Hispanic Fanatic

I’ve been homeschooling my son since March. He is seven years old, and he’s obsessed with dinosaurs and the pyramids of Egypt. So most of our curriculum revolves around velociraptors, King Tut, or a combination of both. And yes, King Tut fighting velociraptors would be an awesome Bruckheimer movie.

However — and this may shock you — I cannot replace a trained teacher who actually knows what he or she is doing. So just a few months ago, I was hopeful that our local schools would at least partially open, and my son could continue his proper education and socialize with his friends.

In retrospect, that idea seems so naïve that perhaps I should be the person in my house who is heading off to second grade soon.

Although to be fair, I did not believe at the time that my fellow Americans would be so foolish, so reckless, so gobsmackingly selfishthat their insane actions would cause the pandemic to not only linger at lethal levels, but soar to deadly new heights. Even at my most cynical (and I can be crazy cynical), I still thought we had a chance at joining the civilized world by cobbling together some kind of semi-organized, barely coherent plan for self-preservation.

No thank you. We would all rather die.

Despite the clear statistical and anecdotal evidence that it is idiotic to open schools now (when the situation is actually worse than when we closed them in the first place), our rejected Veep character of a leader is insisting — even demanding — that we flood kids back into their classrooms and hope for the best. Of course, in this scenario, hoping for the best means “only a hundred kids die and maybe a couple thousand teachers, tops.” Hey, we can’t let the science get in the way.

The president apparently believes that reopening schools and further spreading the virus will boost his chances of reelection. No, I don’t understand the logic either. But keep in mind that this is the same guy who thought sending in federal troops to rough up protesters would somehow make suburban moms vote for him. So who knows what the hell he’s thinking.

In any case, Trump’s bellicose stance on schools is one of his least popular positions (and the guy has lots of opinions that people just hate). In fact, a majority of Americans oppose the administration’s demands for schools to reopen, with an overwhelming 65% against “cutting funds to schools that do not physically reopen, as Trump had threatened.” And of course, school districts from LA to Chicago have ignored the president’s whining and made plans for virtual learning instead.

Yes, even some of Trump’s hardcore supporters draw the line at sacrificing their own children just so he has a better shot at winning North Carolina. Sure, they’ll happily sacrifice other people’s children, but not their own, so maybe there is an upper limit to the cult’s power.

Now, this whole scheme — to call it a “plan” is absurd — is yet another example of the Trump Administration’s general incompetence. After all, there is no national strategy for reopening the schools, no real guidelines on how to do it safely, and no ideas for how to deal with a viral outbreak in the classroom. Call it the return of Republican magical thinking or “no exit strategy, part two.” Either way, it illustrates how conservatives cannot think even one step ahead, no matter how predictable, logical, or necessary that step might be.

But wait — it gets worse.

Because in addition to the haphazard flailing from the White House that we’ve seen so many times before, this debacle in the making is fresh proof of the administration’s complete indifference and/or active contempt for the well-being of Americans.

It also reinforces the conservative disdain for education in general, and for public education in particular. Republicans are always freaking out that their children are being “indoctrinated” by teachers who point out that climate change has a scientific basis and that the Tulsa Massacre actually happened. More specifically, this administration has not been shy about its goal of making sure that only rich kids going to private religious schools actually get instruction. 

Speaking of instructors, I’m still trying to figure out how, according to the GOP, teachers are lazy morons and a scourge to America, but they also should be trusted with firearms (you know, to defend against all those school shootings that are the price of freedom). And in today’s world, teachers should be happy to die of coronavirus if it means kids can get out of their parents’ hair for a few hours.

And speaking of kids, conservatives have made it clear that they really don’t care about educational excellence (that’s something those socialist losers in Finland inexplicably prioritize). To the GOP, school is just glorified daycare, which allows parents to work, which keeps the economy going, which is the most important thing in the universe. And since we should all be willing to die for the sake of the stock market, opening schools is a natural extension of the Republican death cult.

As a final insult, we hear that we cannot possibly take even minimal efforts to safeguard classrooms because it would cost too much. This argument is never — as in never, never, never — made when we are talking about, say, a new aircraft carrier or a pile of bombsthat can blow up a continent or invading a foreign land. For those items, we have infinite cash. Also, we can always cut taxes for millionaires, but hand sanitizer is a fucking handout.

As a not-so-wise man once said, “It is what it is.”

It’s the little things that make us happy. Like the sound of children laughing, or the taste of ice cream, or the toppling of grotesque statues of treacherous slaveholders that are then dragged through the streets and thrown into rivers or hammered into oblivion. Things like that.

