Hispanic Fanatic

Now that the chaotic carnival ride of impeachment is over, we can all go back to being calm, rational Americans who are united in our values, priorities, and patriotic love for this great nation.

OK, sometimes the cynicism just writes itself.

In any case, this era of disunity is not ending soon, if ever. But rather than wallow in depression or drive up our collective blood pressure by enumerating the hypocrisy, cowardice, and outright idiocy of the modern conservative movement, let’s look at a less contentious subject.

Let’s discuss citizenship.

Oh shit, that’s a hot one too, isn’t it? 

Well, you’ll be happy to know that I am not talking about immigration, undocumented residents, the 14^th Amendment, Border Patrol atrocities, or xenophobia.

Hey, I’ve talked a lot about all of those things, and I will again. Good times!

But right now I want to draw your attention to a recent article written by Seth Godin, marketing guru and philosophical entrepreneur.

Godin writes the following:

“Citizens aren’t profit-seeking agents who are simply constrained by rules. Citizens behave even if there isn’t a rule about it.”

“Citizens aren’t craven partisans, voting for party over fact. Citizens do the right thing because they can, even if the short-term cost is high.”

“Citizens live by the rule of community: If everyone did what I’m about to do, would it lead to a useful outcome?”

Clearly, Godin is not talking about what defines a citizen legally. He’s trying to grasp the concept of good citizenship. It requires more than being born within an arbitrary border. It requires engagement, bravery, and a concern for the future.

Yes, much of what Godin is saying can be applied to congressional Republicans (especially that “craven partisan” part).

However, the main point is that in certain respects, we’ve been asking the wrong question. 

It should not be, “Who gets to be a citizen?” 

It should be, “Who will be a good citizen?”

Godin’s traits of a good citizen are not exclusive of other definitions, nor are they the final word on the concept. However, the list he provides is pretty damn solid.

We can all be good citizens — not just of America but of Earth — if we focus on the long-term health of our community.

This concept applies to climate change, where we must be willing to accept lifestyle changes so that we don’t, you know, bake the planet into oblivion.

This applies to corporate responsibility, where CEOs don’t screw over their workers and cause lasting economic damage just to make their bonus a little bigger.

This applies to racial demographics, where white people have to acknowledge that the country is diversifying and, rather than fight the inevitable, embrace the benefits that different perspectives bring.

And yes, this implies to politics, where certain individuals shouldn’t kowtow to insanity just to preserve their cushy jobs.

Well, I guess it’s a bit late for that last one. But the basic message remains the same:

Don’t be a selfish jerk.

We’ll let Godin summarize this ideal:

“Sometimes we call citizens heroes, which is a shame, because their actions should be commonplace, not rare. Every successful community, every organization, every family has citizens. It’s the citizens who define the future, because their commitment to the long-term matters.”

One thing I admire about conservatives is their adherence to a narrow set of principles, as well as their political consistency.

Ha, just warming things up with a little joke there, people.

But seriously folks, the GOP, which once believed in “forceful moral leadership of the world, promotion of the free market and fiscal conservatism,” abandoned those silly ideas the second that Trump became president, and conservatives realized that they could pass tax cuts for millionaires and intimidate ethnic minorities, which are, when you think about it, the only things that the Republican Party currently stands for.

And now another supposed GOP value is quite dead. That would be the questionable virtue of demanding a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. You see, our very conservative president “claims he can defy the Constitution and end birthright citizenship.”

I bet you thought something as well-established and bedrock ingrained as the 14^thAmendment could not be altered just because a president signs an executive order. Well, this shows how little you know. Trumpism, which has supplanted conservatism, means that a president can do whatever he wants — as long as he’s a Republican.

In this case,Trump can do away with any pesky Constitutional rights that he dislikes. And the man dislikes nothing more than immigrants, particularly Latino ones.

So that section in the Constitution that says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States”? Yeah, he can just end it with the stroke of a pen and, if he likes, the snap of his tiny fingers.

