Hispanic Fanatic

I believe it was the philosopher Loki of Asgard who said, “It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation…. You were made to be ruled.”

Well said, Loki, well said.

There is a reason that we create stories about heroes. Our natural tendency is to cave in to fear, run away from trouble, and let someone else take charge. Heroes are rare, and as such, they are inherently more interesting than the vast majority of people who let their anxiety rule their actions. Heroes are inspirations to us, the cowering majority.

Fear is powerful and innate. It is difficult to overcome, and even more difficult to reason with. 

Our recent debacle of an election proved, as if there was any real doubt, that if you scare people enough, they will turn to you for help. They will let you rule.

Trump said Haitians were eating cats and dogs, and this resonated far more than Harris’ proposals to help people buy a house. This is fear in action (it’s also hatred, ignorance, stupidity, racism, and other assorted vile behaviors, but that’s a topic for another post).

People who are honest about Trump’s victory know that “anger and fear were going to work in this election, whether you’re afraid of immigrants or afraid of people who are trans.” Yes, maybe progressives believed that “everyone’s better angels would prevail,” but “the better angels went on vacation when Donald Trump came down the escalator, and they haven’t returned.”

It’s a fearful country, a terrified nation.

Trump’s “promises of fixing what he called a broken country — even if it means abandoning long-held principles — was the whole point.” Conservatives believe it is better to let an addled lunatic do whatever he wants if it makes their fear subside, even temporarily. And Trump has gotten millions of Americans and his entire political party to fall into line, evidenced by the fact that “moderate Republicans used to occasionally criticize Trump’s most outlandish behavior, [but] fealty to Trump is now almost uniform among the GOP.”

These are some seriously petrified motherfuckers.

Well, the nation’s voters are going to get what they asked for. Of course, they probably won’t like what comes next. Indeed, vast swaths “of the Trump majority will soon have cause for second thoughts,” because if GOP’s plans are implemented, the “resulting pain is likely to be felt throughout American society.”

But Americans voted for fear. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get.

Throughout this long, miserable campaign season, every day the news was like “Trump vows to deport gay, left-handed Asian dentists.”

And the next day the news was like “Polls show surge in Trump support among gay, left-handed Asian dentists.”

I can’t explain it. Fuck it, give me another drink.

If a racist rally — a Coachella for bigots — isn’t enough to convince you that both parties are not the same, you are beyond reason. Maybe one day, you will snap out of your right-wing delusion and realize, “Hey, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to vote for guy who assaults women and tried to overthrow the government.”

We are going to elect a politically moderate, well-qualified woman who will continue economic policies that work pretty well.

Or we will elect a felonious, sociopathic lunatic who will likely drive the economy into the ground, open to the door to autocracy and oligarchy, and make life hell for everyone who is a not a white straight Christian male (until eventually turning on them too, because nobody comes out unscathed when under the thumb of an venal, incompetent dictator).

It really is one or the other.

Good luck, America.

In my last post, I discussed how the GOP’s war on reality has convinced Americans that we are living in a dystopian hellhole where the solutions are idiotic proposals that will only backfire and cause calamity.

For example, after decades of obnoxious perseverance, pro-lifers succeeded in overturning Roe vs. Wade. As a result, “following the Supreme Court Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to an abortion, hundreds more infants died than expected in the United States.” So congratulations, pro-lifers, on killing more babies. Oh, and those draconian abortion bans “also affect access to broader health care, which can lead to increased risk for both babies and mothers.”

Thanks again, religious zealots.

The GOP has convinced the populace that up is down, evident in the continued insistence that the Trump years were better for the economy, even though almost every indicator shows that this is not true. Despite our strong economy, a huge chunk of Americans “wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession.”

Republicans also want you to know that ice is hot, and fire is cold.

As a final example, let’s consider the idea that so many Americans think Trump is a tough guy who will stand up for our nation in times of crisis. They “support him precisely because they believe he can protect the country in a way no other politician will.” In truth, his style of incoherent, impulsive governance would create “a politically chaotic” America, where “other countries assert more global influence.” Indeed, our “biggest global rivals believe that a Trump victory will serve their interests instead.”