But while we’re all happy that monuments to Confederate generals are being yanked down across America (just a few decades too late), there remain some dicey issues about who should or should not be honored.

Indeed, it’s fair to ask, “What should be done with statues honoring Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, and what do these statues represent for Latinos — whose ancestry includes this Spanish legacy?”

Yes, depending on our DNA, we Latinos are a mixture of both the oppressed and the oppressor. For example, my family is from El Salvador, but our name originated in Spain. This is a common conundrum. The fancy way to express the twisted nature of our heritage is to state that “Latinx people are both the protagonists in historical justice and the progeny of colonization.”

OK, that all sounds deep — and distressing — but this is largely academic, right? Surely, there is not an undercurrent of bigotry and/or self-loathing within Latino culture when it comes to racial issues. Is there?

Well, the truth is that, historically, many Latinos have “embraced white identity versus mixed identity to avoid further discrimination at the hands of white people.” Personally, I’ve known Hispanics who have happily checked the “white” box on the census and not thought twice about it.

The problem with this attitude is that it frequently becomes a conduit to prejudice against black people. Keep in mind that “anti-blackness has deep and complicated roots throughout Latin America, where fair-skinned people are frequently viewed as the ideal and receive better treatment.”

And if you’re thinking that this mindset is just another one of those silly immigrant traditions — like hating dishwashers — you’re wrong. For many Latino families, antipathy toward darker skin has “often carried over to the United States, where some believe that assimilation is the path to equality.” And for the second generation, “assimilation” often means, “becoming white.”

For proof of this phenomenon, just look at our perpetually tongue-tied, rage-filled president, whose hostility toward Latinos and fear of immigrants are so well-known that only the most delusional or partisan can deny it. 

Currently, almost 30% of Latinos plan to vote for the guy who called them “rapists,” and who has spent years building a shoddily constructed wall to keep brown-skinned people out. Yes, more than one out of every four Latinos is a MAGA supporter. That is nearly triple the percentage of his African American support.

You may be tempted to dismiss this as a polling error that sampled far too many right-wing Cuban Americans. But in truth, Latinos for Trump is a very real thing. And his base of Hispanic support has remained fairly consistent for his entire term.

Now, the president’s “relative resilience with Latino voters can be easy to overlook because he is losing these voters by a large margin” (which is certainly good news). However, Trump “is losing them by less than he did in 2016, which is strange at a time when his numbers are otherwise falling.”

It’s beyond strange. It’s fucked upside-down and backward.

So what are the reasons for this embarrassing anomaly? 

Well, we’ve heard that many Latinos don’t “know” Joe Biden, which is odd, considering his name came up once or twice during the Obama years. We’ve also heard that many Hispanics were big fans of Bernie Sanders, and if they can’t feel the Bern, they’re fine voting for the lunatic who advises chugging bleach. And of course, there are those aforementioned right-wing Cuban-Americans and the fact that Latinos are not a monolithic voting bloc.

But none of those reasons ring fully true.

Because, in truth, many Latinos who support Trump are no different than other conservatives. They are so loathe to admit that they were fantastically, astronomically, stupendously wrong that they are willing to burn America down rather than acknowledge reality. 

And many other Hispanics see nothing offensive about Trumpism. For them, white supremacy is only a problem for blacks and dark-skinned immigrants. It’s not an issue for those who have successfully “assimilated.” Right? 

In essence, Trump is for all those Latinos who look at a statue of a conquistador and think, “Yeah, I’m that guy.”

You really have to give a shout-out to the Founding Fathers. Yes, they were hypocritical slave owners who stole land from the Native Americans, and they routinely drank toilet water and thought mastodons roamed the Pacific Northwest. But they still had some pretty good ideas.

For example, they gave us the First Amendment (a definite highlight). And they also gave us the Second Amendment, a bizarrely worded clause that has defied simple interpretation for almost three centuries now, and which makes the United States the only industrialized nation in the world where it’s easier to get an assault rifle than preventative healthcare.

Now you might ask, “What’s so great about that?”

Well, the whole point of the Second Amendment, according to hardcore advocates of gun rights, is that it is bulwark against government tyranny. Americans are constantly told that if it weren’t for citizens packing heat, the U.S. government would herd us all into labor camps at gunpoint… although it’s unclear who would be doing the rounding up, or why, or how rednecks with shotguns could prevent that from happening, or why the citizens of Japan or Great Britain or Canada don’t require this kind of protection.