And who knows — he just might get his buddies on the Supreme Court (at least one of whom apparently owes him one) to uphold his dictatorial edicts.

Of course, Trump’s promise to end birthright citizenship most likely reflects his complete ignorance — and total indifference — to the laws of this nation. And it has even less chance of happening than his idiotic wall does of being built.

One more time: there will be no wall constructed on the Mexican border.

However, Trump’s offhand musings about crushing our legal system and throwing the entire citizenship process into absolute chaos are really designed to fire up his base. It is “about the midterm elections and the desire of the president and his team to change the channel, grab the news cycle by the throat and talk about immigration rather than the domestic terrorism that we’ve seen in the last week.”

Yes, if there is one thing that will convince an elderly bigot to pull the lever for the Republicans again, it is the idea that no more Hispanics will become citizens, ever ever ever.

The fact that Trump’s ramblings are “a pure political stunt” that is “offensive, deeply troubling, racist, and unconstitutional” is of little concern to a voter who views Latino newborns “not as a source for society’s renewal but as threats.”

And even though that voter could most likely not even pass the U.S. citizenship test himself, he will still support a decrepit, unhinged political movement that can offer nothing but fear, hatred, denial, and a dark, pessimistic view of our changing world.

With all the conniptions about Kavanaugh and the horrible injustices facing rich, white, straight men and the fact that the president is more or less a felonious tax cheat, there is another issue that we all seem to have forgotten about.

Yes, I’m talking about the fact that“in shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses … for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.”

This is the continuation of the Trump Administration’s nightmarish zero-tolerance approach to border enforcement, which as you recall, led to kids being ripped out of their parents’ arms, Americans becoming horrified at our government’s inhumane behavior, and conservatives shrugging and saying, “Eh, what can you do?”

Even though U.S. courts ordered the administration to reunite immigrant families, the White House missed the deadline, which is essentially just another grotesque fuck-up in a long line of staggering incompetence. Now, with even more kids showing up unaccompanied the border, “the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children— the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.”

In these tent cities — where there is no education and access to legal services is limited — the average length of time that migrant kids have spent “in custody has nearly doubled … from 34 days to 59 days.”Studies have down that “the longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts.”

And of course, yanking children out of bed in the middle of the night “without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “There must be a good reason why the Trump Administration hasn’t reunited these families and/or developed a halfway decent plan for taking care of these kids.”

Well, the joke is on you — and me and all Americans and every immigrant child in this morass of madness.

Because the truth is that the administration never had a plan for how to deal with this crisis of its own making. Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security “was not ready to carry out the Trump Administration’s family separation policy, and some of the government’s practices made the problem worse.”

As such, the White House has basically admitted, “Oh shit, we didn’t expect Americans to actually want us to get those kids back to their parents. Our bad.”

Clearly, the president is completely indifferent to the plight of Latinos, immigrants, children, and most especially, Latino immigrant children. This sociopathic blasé attitude toward human suffering is one of the chief characteristics of the Trump Administration. The other is bumbling ineptitude. Put them together, and you have an inevitable dynamo clusterfuck.

In addition, it is only now that the administration is starting to catch on to the fact that destroying families and terrorizing children actually costs money. So the president has “diverted nearly $10 millionin funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

As critics (i.e., sane and/or decent human beings) point out, the administration is paying “for this horrific program by taking away from the ability to respond to damage from this year’s upcoming and potentially devastating hurricane season” even as “American citizens in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are still suffering from FEMA’s inadequate recovery efforts.”

In total, the Department of Homeland Security has “transferred $169 million from other agencies to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the detention and removal of migrants this year.” Documents show that much of the money “was taken from the response and recovery, preparedness and protection and mission support operations budgets, which are used to prepare for emergencies.”

To keep things in perspective, “the Trump Administration would rather separate families and detain and deport parents [than] prepare for hurricanes.”

If one tried, it might be possible to come up with a more costly, delusional, self-destructive, brutalizing system.

