threw out GOP votes, forged dead people’s signatures, hacked voting machines, or mumbled some satanic curse that fooled the media, election experts, and the majority of Americans into thinking Biden won the election. But that just shows how devious liberals are!

Because as we all know, there is just no way that a guy who lost the popular vote in 2016, was projected to lose this time, is reviled like no other president in recent history, and who never once cracked 50% approval for his entire term (a first in polling history) could possibly come up short. 

I mean, it’s just impossible. Right?

In any case, if politics were a football game, the GOP would facemask, eye-gouge, trip, elbow, spike toes, and throw punches in scums. They would do this nonstop. Then they would whine to the refs if the Democrats were off-sides once.

Consider that Republicans, without exception, do everything they can to make voting harder or limit who can vote. To them, voting is not a right. Hell, it’s not even a privilege. It’s a rare luxury reserved for conservatives, preferably white ones.

For example, in my current state of California, the GOP put out ballot boxes, marked them “official” (which they were not) and when caught, simply refused to “comply with an order from the chief elections official to remove the unofficial ballot drop boxes from counties with competitive U.S. House races.” Yes, the party of law and order defied the law and ignored orders. 

In my home state of Wisconsin, “a sophisticated and multi-front effort by Republicans to prevent many Wisconsinites from casting a ballot” was just part of the GOP’s plot to create the most gerrymandered state in the country.

And in Texas, the conservative governor didn’t like all those latte-sipping liberals in the big cities being allowed to vote easily. So Texas counties, regardless of size, were limited to “only one drop-off location for voters to hand deliver their absentee ballots during the pandemic.” Texas Republicans also tried to throw out 120,000 votes from “the state’s most populous, and largely Democratic, county,” which I’m sure was just a coincidence.

Oh, and they also tried to disqualify votes in Pennsylvania, and to stop the counting of votes in Nevada.

When none of that worked, Republican senators just openly tried to “find a way to throw out legally cast absentee ballots.” And if you’re wondering, yes, that effort just might have broken “any number of laws.”

Even after the election was settled, Republicans in Michigan tried to block certifying the results “based on dubious claims of voting irregularities in Detroit.” And then after being shamed into doing their jobs, they attempted to rescind the certification, upon orders from their divine leader.

Of course, the president’s hapless, humiliated lawyers are enduring defeat after defeat, basically getting laughed out of court, as they try to conjure a world in which their delusional client got reelected. Indeed, “some of the lawyers at the firms handling the litigation work for Trump’s campaign or related Republican Party organizations are now raising concerns internally about the legitimacy and purpose of the legal claims they are currently being asked to advance.” The attorneys are concerned that they may run into ethical trouble for filing frivolous lawsuits. But to the GOP, that’s their problem.

However, all this Republican subterfuge really started before the election. After all, it was our neo-fascist chief executive who shrieked those “frequent and false claims of widespread voter fraud and repeated calls for his supporters to ‘watch’ the polls and stop it.” And as we know, conservatives need very little provocation to show up with guns and intimidate people.

Furthermore, it was the president’s supporters who sent threatening emails with the subject line “Vote for Trump or else!” to Florida residents. Opinions vary about whether the originator of the emails was the Iranian government or the Proud Boys (both are winning organizations). But in either case, the message “we will come after you” was pretty clear. 

And don’t forget that the fabled Hispanic vote — which was either a godsend or a major disappointment, depending on your point of view — was likely influenced by “a web of disinformation websites aimed at Latino Americans.” Again, it wasn’t progressives spreading the fake news.

You see, “the objective, pursued by Republicans in a seeming war of attrition, is to use a range of tactics and tools to reduce the number of votes cast by people of color.” The GOP dream is that young people, ethnic minorities, and anyone who lives in a city just shut up and let white rural Americans make all the decisions. 

And yet despite these gargantuan efforts, despite these desperate ploys and unethical maneuvers and pathetic illegalities, Trump still lost — solidly as it turned out.

So to my GOP friends, I must assert — without malice — that if you lie, cheat, and whine but still get trounced, maybe it’s time to admit the truth:

Most Americans just didn’t like your guy.

At the end, perhaps it is the “rapists” who will undo him.

That would be ironic, considering that we all remember how this little nightmare started, with Donald Trump announcing his 2016 presidential run by insisting that Mexicans — and by extension, all Latinos — were nothing more than thugs and rapists.

At the time, conservatives and media figures fell over themselves insisting that this creepy failed businessman didn’t actually mean what he so clearly said. The result of the gaslighting was that millions of Americans voted for the guy, only to find — four long, horrific years later — that he did indeed mean every word of his grotesque opinion. Their bad! It could happen to anyone, right?

Ahem. 

But here in 2020, many commentators theorize that the fabled Latino vote could be the tipping point in a potential Biden landslide. For example, if Hispanic voters turn out in force for Biden, it would give him wins in Texas, Florida, and Georgia. And that, of course, would be the end of the line, electorally speaking, for the GOP, regardless of what happens in other swing states.

However, that is a huge “if,” considering that Latinos are less likely to vote than other demographics. And keep in mind that even though Biden has overwhelming support from Latinos, a sizable minority of Hispanics still plan to vote for a xenophobe who would happily deport them if he could.