Yeah, the details are a little fuzzy. But the point is that we have to guard against tyranny. 

Well, I have good news for all those militia types who have spent their lives hoarding AR-15s and shrieking about government oppression.

This is your chance. The tyranny is here.

You see, we now have a president who is in office only through a constitutional fluke and who has never been the American people’s choice. And this president has spent his entire term undermining our democratic norms and using the White House for personal gain. He has sold out to foreign dictators, ignored the murder of our troops, and dismissed any calls for accountability or transparency. And to top it off, his incompetence and hubris in the face of a pandemic has led to needless death and economic turmoil.

Doesn’t all that send a chill down your freedom-lovin’ spine? It should. But ok, maybe you gun-toting patriots out there believe that this is not enough to take up arms against the government. 

Well, how about the fact that, just last week, the president deployed federal law enforcement officers in “unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters”? These government shock troops are “driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation about why they are being arrested, and driving off.”

I mean, heavily armed government agents with no ID are grabbing citizens and shoving them into cars, with no respect for law and order. These brazen violations of civil rights “are more reflective of tactics of a government led by a dictator, not from the government of our constitutional democratic republic.”

Come on, all you Clive Bundy clones. There are literally jackbooted thugs marching around Portland! Unarmed moms are putting up more of a fight than you are! What are you waiting for?

OK, maybe I’m a little confused.

You showed up, armed and ready, when governors asked you wear a mask. But you don’t issue a peep when unidentifiable storm troopers are breaking the bones of veterans.

And perhaps you missed our president’s latest executive order, which is in direct violation of the Constitution? Or maybe you didn’t notice when he implied that he might ignore the results of an election and stay in office illegally?

I mean, all that is Despotism 101. And yet you do nothing.

Do you really want to prove that liberals are right when they say that threatening to fight your own government is paranoid delusion? Do you actually want progressives to point out that despite your tough talk, you are happy to fall into line behind a wannabe fascist prone to Orwellian doublespeak?

If so, maybe you can go ahead now and admit that your problem isn’t “government oppression.” It’s the fear of change, of an evolving country, of people who don’t look like you gaining more respect and power.

So the next time you feel the urge to issue a manifesto or proclaim your supposed principles, do the rest of us a favor.

As you stand there clutching your gun, just consider, for a moment, that nobody believes you. Because it’s all nothing but lies.

To be honest, I’ve been boycotting Goya for years. Not for political reasons, but because their canned salty slop sucks.

Regardless of motive or rationale, however, I appear to be one of those unhinged progressives who want to cancel everyone and everything for the slightest digression.

Yes, as you know, “cancel culture” is the direct heir to “political correctness.” 

Of course, PC was always overblown nonsense — an imaginary threat and convenient scapegoat. Many of the ideas that conservatives labeled as “political correct” were just basic decency. And many of the people who proudly proclaimed that they were “not PC” were just belligerent assholes. And it didn’t help that the individuals shrieking the most about snowflakes and being oversensitive were themselves the most easily triggered Americans alive.

However, right-wing culture warriors are not idiots. They’re dangerous, hate-filled lunatics, but not idiots.

So they have been working hard on replacing the antiquated “political correctness” with the new, hip “cancel culture.” In both cases, it refers to the right of conservatives (usually white men) to say or do whatever they want without the fear of consequences, or even criticism.

But in truth, “the right and the left both cancel; it’s just that today’s right is too weak to do it effectively.”

Indeed, our old friend Ted Cruz recently proved this point by ranting about cancel culture. Cruz mocked all these outraged Latinos who are sickened by the Goya CEO’s grotesque praising of Trump.

This, of course, is the same Ted Cruz who called for people to boycott the NFL when players started taking a knee. But attempting to get Colin Kaepernick fired or shouting for Nike boycotts was apparently not canceling someone.

Aren’t you happy to have that cleared up?

In any case, our scattershot president has railed against cancel culture at times. Naturally, this is hilarious coming from a guy who wants to cancel anything that even mildly displeases him.

But he’s old, so he keeps coming back to the original term: “politically correct.”

And what, exactly, has Trump identified as PC outrages?

Well, he believes that removing the Confederate flag or tearing down Confederate monuments is PC, as is changing the name of the Washington Redskins. And just a few years ago, most Americans agreed with him on both counts. But now, weirdly enough, they do not, which proves that much of what was considered politically correct in the 1990s is now regarded as goddamn common sense. So all that screaming and yelling in defense of antebellum symbolism and racist monikers was totally worth it. I’m sure there are no regrets there — nope.