But I doubt it.

It is, perhaps, the most pathetic attempt in a long line of pathetic attempts to distract from the president’s colossal failures and massive corruption.

I’m talking about the right wing’s frenzied, frantic endeavor to get you to focus on the tragic death of Mollie Tibbetts, a young white woman who was allegedly murdered by — and I bet this is the first you’re hearing about it — an undocumented Latino.

The grotesque individual who killed Tibbetts supplied the perfect imagery for the Republican Party, which wants“voters to believe they’re living in a horror movie” as part of their plan for avoiding disaster in the midterm elections. You see, “it is no accident that a president whose supporters are overwhelmingly white and less educated, who tend to live among other whites, are being targeted” and motivated to vote Republican based “on fears of the other and the unknown.”

I mean, what else are they going to run on? An unpopular president in legal jeopardy, a tax cut for billionaires, and a total lack of progress on health care, the opioid crisis, and the fabled wall with Mexico are not very compelling highlights.

So instead we have GOP leaders publicly admitting that they want to make Tibbetts’ murder a midterms issue.

And yes, this is the very same political party that insists any talk about gun control after a mass shooting is “politicizing” tragedy (by the way, there was another mass shooting just this week).

However, the opportunistic xenophobia of conservatives has disgusted Tibbetts’ family, which has called out the racist fear-mongering and callus exploitation of their agony. It has prompted at least one family member to tell right-wingers to “keep her name out of your mouth.”

But of course, Trump and his enablers are not going to allow little things like overt racism, blatant hypocrisy, and a devastated family’s loss get in the way of their political playbook. They fully intend to keep insisting that undocumented immigrants are killing their way across America.

Oddly, conservatives can write whole impassioned editorials about the Tibbetts murder without once mentioning, even in passing, the well-established fact that immigrants — including undocumented ones — are substantially less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

Also lost in the conservative outrage over Tibbetts’ death is the fact that the woman died because a man decided he had the right to take her — and take her life — without a moment’s hesitation. Acknowledging misogyny’s killer strain is not big with the Republican Party, which tends to appeal to men and female apologists for sexism.

However, “the truth is that any young woman like Mollie Tibbetts has a much greater chance of dying at the hands of a husband or boyfriendof any type than meeting harm at the hands of an undocumented immigrant.”

If you don’t believe me, just look at the week’s other big story about homicide. Apparently, some monstrosity in Colorado murdered his wife and two daughters — or triple the women that Tibbetts’ killer has confessed to.

But hey, at least that guy was a citizen, so I guess it’s no big deal, right?

As I’ve mentioned before, my mom emigrated from El Salvador. She’s been a US citizen for decades now and has never regretted her decision to leave Central America.

We all know, of course, that the United States is a nation of immigrants (ok, not all of us know that).

Still, the only reason that this nation exists as a major world power is because, over the centuries, millions of people, originating from just about every country on Earth, took huge gambles and endured hardships to come here for a shot at a better life.

It’s the American Dream, right?

Well, maybe that’s no longer true.

You see, a recent article in Bloomberg asked the completely logical question “Why do Americans stay when their town has no future?”

Yes, the article is a look at our favorite fellow citizens — the white working class — and an examination of why they refuse to leave their dying small towns in search of better opportunities. After all, they are the descendents of hearty immigrants who crossed oceans for a new life. So why do they insist on sticking around decrepit mill towns and desolate farm communities, when in many cases, all they have to do is drive to another part of their home state?

The article, which makes for extremely depressing reading, quotes one low-income blue-collar worker as saying, “The American Dream is kind of to stay close to your family, do well, and let your kids grow up around your parents.”

Personally, I found that statement jarring. The article’s writers apparently agreed, calling the quote “a striking comment” because of the fact that “not that long ago, the American Dream more often meant something quite different, about achieving mobility — about moving up, even if that meant moving out.”

