Hispanic Fanatic

People are constantly bitching that the world is getting crazier every day.

OK, they may be right.

But the good news is that the world is not getting any more complex. Because at this point in American culture, we all know exactly where we stand.

Is it a surprise that an unrepentant conman, pathological liar, overt bigot, and fledgling dictator would endanger national security, and then complain that he is the one being oppressed? And yet pundits still express shock at this.

Is it an unexpected twist that the followers of this corrupt megalomaniac would enthusiastically support him and dismiss damning evidence that they can see with their own eyes? It should not be, but we have perfectly rational adults who still think this latest grotesquery will somehow convince the Republican Party to abandon their lunatic messiah. I mean, really, who can possibly believe that?

However, perhaps the most straightforward, most uncomplicated aspect of modern politics is the philosophy of the GOP. This principle can be expressed as the following:

Any allegation against a liberal or a Democrat is sufficient to lock ‘em up. There doesn’t need to be a trail, or formal charges, or any evidence at all. Just a deranged conspiracy theory is proof that the liberal should be imprisoned, or even executed.

In contrast, conservatives are allowed to commit whatever crimes they want, including treason and murder. But any attempt to hold them accountable is a witch hunt. It doesn’t matter if there is overwhelming evidence, or formal procedures that were strictly followed. If you try to prosecute a conservative for anything, they have every right to shoot you.

If you don’t believe me, just ask that guy who marches around with a pig’s head on a stick.

He knows the deal.

Let’s say you were a member of a political party that increased the national debt to astronomical levels. And you did this not by investing in the country’s development or funding programs that benefitted Americans. You did this by cutting taxes for rich people who already have more money than they will ever need.

I assume that you would then scream that the other political party has a spending problem. Furthermore, even though the other party has cut the debt more than you ever have — not just recently but over the course of decades — you would threaten to destroy the economy unless they cut it more.

Yes, you would be a Republican.

Now, this level of hypocrisy is not just galling. It’s pathological. It’s also dangerous and potentially catastrophic, but that’s merely a bonus for the GOP.

Conservatives are way into projection — that is, accusing others of behavior that they themselves indulge in.

For example, studies have shown that white people with a high degree of racial resentment are more likely to be Trump supporters. Despite the fact that racist attitudes permeate the GOP, a majority of Republicans still insist that white people are the ones being discriminated against. Yes, white conservatives who despise minorities say it’s actually the minorities who are racist.

Or consider that “all the threats and violence against Pride in stores is exactly what evangelicals think is happening with their wholly imagined ‘War on Christmas.’” No, crowds of atheists are not lighting Christmas trees on fire in stores. 

But conservatives are too busy smashing up Pride displays to acknowledge that.

Even more disturbingly, we all know that conservatives are spending virtually all their time trying to outlaw drag queens, under the guise that men who dress like women will inevitably rape children. But to my knowledge, no drag queen story hour ever ended in child abuse. Plenty of church services have ended that way, however, and it seems like another youth pastor is arrested every week for molesting kids. And of course, the Catholic Church — which is perfectly happy to lecture everyone on morality and “normal” sexual behavior — covered up reports of “hundreds of clergy members who were accused of sexual abuse … of almost 2,000 children who were harmed over seven decades.”

And that’s just in the state of Illinois.

Meanwhile, the leader of the party of Law and Order is currently facing his second indictment and was recently found liable for sexual assault and defamation, which is interesting for a guy whose catchphrase was “lock her up.”

So why do conservatives project so much? Why do they act in reprehensible ways, and then shriek that it is everybody else who committed those horrible acts?

We need a political psychologist to decipher the Freudian rationales. But until then, we will simply have to endure their constant lecturing, and repeated threats, and loud shrieks about the vile behavior of others.

And we will have to wonder exactly what they are trying to hide.

Well, it appears that the United States has narrowly avoided its first-ever debt default, which would have unleashed an economic cataclysm upon the country and thrown us into an instant recession, as well as destroyed what little remains of our international reputation.

It bears repeating that this crisis was entirely manufactured by right-wing zealots who careened from hypocrisy (for their past willingness to drive up the debt) to insanity (for their willingness to torch the economy) to stupidity (for their inability to grasp how the economy actually works).

Now, you might believe it is a little bit of a problem that the world economy was essentially held hostage by a small group of wild-eyed conspiracy mongers, high school dropouts, and statutory rapists.

But remember, we have to respect the GOP as a serious political party.

Please ignore the fact that just 30 years ago, Republican ideas could be broken down in the following manner:

25%—debatable policy point

25%—selfish nonsense that Republicans convinced themselves into believing

25%—dog whistles and grotesque appeals to the lunatic base

25%—the lunatic base

That’s not the best proportion. In my lifetime, the conservative movement has never had a solid foundation of goals that would actually help most Americans. 

But the percentage has gotten even worse over the years. Today, Republican ideas could be broken down in the following manner:

1%—debatable policy point

9%—selfish nonsense that Republicans convinced themselves into believing

30%—dog whistles and grotesque appeals to the lunatic base

60%—the lunatic base

But hey, at least we didn’t default. This time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But at least we’re tough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that’s good news, right?

Ha, we’re not falling for that.

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

How’s that for a post?