But the biggest symbol of the insidious reach of political correctness — in the conservative mind, at least —- is the facemask.

No doubt you’ve seen or heard of brave patriots across the nation who shriek about freedom and refuse to wear the mark of the weak-willed lemming (i.e., a facemask). They often seem to do this while spewing insults and threats at minimum-wage workers, or throwing tantrums so crazed that even toddlers might say, “Wow, time out.” But that’s another story.

It’s no surprise that our president long refused to listen to scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, economists, and a majority of the American people by insisting that he would not wear a facemask. Yes, it is the most effective, simplest way to limit the infection rate. And there is no real constitutional issue with asking people to mask up. And no other country in the world has our bizarre, obstinate, illogical, sociopathic opposition to facemasks.

The point is that wearing a mask is something wimpy liberals do, so donning a mask or practicing social distancing is clearly politically correct.

And then this past weekend, Trump finally wore a fucking mask.

His capitulation means that all the bellowing and fury directed at facemasks was complete idiocy on a homicidal level, and that we have lost a chance to make real progress against coronavirus. Or maybe the president just caved to PC pressure and cancel culture because it’s so, you know, all-powerful. Who can tell which is true?

(Hint: It’s the former, not the latter.)

There can be no doubt that the conservative hatred of facemasks has directly lead to the proliferation of Covid-19. Right-wingers despise imaginary enemies — political correctness or cancel culture — more than they fear a lethal virus.

Keep in mind that liberalism in the form of PC, at its very worst, is annoying and self-righteous. But to my knowledge, cancel culture has never killed anyone.

In contrast, hardcore conservatism — whether through intentional attack or misguided hubris — has now killed thousands of people.

Can anyone blame Americans if they want to cancel it?

Good news!

America is once more open for business, with a thriving economy, a healthy populace, and a vibrant culture that is spilling out onto the streets of every city in our bounteous, invincible nation. Nonstop laughter threatens to deafen us. Our happiness and joy is at maximum exhilaration. Truly, these are the best of times.

Wait, you say that you’re looking out your window, and you don’t see any of that?

OK, it’s true that the coronavirus is rampaging anew across the country, with spiking infection rates in multiple states. It’s true also that the federal government has basically given up fighting the virus, and is now urging Americans “to plow headfirst into a deadly crisis that is racking up horrific numbers of dead in an unprecedented abdication of presidential leadership.”

And yes, every industrialized nation in the world is staring at us, collective mouths agog, shocked at our floundering inability to protect our citizens and our apparent zeal for societal suicide.

But those are the only negative things going on, so don’t get all pessimistic.

Oh wait — there is also the fact that our economy is still near Great Depression levels, and the insistence that we needed to reopen our states has only backfired spectacularly, causing more damage than if we had simply behaved like responsible adults instead of spoiled children, and myriad experts predicted that this exact horrific situation would occur.

Sure, if you look at it that way, it’s a little frustrating.

However, it’s not as if the president of the United States ignored a hostile power placing cash bounties on the heads of our nation’s soldiers, possibly leading to the murders of many troops. And then that chief executive, who has exhibited nothing but disdain and contempt for the military that his party supposedly reveres, then lied about being informed of the Russian plot, and followed up by kowtowing (yet again) to a malevolent dictator for his own unknown, incomprehensible reasons.

Well, maybe that kind of, sort of… actually happened. 

But hey, at least everyone is rallying around the need for cultural change. I mean, nobody is still denying that racism is a major crisis, and it’s not as if furious, frazzled white people are panicking that their unquestioned dominance is now actually being questioned, and responding by shrieking and vandalizing and freaking out, even drawing guns on black people over the slightest provocation.

OK, maybe a little.

However, it’s a tribute to the American spirit that our nation’s citizens are still displaying that upbeat, can-to attitude that…

Hmmm, it seems that in truth, Americans have not been this unhappy in at least a half-century. And “an overwhelming 89 percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country.”

Well… fuck it. I got nothing.

Except for this little tidbit:

“Black and Latino Americans are significantly more optimistic than they were last year that life will be better for future generations than it is now.” 

Yes, the percentage of African Americans who believe in a brighter tomorrow has doubled over the past year, and the percentage of Hispanics who agree with that sentiment has also increased to the point that white people — specifically white Republicans — are now the least optimistic about the future.

And here you thought Trump was going to make life better for his followers.