Let me mention here again that my seven cousins and I grew up together and were tighter than many nuclear families. That’s common among Latino families. In adulthood, we’re still close, but many of us have moved to other states to pursue the best lives for ourselves. Right now, we’re scattered around the country. In spite of having stronger bonds than most families (not a boast, just the truth), we also knew that all of us living in the same city for our entire lives was unlikely. Our parents came from other countries, so the concept of moving just wasn’t scary to us.

Contrast that to the residents of rural Ohio profiled in the Bloomberg article. They seem petrified of ever leaving their bleak environs. And this reluctance to move is “all the more confounding given how wide the opportunity gap has grown between the country’s most dynamic urban areas and its struggling small cities and towns.”

Economists are perplexed at this phenomenon. But keep in mind that these are the same people who wondered why so many Americans threw logic out the window during the Great Recession and held onto their underwater houses. One would think that economists would now have plenty of proof that Americans don’t make purely objective financial decisions and that emotions play a huge part in their behavior.

So I guess I’m saying that maybe it’s the economists who are clueless here.

In any case, “Americans have grown less likely to migrate for opportunity.” The statistics back this up. We see that “fewer Americans moved in 2017 than in any year in at least a half-century. This change has caused consternation among economists and pundits, who wonder why Americans, especially those lower on the income scale, lack their ancestors’ get-up-and-go.”

We would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that the situation has “a stark political dimension, too, given how much Trump outperformed past Republican candidates in those left-behind places.”

What many experts don’t want to admit is that the fear of moving is related to the fear of change, which in turn is related to the fear of immigrants, and so on down the scale of anxiety. The basic factor here is the terror that the white working class feels about a changing world, and its members’ strong sense of entitlement that they never have to change a damn thing in their lives because everything must to be altered to maintain their status.

Many people in these depressed areas feel that America owes it to them to make their towns boom again, regardless of the cost to the rest of the country. However, “it’s hard to argue that, say, a town that sprang up for a decade around a silver mine in Nevada in the 1870s needed to be sustained forever once the silver was gone.” That would be ludicrous. But “if all of southern Ohio is lagging behind an ever-more-vibrant Columbus, should people there be encouraged to seek their fortunes in the capital?”

Um, yeah — they should.

In essence, “America was built on the idea of picking yourself up and striking out for more promising territory.”

What’s changed?

Only the specter of crippling fear.

If you’re like me, you spent the first week of 2018 striving to achieve your goals and keep your resolutions. In my case, that means trying to gain weight, start smoking, and focus on the big things in life (yes, I’m a contrarian).

But one thing I did not do is spend any time — I mean, zero minutes — perusing articles on what the Trump Administration “might” do with regards to the temporary protected status of the 200,000 immigrants who have fled my family’s homeland of El Salvador. These individuals were given protection after a series of earthquakes hit the country in 2001.

A couple of headlines proclaimed that Trump faced a big decision, or that the administration was weighing the pros and cons, or that the Salvadorans still had a shot at gaining citizenship, blah blah blah.

Come on, people. No one could seriously believe, for even the briefest scintilla of a moment, that this administration would say, “Sure, all you Latino immigrants. Please stick around.”

The only shocker is that Trump minions are not going door to door, rounding up Salvadorans and cattle-prodding them onto trucks.

To extend protections, or to offer a pathway to citizenship, would require the White House to analyze the political situation, embrace empathy as a virtue, and end its ceaseless hatred of Hispanics. None of those things is going to happen any time soon, let alone all of them at once. There is just no chance.So the Salvadorans have until September 2019 to seek permanent residency in the United States or risk deportation. As immigration experts have pointed out, “these are people who have been living by the rules … getting background checks every 18 months, getting their fingerprints for 20 years.” But America is so over that whole “give me your tired and meek” pabulum. Now, it’s more about “Serve your masters or get out now.”

In any case, “the Trump administration did not consider the gang-perpetrated violence in El Salvador when deciding to end the protected status.” If it had, perhaps it would have realized that terminating the program “will not make America safer and will undermine U.S. efforts in the Western Hemisphere to better protect America from drug trafficking and gang violence.”