To complicate matters, remember that there are multiple subgroups within the Latino demographic, so it is impossible to say definitively who is or isn’t Hispanic, or how that lines up with polling. Indeed, some analysts boldly insist that “there is no such thing as the Latino vote.”

Whoa — now we’re getting metaphysical here.

So let’s return to the subject of Hispanics as thugs and rapists. As we all know, rather than sending us their criminals, Latin America is actually sending us their bravest, such as the 100 wildland firefighters from Mexico who are in California to assist with firefighting efforts. And don’t forget that “nearly 40 countries across five continents have received Cuban medics during the pandemic.”

Closer to home, “Latinos are on the coronavirus front lines,” working as essential workers and suffering much higher rates of infectionbecause of it. In fact, global health experts say that coronavirus is causing “the historic decimation of the Latino community, ravaging generations of loved ones in Hispanic families.”

Basically, our country is fine with Latinos risking their lives to keep the nation intact, but not so upbeat about, you know, actually accepting Hispanics as Americans with equal rights. You might find that a sickening contraction, but to Trump supporters, it’s a patriotic virtue.

The good news is that if our health care system continues to flounder, we can just go to Mexico for civilized treatment. That’s right, many Latino families who lack medical insurance and resources “are crossing the border for affordable medical visits and medicine.” More than 2 million “medical tourists” make the crossing each year, because in Mexico, “it is possible to save from 40% to 65% on a treatment compared to the United States,” and the quality of medical care is “usually first class.”

Just don’t tell Trumpists that, because they might actually start heading south for decent medical care. And we certainly don’t want to send Mexico our worst people.

PS: I rarely update my articles after I post them. I figure that once the words are out there, it is what it is (to quote a super-genius).

But I just read this info, and it directly relates to Latino voters, so I’m adding this little tidbit to the post:

“The gender gap among Latino voters — 26 percentage points — is significantly larger than it is among Black, white or Asian voters.” Apparently, for many Hispanic men “the macho allure of Mr. Trump is undeniable.” In fact, “what has alienated so many older, female and suburban voters is a key part of Mr. Trump’s appeal to these men.” 

So the point is that, once again, we should all listen to the Latinas.

Yes, we’ve all been there.

At some point, we’ve all been jammed into the uncomfortable position of reconciling our sincere beliefs with unpleasant facts, with the result that we are often found wanting. 

For example, some of our greatest artists are horrible human beings. But we still buy their books and see their movies.

We preach sustainability, but when there’s no recycling bin around, we’ll throw that soda can in the garbage.

And we say we’re compassionate people who detest bigotry, but then we support white supremacy and calls for violence. 

OK, stop. 

As it turns out, maybe we haven’t all been there.

You see, we’re closing in on the election that will decide if America is going to crawl out of the intractable quicksand of oligarchy, racial warfare, and religious fanaticism, or if we’re going to happily cannonball into the abyss.

And Trump supporters have made it clear that they are having no crises of conscience, no blinding epiphanies, and no moments of hesitation. 

When our cacophonous chief executive told the Proud Boys to “stand by,” this pack of neo-Nazis responded by shouting, “Yes, sir!” And rather than glance around at the company they are keeping, and growing alarmed about it, most Republicans just shrugged and mumbled something about Hunter Biden and creeping socialism.

It is just the latest in an unending string of lemming-like behavior that, way back in 2016, might have caused us to wonder how anyone could be so delusional, hypocritical, and abhorrent, not to mention self-destructive.

But we have now come to accept that 40 percent of our fellow Americans will rationalize just about anything rather than flick on the neurons that provoke empathy, logic, or introspection.

These are people who are furious that “illegals” don’t pay taxes (even though undocumented immigrants “pay billions of dollars in federal taxes annually”). However, their fake billionaire dodges his taxes for years, and that just makes him “smart.”

One would think they might be disturbed that a privately owned U.S. immigration detention center in Georgia forcibly sterilizedimmigrant women. But then conservatives realized that we’re talking about brown-skinned women, and anyway, unauthorized hysterectomies without anesthesia are completely justifiable because Trump is simply carrying out God’s will.

And the threats that Trump will not leave office even if he loses, and that his minions are plotting to undermine democracy? Well, in a refrain that has become farcical, we hear that Trump “doesn’t really mean it.”

Clearly, the guy could mock their religion and play them for suckers, and they would be fine with it.

It must be exhausting for Trump supporters, constantly spinning their president’s deranged threats into patriotic virtues, and insisting that everyone is a malicious liar unless he works for the administration or Fox News. 

They might view their perpetual churning of reasons and motivations as charming complexity, or an example of the inherent contradictions of being human.

But the rest of see a bunch of hate-filled zealots eager to sell out their supposed principles just to say they owned the libs.

You see, being a Trump supporter “is about winning at any cost, cheating and subjugating. It’s about unraveling the culture in service of just one aim: victory over the others.”

The rest of America can do nothing except futilely hope for the president’s acolytes to snap out of it, and come to their senses. In this sense, it is we who are standing by. But our wait will be endless.