In any case, why are African Americans and Latinos cautiously optimistic about the future?

Perhaps it is because Latinos, in particular, tend to maintain positive attitudes. Or maybe it’s because ethnic minorities have a lot of experience dealing with calamity and dark days, so we roll with the horror better than most. Or perhaps it’s because many of us believe that the nation is finally addressing its long-simmering, long-ignored racial issues, with the possibility that real change will finally occur. Or maybe we just figure the country bottomed out when Trump got elected, leading to today’s inevitable quagmire of disaster, and things can only get better from here out.

Regardless of cause or rationality, it’s hope. And it’s about all we have going for us.

For most of my lifetime, a vocal mixture of liberals, African Americans, and historians have insisted that the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. Until recently, conservatives always responded that this was PC nonsense, and that the flag merely indicated Southern pride.

Of course, within the last few weeks, everyone from NASCAR drivers to Mississippi state legislators have said, “You know what? It is a racist symbol. Let’s get rid of it.” They behave as if they never noticed the overt bigotry before, like they had to squint to see it behind all those stars and bars.

Now, this is the exact same emblem, long championed by the exact same people who are now denouncing it. All of this begs the question of why we have to fight with conservatives over and over again, sometimes sparring for years in heated debate, only to have them eventually discard their supposedly principled arguments, shrug, and say, “Oh yeah, everybody knows that. Old news.”

Nothing exemplifies this abrupt switch from loathing to loving as much as Black Lives Matter. As we all know, until recently it was perfectly acceptable to call BLM a mob of racial agitators or even a terrorist group.

But today, majorities across multiple racial and ethnic groups express support for BLM. In fact, “two-thirds of U.S. adults say they support the movement, with 38% saying they strongly support it.” Not surprisingly, this sentiment is “particularly strong among black Americans, although majorities of Hispanic (77%), Asian (75%) and white (60%), Americans express at least some support.”

Yes, it seems like everybody now supports Black Lives Matter.

Well, maybe not everybody (certainly not these two).

In any case, studies show that the percentage of Americans who consider racism and discrimination a “big problem” has skyrocketed since Trump oozed his way onto the political scene. Currently, three-quarters of Americans think bigotry is a national crisis, but as recently as 2015, barely half of Americans believed that. Furthermore, 57% of voters say that the anger behind the George Floyd demonstrations “is fully justified, while a further 21 percent call it somewhat justified.”

So only about one-quarter of Americans look at the protests and say, “I don’t see what they’re complaining about.” I am sure you will be shocked to know that the people who are most likely to dismiss BLM are white Republicans.

Keep in mind that the GOP “might want government to be ‘smaller’ when it comes to providing essential services, but it wants the violent authority of the state to be a constant intrusion into the day-to-day lives of many Americans, particular the lives of people of color, women and/or poor people.”

This attitude lines up with their standard bearer, old Mr. Racial Reconciliation himself. As we know, Trump is fine with ethnic minorities… as long as they never, ever disagree with him or question his authority in even the slightest way.

However, it is not enough to point out the hypocrisy of Republican attitudes, nor is it sufficient to state that they are woefully out of touch with mainstream American thought (i.e., the Silent Majority is as real as Pizzagate).

It is worth considering what, exactly, the conservative opposition to BLM is based upon.

After all, it is easy to pinpoint what Black Lives Matter protesters stand for (i.e., racial justice and an end to police brutality). 

It is more difficult to ascertain what BLM opponents want. The most generous interpretation is that they believe cops are being unfairly maligned and even endangered. This viewpoint, of course, doesn’t line up with statistics that show how the police disproportionally target ethnic minorities. Nor does it sync with the images we have seen over the past few months (unless you think an unarmed septuagenarian hypnotized a good cop into pushing him down and cracking his skull, brainwashed all the other good cops into walking away without offering help, then convinced all of them to lie about it).

So at its best, opposing BLM’s goals requires a strange suspension of disbelief. As we climb the ladder of probable motivations, we encounter familiar unpleasantries such as denial, delusion, fear, weaponized privilege, subconscious racism, and overt hatred.

In case you’re wondering, none of these are good.

All of the white conservatives who insist that racism is not an issue are basically saying that they understand the lives of ethnic minorities better than African Americans and Latinos do themselves. They are saying that we are imagining hostile interactions with cops and racial epitaphs casually tossed our way and smirking slights that can have only one origin. 