In addition, “by sending back 200,000 workers who have been in America for 17 years, the Trump Administration will actually increase the flow of migrants from El Salvador.” The move will have a negative impact on remittances and “displace already economically precarious workers in El Salvador, who will migrate to the United States out of desperation.”

Yes, leave it to the Trump Administration to placate its hardline nativist base with a decision that is “not in line with American values” and that may actually increase illegal immigration.

It’s something that only a really stable genius would do.

Within the landslide of inanity, insanity, and alternative facts that has gushed from the Trump administration thus far, one true statement has miraculously emerged.

This was when the Minister of Misinformation said that Trump would renege on his campaign promise to release his tax returns because “people don’t care.”

And she is correct. Most Americans don’t give a damn about Trump’s taxes, nor do they care that he is breaking his word. Hey, most Trumpkins don’t even see it as the tiniest bit problematic that the president has myriad conflicts of interest and doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution and that pesky Emoluments Clause.

So it’s clear that Americans are just fine with the executive brand functioning as a get-rich-quick scheme for a select few. Hey, I wouldn’t be surprised if shilling for the Trump brand becomes an overt job duty for administration officials… wait, what? Oh, that has already happened.

This is plutocracy, where the ruling class derives its power from its wealth, with no regard for what’s best for the nation.

But wait a second. I thought we were heading into neo-fascism. That’s where a horde of grotesque political movements — ultranationalism, populism, anti-immigration sentiments, nativism, xenophobia, and so on — coalesce into a situation where an unpredictable strong man runs roughshod over liberal democracy. Good thing, then, that Trump has nothing but respect for our system of checks and balances, such as his adoration for our judicial system… yup. So maybe this is a more accurate indicator of our national predicament.

Now, you might ask, “But what about all this Orwellian nightmare stuff I keep hearing about? Isn’t that what’s going on now?”

Well, it’s true that Trump and his flunkies have mastered doublespeak. For example, they can claim massive voter fraud (despite a complete lack of evidence), while simultaneously insisting Russian hacking is a myth (despite an overwhelming amount of evidence). Hell, they can insist the sun was shining when we know it was raining.

By the way, the president insists that “he has ‘solved’ Latinos’ fears of being under attack by his administration.” That, my friends, is impressive 1984 jamming.

Of course, it’s also possible that we are also living in an autocracy, which is a system of government where one person rules with absolute power.

As some commentators have pointed out, “Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter.” And this approach “will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption. That, over time, is what truly subverts the institutions of democracy and the rule of law.”

More bluntly, America has handed “power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself,” and that “everything we know suggests that we’re entering an era of epic corruption and contempt for the rule of law, with no restraint whatsoever.”

OK, that’s pretty grim. So let’s try another direction. Maybe all this is just America’s flirtation with kakocracy. You know, that’s rule by the absolute worst.

If so, it will not end well. Many commentators believe that with this group of reckless clowns, impeachment or removal of the president under the 25^th Amendment are real possibilities. But even if that happens, Trump “will do much more damage before he departs the scene, to become a subject of horrified wonder in our grandchildren’s history books.”

And even some conservatives are saying that Trump’s presidency “will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars.”

At that point, we will enter a whole new dystopia — maybe one that doesn’t even have a name yet.

I admit that my powers of prediction are so-so.

After all, I didn’t think the racist misogynist would win. However, in my defense, I was the only progressive in the country who was merely surprised — as opposed to shocked, flabbergasted, and devastated — when Trump clinched the White House. I had always acknowledged it as an unpleasant possibility.

But now I’m going full-on psychic when I say that Trump will not turn America into a dictatorship, or provoke a nuclear war, or imprison every intellectual, or fulfill any of the other alarmist predictions you’ve seen from my fellow liberals.

For example, Trump’s wall on the Mexican border will turn out to be a couple hundred miles of extra fencing, if that.