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

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

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

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

And thus my track record of always being right began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy 1,000 indeed.

Thanks again for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it’s not going so well.

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

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

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

No, it’s because ESG is good business. 

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

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

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

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

Wow — owning the libs is not cheap.

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

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

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

Again, the exact opposite is true.

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

In a few weeks, the US government will end COVID-19 emergency declarations, meaning that the pandemic will officially be over.

Hey, that wasn’t so bad, was it?

You know, aside from the years of death and madness and depression and trauma and societal unraveling, it wasn’t that big of a deal, right?

Ahem.

In any case, the pandemic provoked behavioral changes that we could not have imagined in 2019, like carrying a mask everywhere or washing your hands incessantly or sticking those weird clamp things on your fingers to check your oxygen levels.

Those were called pulse oximeters, by the way, and they were “a crucial tool for tracking the health of COVID-19 patients.”

Yes, pulse oximeters helped gauge the severity of the illness. They were a sterling example of medical knowledge, technological innovation, and white supremacy.

OK, that last one is an unpleasant addendum. But unfortunately, it is true.

You see, pulse oximeters were often “inaccurate when measuring oxygen levels in people with dark skin tones.”

This is because medical products are often developed using data from “trials that involve primarily white individuals.” As a result, pulse oximeters were designed to work well on white people. For the rest of us, however, not so much.

Experts say “it’s not possible to know how much pulse oximeters have contributed to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color.” But considering Latinos and blacks “experienced higher rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 compared to white people,” it was likely a factor.

Of course, the assumption that white is the most common skin color, or even the only skin color, has a long history in America.

Until the 1960s, Crayola crayons had a pinkish hue that was labeled, “flesh.” 

And as we all know, band-aids don’t come in dark brown, which has “long been a point of contention among people of color who have questioned why white skin is the default shade for a range of flesh-toned products, including nude bras and other garments.”

Why, indeed?

But you will be happy to know that the baseline for the human experience is not just white people, but white men specifically.

We’re not just talking about the fact that white men hold over 60% of all elected offices, despite being just 30% of the population.

Or the fact that most films and TV shows focus on a white male protagonist. 

Or that white men are apparently the only group whose opinions matter, and that the rest of us are pretty much at their mercy.

No, I’m talking about air conditioning.

Yes, you heard me correctly.

Back in the 1960s, when air conditioning became common in office buildings, engineers needed a standard to ensure the temperature would be comfortable.

And of course, they based this standard on the preferences of white men in wool suits — the Don Drapers of the era. 

These temperatures “favor the thermal preferences of men,” and are the baseline to this day, which is why women in office settings often feel like they’re freezing.

It’s because they are.

But don’t worry. Those white guys in suits are perfectly comfortable.

It seems that “everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.” And this is not just annoying. It’s also detrimental to our nation.

You see, the “rewarding of white male mediocrity not only limits the drive and imagination of white men; it also requires forced limitations on the success of women and people of color in order to deliver on the promised white male supremacy.”

When everyone just assumes that a certain group should be in charge (i.e., white guys), members of that group don’t have to excel to succeed, while members of other groups struggle, and the culture as a whole stagnates.

In this way, “white male mediocrity harms us all.”

Unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to change any time soon.

But hey, at least the pandemic is over.

My relentless quest to conquer all media channels continues unabated.

Recently, I wrote my first article for Latino Rebels, which is the premier site for Latino-centric news and insights. I hope to write many more for them.

You can read my debut by clicking here.

Or you can look at this really cool picture I created with AI called, “The Conflagration of Dreams.”

It’s your choice.

I’ve been married for many years now, so I am blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the dating scene. But I’ve heard from single friends that it’s a hellish endeavor

Yes, it has to be difficult to go out on date after date, vainly searching for that one person with whom you can laugh, open up, and plot the overthrow of the lizard people who are trying to enslave humanity.

This universal dilemma has provoked fed-up and ostracized conspiracy theorists to set up “their own dedicated dating sites, in response to what they see as their growing incompatibility with mainstream society.”

Hey, just because someone is a raving lunatic who believes Jewish laser beams are targeting patriots doesn’t mean he isn’t looking for love. Come on, after a hard day of ranting on Reddit about liberal pedophiles, guys just want to cuddle with a lucky lady who will agree that Islamic terrorists are poisoning the water supply.

One such dating site asks users “to list which conspiracy theories they consider to be real — such as coronavirus, QAnon, New World Order or prepper ideology.”

Really, that’s a lot of craziness to choose from, and one wonders if the person who picks all of them is considered a real catch.

In any case, the desire of conspiracy theorists to mate only with people who share their belief in chemtrails is understandable. After all, so-called normal people are unwilling to put up with lengthy diatribes about JFK Jr. coming back to life. And as one dating-site owner puts it, “vaccinated people are hardly an option” for true believers.

Conspiracy-oriented dating sites are part of a larger pattern. In America and Europe, “hardline conspiracy groups have set up their own off-grid “education hubs” to pull their children out of mainstream education, while others have launched efforts to set up entire breakaway communities.”

Just imagine that community. Every town hall would deteriorate into a shouting match about secret symbols and which neighbor is plotting to betray the others to the one-world government. 

In such an environment, can true love last?