The white conservative believes that he alone is plugged into the happenings of the urban cities that he avoids as much as possible. The GOP stalwart insists that the 84% of African Americans who say they “contend with discrimination a lot or a great deal” are clearly wrong. And according to Republican guys with their fingers on the pulse of the nation, the one-third of Latinos who say that they have been slurred are just making it up for attention.

No, systematic racism is just your imagination. We know this because conservative suburbanites have told us so.

By the way, statistics show that African American men receive prison sentences nearly 20% longer “than those of white men convicted for the same crimes.”

Be sure to ask some white Republicans if that’s actually true. After all, they are the final authority.

In the last week, America has endured even more protests (often marred by aggressive cops and/or right-wing lunatics), a surge in Covid-19, and allegations that the president is so corrupt that the House articles of impeachment were penny ante compared to his actual malfeasance.

On a personal note, I’m exhausted from overwork, an old friend abruptly begin spewing Soros conspiracy nonsense, and I think I’m catching a cold.

Yes, there was a major victory for LGBTQ rights, and a narrow win for the Dreamers. So that’s ending the week on a high note. But let’s not push it.

Yeah, I’m taking a break. 

I will be back next week with (hopefully) more astute and coherent points to make.

Until then, I will leave you with this quirky factoid:

A couple of weeks ago, Irene Triplett died at the age of 90 in a North Carolina nursing home. Her father was teenage soldier in the Civil War, and as his only surviving child, Ms. Triplett was the last person to receive a pension from a veteran’s Civil War service.

Every month, the Veterans Administration paid Irene Triplett $73.13. By the time of her death, the family had been collecting the pension for 155 years. One has to wonder about the VA employee tasked with cutting Ms. Triplett’s check each month. He now has a little more free time.

In any case, Irene Triplett was the last living link to the Civil War. Her demise is ironic, considering that it comes at a time when all of us are primed to become living links to the Second Civil War.

So there’s that to consider.

See you next week.

And then everybody made the exact same joke at the same time.

You see, the timing was too good, the irony too evident, and the metaphor too glaring for us to help ourselves.

So that’s why half of Facebook, most of Twitter, and all of the headline writers in America shouted the following:

“Trump finally got his wall. But it’s at the White House!”

And then we all laughed, or at least chuckled as much as we could while coughing up tear gas or choking down existential angst.

Yes, the president who is so popular with his nation’s citizens that he has to hide in the basement now has a riot fence to protect him from America. As many have pointed out, only despots ruling over troubled lands construct barriers to keep the populace at bay. A wall around the presidential residence is what “authoritarian rulers in third-world countries build to protect themselves from the passions of their own aggrieved people, and a far cry from the ‘people’s house’ that has for centuries symbolized a president accountable to the citizens who elected him.”

Furthermore, “as Trump tries to project strength, he instead appears weaker than ever.” After all, Mr. Law and Order can “bluster about force and domination” but the new multilayered black fencing “around the executive mansion reveals the reality that he is operating not from strength but from fear.”

Seriously, can you imagine anything that petrifies Trump more than thousands of black people massed outside his bedroom window? The only way it would be scarier for him is if they all waved around copies of his tax returns.

To add insult to — well, insult — those protesters who terrify the president so much are now marching right up to White House wall and plastering it with Black Lives Matter slogans. So the administration has given the demonstrators an even bigger platform.

With such a heavy-handed symbol of Trump’s ineptitude and cowardice encircling the White House, it’s a good time to ask, “Hey, whatever happened to the origina l wall?” 

You know, the one that Mexico was going to pay for? The Trump campaign’s chief selling point to xenophobes? The central promise of his presidency that inspired racists to taunt Latino kids with chants of “Build the wall! Build the wall!” Yeah, that one.

Well, I’m glad you asked.

It turns out that the administration’s goal of blocking Latin America behind 2,000 miles of towering concrete has fallen just a little short.

The Customs and Border Protection has acknowledged that a mere 194 miles of border barriers has been constructed since Trump took office. Furthermore, 191 of those miles “already had barriers in place.” This means that the president has placed fresh obstacles on a grand total of three miles of borderland. Once again, the number of miles with new barriers is… three.

You can walk that distance in an hour or so. It amounts to less than a mile per year that Trump has been in office.

This is even more pathetic when you consider that the president has pulled billions of dollars from other military projects, and engaged in blatant cronyism while doing it.

Of course, it’s not just about length (ahem). It’s about strength.

Which makes it all the more laughable — or tragic, who can tell the difference anymore — that the new barriers have been easily climbed, hacked through, carted off, and toppled over by heavy breezes.