There will be no deportation force that kicks 12 million people out of the country.

The First Amendment will remain intact.

And we can move on and on through the numerous other apocalyptic visions of what will happen in the next few years — they will not come to pass.

To be clear, this isn’t because Trump doesn’t want to do these things. Indeed, one of the more insane comments we heard during this most insane of presidential campaigns was that Trump didn’t really mean what he was saying, and was just riling up the base. Bullshit — he meant every word.

Also, let’s drop the delusion that Trump will somehow settle down once he takes the oath of office. The man has no intention of backing off on his reactionary agenda. He really does want to revoke the citizenship of people who burn the American flag.

But he won’t — mostly because he can’t. The first reason is checks and balances.

And I don’t mean that the Republican-dominated Congress is finally going to stand up for principles and standards and decency and other quaint concepts that the GOP sloughed off when it embraced Trump. It’s very cute to think so.

The only reason the Republican Congress will block Trump’s more egregious proposals is because it’s not worth the political headache. They will be too busy passing tax cuts for the rich and killing Obamacare and gutting Social Security — you know, standard GOP stuff. And they will send bills to Trump and say, “Sign here,” and he will do it, because he has no political viewpoint other than self-aggrandizement, and in any case, he will be too busy composing attack tweets.

So clearly, it’s going to be bad — just not “Here comes Hitler” bad.

And that leads to the chief reason why Trump will not shut down the New York Times, or make college professors sign loyalty oaths, or change the nation’s motto from “E Pluribus Unum” to “Bros before Ho’s.”

Oh, all that would be very Trumpian — and way too obvious.

You see, I know you were all ready to sign up for that Muslim registry (whether you are Muslim or not), just to stick it to the man and mess with the banality of evil and be all defiant. But there will be no Muslim registry. So then we’ll all relax and just shrug when surveillance on mosques is increased and hostility toward Muslims gets even worse. We’ll say, “Well, that’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”

And when the new Supreme Court chips away at abortion rights, we’ll say, “Whew, I though they were going to completely overturn Roe v. Wade. So I’ll take it.”

And when voting laws continue to suppress blacks and Latinos, we’ll say, “Hey, I thought he was going to trample civil rights all at once. Close call.”

You get the picture. All this shrieking that Trump is going to be an American Mussolini does us a disservice. It primes us to be relieved when climate change is ignored, or when gun control becomes even less of an issue, or when healthcare is merely as terrible as it was ten years ago.

We are setting ourselves up to embrace the miserable, simply because it is not the horrific.

The most egregious, outrageous, and overt violations of our Constitution and societal norms will not be so easy for you to spot. They rarely are. So it will require work to fight cultural deterioration. Caving in to hysteria doesn’t help.

Of course, I could be tragically wrong on this, and four years from now our nation might be a fascistic nightmare and/or in the midst of societal collapse.

What happens then?

Well, then you can turn to me, as they march us into the thunderdome, and smirk when you say, “Told you so.”

Americans have received more than a fair amount of post-mortem analysis and 20/20 hindsight into how the country got stuck with that malignant clown for president. Despite this, it remains astonishing to note how the media tries to avoid stating the obvious.

For example, CNN recently unveiled its 24 theories why Trump won. Here are a full two dozen rationales — some astute, some questionable — in which the word “bigotry” does not appear.

Yes, a couple of CNN’s theories allude to it in euphemistic terms (e.g., “white male resentment”). But the nearest any of its reasons comes to acknowledging real prejudice among Trump supporters is to discount the very idea. In fact, theory #22 clearly states, “Not because of racism.”

By the way, the words “misogyny” and “sexism” do not appear on CNN’s list at all. So apparently, “Trump that bitch” was just a catchy slogan.

In any case, here we have a major news outlet listing dozens of reasons why Trump emerged victorious, and heaven forbid they acknowledge the well-documented fact that a significant number of Trump supporters are white supremacists. Or perhaps I just imagined that whole thing about the KKK throwing a victory parade.

