Hispanic Fanatic

One thing I don’t understand:

Why would anyone jump on Twitter and post a racial slur or homophobic tirade?

What is the upside? You rile up a dozen of your followers for 30 seconds?

Because the downside is that you look like a total fucking asshole to millions of people years from now, when your idiotic tweets are uncovered, and your career is threatened and your reputation is ruined.

That is a really bad return on investment.

Recently, major league baseball has had to deal with the fallout of several of its players who have had their old bigoted tweets unearthed.

Among them is reliever Josh Hader, an All-Star who pitches for my hometown Milwaukee Brewers.

Hader, like his fellow misguided tweeters, has apologized profusely for his words and insisted that his hateful outbursts are not indicative of who he is today.

OK, sure. Let’s go ahead and give the guy the benefit of the doubt. He was a dick when he was a teenager, but now he’s older and wiser, and not a racist jerk.

But this issue goes beyond a couple of pitchers who may or may not have issues with ethnic minorities.

You see, when Hader took the mound in Milwaukee for the first time after his apology, Brewers fans gave him a standing ovation.

I can’t be the only one who found that distasteful. I’d like to think that most of my fellow fans were just trying to be supportive of Hader’s quest for redemption.

But I also know my hometown. Milwaukee has long had problematic racial issues, even by the problematic standards of the USA.

I can’t help but think that some of those fans were cheering for Hader because he wasn’t “politically correct” or because they wanted to stick it to the libs or some bizarre motivation like that. And some of them, unfortunately, were cheering for Hader’s original tweets and wanted to indicate that he nothing to apologize for.

If that sounds paranoid or accusatory, let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine that Lorenzo Cain, also a Milwaukee Brewer and also an All-Star, had old tweets surface in which he denigrated people of a different race. The catch (and I’m sure you saw it coming) is that Cain is African American, and let’s pretend that he slurred white people.

In such a scenario, it’s difficult to“imagine thousands of white fans rising to their feet and giving him a standing ovation, even after he apologizes and blames youthful indiscretion.”

It’s not just about my hometown, of course. You see,  “baseball has the oldest (average age of an MLB viewer in 2016: 57) and one of the whitest (83 percent in 2013) viewerships of any major American sport.”

It means that baseball — despite its prominence in Latino culture — has a fan base that is more likely to be both more socially conservative and more forgiving of white athletes who screw up.

And this means that young white fireballers who tweet vile things are more likely to get standing o’s, whether they are deserved or not.

By the way, I do indeed have a Twitter account. You can check it out here.

Go ahead and dig around. You won’t find any racist tweets.

Well, everything is all official and shit, and America has finally gotten the cage match that it has long been clamoring for: a former senator, secretary of state, and first female nominee of a major party versus a short-tempered, short-fingered billionaire who despises everyone who isn’t a white male and who casually utters treasonous asides in public.

Yes, it should be a quite entertaining few months.

But before we go into the pros and cons of the respective candidates, let me refer back to my most recent post, in which I pointed out that the Republican Party has a strong pillar of racism propping it up, and that moderate GOPers are in denial about this.

I could point out that the RNC featured any number of speakers making veiled bigoted comments. Or I could mention that one Trump delegate proudly tweeted what the GOP later called a “racially insensitive” term (i.e., the N-word) and that this is fresh proof not only of bigotry but denial.

Note #1: The N-word is not “racially insensitive” or anti-PC. It is as flat-out obscenely racist as it gets. And why do I have to point that out to people?

No, instead I would like to refer to this article, in which a well-known conservative intellectual, Avik Roy, says that as bad as Trump is, the GOP suffers from “a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their party’s voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.”

So the guy agrees with me.

Roy goes on to say that the lament of liberals that many conservatives are racist is “an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”

No, they have not.

We see it not just in the outright insistence of many conservatives that racism doesn’t exist in the GOP — or indeed, in America. We see it in the strange reaction that Trump has provoked in those conservatives who have refused to support him.

I would like to think that many Republicans are taking a stand against bigotry by refusing to vote for Trump, and indeed many of them are. But a disturbing number of Republicans say they are against Trump not because he’s a misogynist or hates Muslims or sees every Latino as a potential rapist.

No, they say it’s because he is not sufficiently conservative. By this, they mean Trump doesn’t despise gays as much as they do, and he once said a few nice words about Planned Parenthood, and he has issues with free trade.

This is so backward and bizarre, so perplexing, that it defies belief. It’s sort of like saying you hated Limp Bizket not because their music sucked, but because you didn’t care for red baseball caps.

Note #2: Limp Bizket really sucked.

To ignore Trump’s racism, in favor of focusing on his conservative bone fides, is yet another example of GOP denial. Maybe these Republicans are happier with the vice presidential nominee, Mike Pence, whose views are just as bigoted but more reliably in the GOP mainstream.

Yeah, that’s the direction they should go in. It will all work out great.

By now you’ve heard GOP Rep. Steve King (a longtime friend of the Hispanic community) insist that “among young undocumented immigrants in the United States, ‘for everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who’” are essentially drug mules.

King, “an Iowa conservative who has come under fire for comments about immigrants before,” has stood by his remarks, insisting that he has “seen it with my eyes and watched the data and video that support what I say.”

I think we would all like to see the video that shows 100 Latino drug mules ganging up on one Hispanic valedictorian. That would indeed be persuasive to the immigration debate.

But all these references to mules have me thinking about another anti-immigration zealot who was obsessed with animals. I’m taking about Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress who, “before her death in 2005, devoted much of her wealth to … curbing immigration, both legal and illegal.”

Scaife May “never knew poverty,” unlike so many of the immigrants she despised. Ultimately, she became a crazy recluse and alcoholic. She also was obsessed with birds.

Her millions continue to fund right-wing anti-immigrant groups to this day. So here we have a rich person who never worked a day in her life. She was a virulent xenophobe and racist who held her fellow humans in contempt simply because they were born in another country. But she had a soft spot for the little birdies.

And who can argue with those priorities?

Basically, some conservatives don’t think of Hispanics as animals. They think of Hispanics as less than animals.

As we all know, President Obama won reelection only because he promised Hispanics unspecified “gifts,” and we responded by casting more than 70% of our votes for him.

Yet I have not received even a thank-you note. Hmm…

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There’s a new horrifying sign that America is on the decline.

I’m not talking about the chaotic state of our politics, or the struggling economy, or even the fact that half of us refuse to acknowledge basic scientific facts.

I’m referring to the recent implication that white conservative guys can’t casually throw around racial slurs anymore. Truly, it’s a sign of the apocalypse.

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As everyone knows, the Republican Party is in serious trouble with Latinos. If Mitt Romney gets any less popular with Hispanics, he’ll disappear from their consciousness altogether.

The reasons for Latinos’ antipathy toward the GOP include the endless insults that Republicans have lobbed at Hispanics, along with the fact that Latinos are not as socially conservative as people think.

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Earlier this month, some polls implied that President Obama’s support among Latinos was so high that he was “close to maxing out” his lead over Mitt Romney. Think about that — Obama statistically could not get any more popular with Hispanics. The president might explode or something.

But then Obama went ahead and said that he supported gay marriage, and Republicans shouted that Latinos were so outraged that they were going to abandon the Democratic Party and vote for Romney, who of course, is semi-pseudo-quasi Mexican. The only problem with this GOP wishful thinking is that it is not based in reality.

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