Yes, the president “wants Americans to believe he’s built hundreds of miles of impenetrable wall that cannot be climbed.” But in truth, his half-assed engineering project is “not a wall; it’s not hundreds of miles; it can be climbed; it’s penetrable, and in one instance, it failed to withstand wind gusts.”

And it bears repeating that “Mexico isn’t paying for any of it, the Republican’s campaign promises notwithstanding.”

At this point, let me remind everyone that I repeatedly said, back in 2016, that there would never be a huge wall on the Mexican border, and to think otherwise was just racist, delusional nonsense.

I should have bet money on that statement.

So maybe the wall around the White House is as good as it gets for our beleaguered, doltish commander in chief. Yes, it’s true that “apresident who needs to take shelter behind fences and barriers because he feels threatened by his own citizens is not their leader.” More accurately, “he is their prisoner.”

But give the guy a break. It’s the closest he’s come to fulfilling a campaign promise, and it won’t matter to his dead-eyed worshippers anyway

No matter what, they will all keep chanting to “Build the wall! Build that wall!” — in denial to the very end.

If you could time travel back to 2016 and issue dire warnings about the Trump Administration, as soon as you mentioned the president tear-gassing peaceful protesters in order to engineer a photo op in front of a church while waving a bible around… well, your listeners would dismiss you as a deranged liberal spewing heavy-handed metaphors that defy belief.

And yet, here we are, in the clutches of a fascist Snidely Whiplash who is so comically corrupt, idiotically inept, and grotesquely authoritarian that he’s morphed into a human parody. Except nobody is laughing.

There is some comfort, however, in the fact that American society has deteriorated so far and so quickly that subtlety, subtext, and irony have all been trampled under the leaden heels of conservative fear-mongering and white nationalism. And that sliver of a silver lining is this:

We all know exactly where we stand.

There is no more justifying tortured syntaxes, misogynistic insults, or racist asides with mutterings of “What the president really meant to say is…”

There is no more dismissing neo-Nazis on parade as potentially good people in disguise, or claiming that the GOP is going along with high-caliber insanity in exchange for tax cuts.

There is no more shadowboxing the truth, rationalizing praise for dictators, or dismissing the fetishization of violence.

There is not a conservative or a liberal who is confused about this president. 

You say that Trump wants to censor social media — a blatant kneecapping of free speech — solely because Twitter fact-checked one of countless lies? That sounds about right.

You say the president has “mused” (now there’s a quaint word!) about unleashing American military might on American citizens on American soil? Not a shocker.

Similarly, we cannot be too taken aback at the state of this country, and the morass of shameless, vile behavior that erupts forth every day.

So there’s a white woman in Central Park who calls the cops on a black man, knowing full well he could be killed because of her false accusation, because he dared to ask her to follow the rules? Yes, we could have predicted that.

And a homicidal cop in Minneapolis kneeled on a black man’s neck for several minutes, for no reason other than to inflict critical physical pain, without even the slightest concern that people were watching and videotaping for minutes on end? Hey, the only surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.

And you shout that we now have nationwide — and even worldwide — protests against America’s systemic racism that have turned hundreds of city streets into rolling street battles? Honestly, who couldn’t have seen that one coming?

Yes, perhaps there is yet one sad, stupendously delusional Trump fan who is muttering, mostly to himself, that our jabbering chief executive is not as power-hungry as he seems to be, and that our nation is actually on the right track. 

Well, I’m sorry, my friend, but when it comes to this president and this country, plausible deniability died long ago, brutality and decisively. Its essence was cremated, and then the ashes were scattered over cages holding migrant children. 

The benefit of the doubt has been executed, and conservative “principles” have been revealed as the pathetic façade they always were. 

Those moderate Republicans who still believe Trump will magically become a unifying leader? They are as real as Bigfoot. 

And journalists who still believe that Trump won the votes of rural whites because of “economic anxiety”? They are some strange fairy tale or a half-forgotten urban myth.

Nobody truly believes any of those absurd ideas anymore.

Instead, we believe in the undeniable, the clear-cut and the perfectly obvious. We believe in rage and malicious motives and unquenchable greed. We believe in irrational fear and shrieking and the banging of heads against walls. We believe in those things because we see them every day.

It’s all out in the open now. 

African Americans are sick of being targets. Progressives are tired of being polite. And racists aren’t even hiding it anymore. Everyone knows where one another stands.

And everyone is poised.

Over the past few months, I’ve learned a number of interesting things from conservative media.