Now, racism certainly wasn’t the only reason for Trump’s ascendency, and it probably wasn’t even the main reason. But to imply that it was no reason at all, and to sidestep this most unpleasant of factors, is disingenuous at best and cowardly at worst.

Another CNN piece states “this election was for the forgotten among the American people…. When Donald Trump came on the scene, for the first time, they had a voice.

Yes, thank god someone is finally speaking up for white men!

However, it is not just CNN that is embracing this soothing narrative that bigotry is miniscule among Trump supporters.

For example, a professor at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin — Madison, recently published a book based on her months of talking to rural voters of that swing state. In a Washington Post interview about Trump’s popularity in the heartland, the professor acknowledged that many of her interview subjects expressed bigoted sentiments, but she quickly dismissed this by stating, “it’s not just resentment toward people of color. It’s resentment toward elites, city people.”

Ah, I see. So to the professor, whenever a Midwestern farmer snapped that blacks are lazy criminals, it was justifiable irritation with all those fancy urban types.

Good thing it wasn’t racism.

By the way, I am from Wisconsin and have spent more time in small towns and on dairy farms than the vast majority of “coastal elites.” The people there are overwhelmingly polite and hardworking. But yes, I’ve been slurred a few times. And I assure you that it wasn’t because I was too cosmopolitan.

Again, all this dancing around and justifying and flat-out ignoring is jarring to both our knowledge of the world and our sense of decency.

For some delusional reason, we remain deathly afraid of calling out racism in a large swath of people, as if doing so might acknowledge that bigotry still lingers in our “post-racial” society. And we can’t have that.

Or maybe we just can’t offend white people.

After all, as some writers have noted, “to call out voters for falling for damagingly racist and sexist messages is viewed [as] dangerously snobby by the media, as though working-class people are precious toddlers who must be humored and can’t possibly be held responsible for any flawed thinking.” We should also be aware that “only the white working classes are accorded this handwringing and insistent media empathy.”

It’s all about white fragility, which often mixes with a toxic helping of male insecurity. When that happens, we get the idea that “if white men are not living the American Dream the system must be broken. For everyone else, failure is a sign of individual failure, cultural failure, and communal shortcomings, but if white men ain’t winning, the game is rigged.”

So we remain highly sensitive about making any accusations of prejudice. And we embrace the lie that blatant xenophobia had little to do with Trump winning — anything but that.

By the way, hate crimes against ethnic minorities surged after the election. But I’m sure it was just a coincidence.

To summarize my point on this topic, please allow me to share an email I received the morning after the election. It was from a Trump supporter, identified only as Nmslr1. He had read my articles and was rather displeased with my conclusions.

I have edited his email for length because, quite frankly, it went on and on. But I have not corrected any of the grammatical errors (yes, I’m aware of the irony that this person has a horrific grasp of English).

In any case, here is my fan mail from Nmslr1:

Well, it seems White People have seen and heard about all they are gonna take from the ingrates called hispanics.

Did you really think we were just going to turn the other cheek while you all pilfer our resources and hard work? Did you?

Well you all are going to get whats coming, thats for sure.

The joy! The absolute joy to think we banded together and finally said “enough”. The only solution left is to round them up and send them back where the hell they came from.

Oh, and don’t forget little ole abuela, poor thing.

Now its our turn to gloat.

Get this straight: your raping, thieving shit cultures will respect our culture when you’re on the next bus to the living hell holes you all created and where you all ran from.

Oh, are you an anchor baby? Just to make clear when that insane and abused statute is voided out there will be an amendment to make it retroactive.

Gone. Gone. All gone.

Picking up where I left off, in last week’s post I asked the following: Why should we feel sorry for the white working class?

Yes, that’s harsh, but we’re talking about a demographic that prides itself on straight talk and not being politically correct and so on and so on.