For example, I’ve learned that Covid-19 is no worse than the flu — wait, check that — it is no worse than a really bad cold. So we should all stop cowering in fear, jam ourselves into a crowded bar (without a face mask of course), and inhale a big old lungful of freedom. It’s all a hoax!

Also, I’ve learned that coronavirus is a highly lethal weapon that was created in a lab, then unleashed on America as an insidious plot to kill millions and destroy the country. 

Now, you might think that those beliefs are completely contradictory. 

But that’s just what they want you to think.

Yes, these are the golden days for people who love a good conspiracy theory. Or for people who have a soft spot for full-on lunacy. Or for sociopaths who want to undermine society and turn us all into babbling, paranoid freaks. For any of these people, these are the good times.

For the rest of us, these days suck.

You see, it’s bad enough that we are all preoccupied with the thought of ending up unemployed and hooked into a ventilator. The real world is sufficiently horrifying, thank you.

But no, we have C-level celebrities and right-wing demagogues overruling medical professionals because doctors are, you know, in on it. 

Meanwhile, across all social media, we hear shouts to “stop being a sheep and think for yourself,” a phrase usually screeched by people who have formed their entire worldview based on one YouTube video from a disgraced scientist and forwarded emails from acquaintances who barely graduated high school.

And of course, there is Q, an amalgamation of madness so twisted that it is difficult to believe that its adherents are not enacting some bizarro performance-art piece.

As we know, people who worship Q are proud of seeking the truth, which is odd in that they believe literally anything that an unknown person with unknown motivations and unknown credibility says on the internet. If this Q individual — who again they know absolutely nothing about and has not called a single thing correctly — told them that ducks were secretly cows, they would believe it.

This is what thinking for yourself looks like.

Keep in mind that there is no liberal equivalent to the Q movement. It is yet another odd manifestation of the right-wing mindset that conspiracies are more prevalent among conservatives (along with their tendencies to be more fearful and to possess absolutely no sense of humor).

In any case, Q fans and Plandemic believers and 5G truthers and others of their tribe all insist that their beliefs are true because they cannot be disproven.

Indeed, can you definitely prove that lizard people are not running the post office? I didn’t think so.

However, what these lovers of speculation and heresy forget is that “there are no good conspiracy theories, because they are attractive precisely because they’re unproven, imprecise and non-falsifiable.”

Science, in contrast, rests on the assumption that theories can be verified, or replicated, or dismissed based on the evidence. 

But that’s damn dull in a world that thrives on “confusion to create a sense of comfort and control when it’s in short supply,” such as when a killer virus arrives, apparently out of nowhere, to decimate society.

Instead of acknowledging that viral pandemics are part of the natural course of civilization (which they are), many Americans declare that it’s all the fault of Bill Gates, so if we can somehow stop him, everything will return to normal.

So then we enter a vicious loop where “you can’t productively question someone’s superstition, because they never really thought it was an actual explanation of how the world is.”

In this way, conspiracy theories aren’t theories at all. They aren’t hypothesis about how the world works. 

They are desperate, illogical, and pathetic attempts to gain control of an uncontrollable narrative.

The result is that we now have millions of Americans who believe the government has engineered a fake crisis in order to… what exactly? Keep us at home for a few months? Exert power over our lives (and then inexplicably relinquish that power over several weeks)? Or groom us for nefarious ends that are conveniently never identified?

No, I’m pretty sure that the number of people who are petrified of being microchipped far exceeds the number of people who actively want to microchip them. I mean, nobody gives a fuck about tracking your every movement, because your every movement is boring.

But in the spirit of reaching out to my conspiratorial brothers and sisters, I propose a friendly wager. Let’s assume that coronavirus is indeed a manmade plot. Now please note that Covid-19 is the worst pandemic in a century, has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and pulverized almost every country on Earth. That can’t be easy to pull off, so this shit is not a test. This is the final gambit of the Bavarian Illuminati or the New World Order or the UN black helicopter dudes — whoever you like. 

That means it’s time to put up or shut up. Five years from now, if people are no longer dying by the thousands, a malicious government has not imprisoned you, and you have not been microchipped, will you lunatics shut the fuck up permanently? Will you admit that you were wrong, and your nonsense did nothing but terrify people and poison the nation? Will you see that Covid-19 was not a means to a totalitarian end, but a horrific plague made worse by governmental incompetence?

Or will you just make up some new insanity about the ceaseless quest to destroy your freedom, even though that war never seems to actually get waged?

How will you possibly justify the next conspiracy?