Of course, claims about being non-PC usually mean, “We like to talk shit about minorities, who better not say a damn thing back, and watch your mouth when you’re addressing white Christian America.”

In any case, the WWC, by almost any measure, is not doing particularly well.

However, to be brutally honest about it, these people are white — still the majority in this country — and as such they enjoy the benefits of white privilege. They have more economic clout, more societal influence, and more cultural power (obvious in that we are constantly talking about how they feel and think and live).

At the very least, one cannot argue with the inherent contradiction that their anti-immigrant stance has created. Namely, the white working class prides itself on its deep roots in American society. They have been here for generations, with great-great-grandparents who came from the good countries (i.e., Europe). The WWC is not fresh off the boat.

OK, but here’s my question to them: With such an overpowering head start, why are you struggling so much? You’ve had generations to build up wealth and establish your families. Why are you still slaving away in coal mines? Isn’t that what your ancestors in Great Britain were trying to escape?

Taking this point further, how can a group of swarthy outsiders who don’t even speak English — and are supposedly lazy and stupid — be so thoroughly kicking your ass? What are you doing wrong?

“But they’re stealing our jobs!” the white working class screams.

First, this is not true, as many studies have shown. Second, even if it were true, perhaps the WWC should be annoyed at the corporations that are kicking them to the curb in favor of immigrants (and yes, voting Republican will surely show corporate America a thing or two). And third, if you’ll permit me to use a conservative talking point, that’s just an excuse.

You see, whenever someone tries to explain the cycle of poverty that engulfs many African American or Latino communities, a huge right-wing chorus rises up to dismiss the hard data and sociological theories and economic realities that show why poor communities stay impoverished.

Instead, we hear that all those blacks and Hispanics just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop whining.

I never — and I mean, never — hear this argument applied to the poor regions of Appalachia. Not once have I heard a politician tell laid-off blue-collar workers in white towns that they need to take responsibility for their decisions and stop blaming others.

Actually, I’ve heard the opposite, which is that the WWC should blame immigrants and nobody else.

In addition to this illogical, hypocritical, misplaced blame, there is often a powerful sense of entitlement — supposedly anathema to conservatives — that pervades the white working class. For example, there are members of the WWC who are “sick of hearing in job interviews” that certain positions require Spanish.

Now, as I’ve written before, learning Spanish is not some magical skill beyond the reach of mere mortals. My own fluency is marginal at best, but I can tell you it’s not difficult to learn the basics and, with some effort, become proficient.

But hostility toward a bilingual world is a chief way in which the WWC tries to flex its entitlement. After all, if a job calls for being an expert in Microsoft Word, or knowing how to fix a carburetor, or identifying the cortex after opening up the skull, or knowing whether to snip the blue wire or the red wire, we don’t stomp our feet and say, “But I speak English, and that should be good enough!”

No, we accept that those are the requirements for the position, and the skill sets of the past may no longer apply.

America, as we all know, is evolving rapidly. And the stubborn refusal to acknowledge this — the overt battling to prevent this evolution — is one reason the WWC is in such a messed-up situation.

So again I ask, why are we bending over backward to spare the feelings of poor white people?

Well, an immediate answer is this: Because we should. They are human beings and deserve the support of their nation and their countrymen.

And despite my harsh words in some of this article, I do feel sorry for the white working class (I’m just a bleeding heart that way).

They have indeed been screwed over by politicians, corporations, and a rigged societal structure. And I don’t believe it’s as easy as pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. All that is true.

I’m just asking why our cultural sympathies are so easily tapped into when it comes to the WWC. Why do we feel for a white person mired in the economic misery of dying small town, but we mock blacks and Latinos who struggle in inner cities?

More important, what can we do to lift people of all backgrounds out of poverty, without making them go all Hunger Games on each other?

Well, I know that telling the WWC that they are right to feel rage at immigrants, and are correct to get pissed at a changing world, are not productive ideas.

So now that we’ve embraced the exact wrong thing to do, can we somehow adjust and do things the right way — for all our sakes?