Clearly, millions of Americans are basing their decisions not on facts or even emotions. Rather, they are clamoring for what they sincerely believe is real, despite acres of easily accessibly evidence that shows them they are wrong.

They are listening to Republicans, whose stated goal is to “make America great again, because it’s not great now, what with Black people protesting the police, Pride flags flying, and immigrants seeking new lives in America.” Conservatives don’t want “to hear Spanish at the supermarket or be aware that someone is dressed in drag,” and they are filled with anger at all those “New York and Los Angeles elites who, in the estimation of many Republicans, are actively discriminating against White people and Christians.”

At this point, “it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.”

It is also becoming more difficult to deny that the GOP candidate for president has, right before our eyes, gone “from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention.” The guy is “one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

And yet, whole swaths of Americans will vote for him, vote for this Wonderland logic, and insist that the truth is on their side.

In a sane world, a babbling old man who threatened to deploy the US military against American civilians would be shuffled off to nap time at the facility, rather than hailed as a conquering hero to millions of conservatives who have the audacity to call themselves patriots.

But the GOP has succeeded in turning our country into a bizarro world of contradictions and backward logic.

This accomplishment may be Republicans’ only achievement of the century, as every other project they have led over the past 20 years—Iraq, Covid, the economy, etc—has ended in full-fledged disaster.

As an example of the fun-house mirror that America has morphed into, consider that Republicans continue to insist that immigrants are invading the country, raping and pillaging at will, stealing everyone’s job, taking over whole swaths of the country, and eating all our pets.

In reality, immigration is a key reason that our economy is doing better than other industrialized nations. Furthermore,  “the ‘magic bullet’ driving the post-pandemic population revival of major US urban centers is immigration,” and immigrants are filling a labor gapthat, if left unfilled, would lead to financial devastation. In fact, studies show that “the large influx of immigrants” over the past few years have “helped grow the U.S. economy.”

As for those rampaging immigrants killing and looting nonstop, even Republicans admit that they are making those stories up. Immigrants have lower rates of crime than native-born Americans, as we all know.

Any while we’re at it, please note that “crime rose rapidly at the end of Trump’s term but is now dropping.” In particular, the homicide rate recently saw “the largest single-year decline in the last 20 years.”

That hasn’t stopped the GOP nominee from advocating for a real-life version of The Purge, in which one violent day would bring down crime rates that aren’t that high in the first place.

There are more ways in which conservatives have it completely backwards, but I will save those examples for next week’s post.

Here are some fun statistics for you: 

“A majority (52 percent) of Trump supporters say they believe the claim about Haitian migrants abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.” Slightly fewer believe that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth,” and almost a third think that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations.” As nuts as these viewpoints are, they pale in comparison to the 81 percent of Trump supporters who believe “Venezuela is deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions to the United States.”

But they constitute a serious political party, and we should respect their opinions. Right?

Of course, among Trump’s strongest supporters are Christian nationalists. These are people who talk a lot about how much they love Jesus but in reality despise almost everything the guy actually taught. Trump-centered Christians “are not churchgoers and are looking for what they see as retribution against those they believe are destroying traditional values, those who defend a secular society in which everyone is treated equally before the law.” Their support for the GOP is “less about religion than it is about a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically, and Mr. Trump looms large.”

They have found a cozy home in The Republican Party, which is “68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian.”

We’re talking about “Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.”

These religious zealots are “developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in [Trump’s] administration should the former president return to power.”

And what are those plans? Well, it’s the usual right-wing obsession with overturning same-sex marriage, enacting a nationwide abortion ban, and reducing access to contraceptives. But they also want to create “a restrictionist immigration agenda” that allows only those newcomers who “accept Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history.” 

So basically, they want an America that is virtually 100% Christian, with a few conservative Jews allowed to hang around.

The GOP is so hyper-religious that they enthusiastically nominate fundamentalists who preach violence in the name of God. And if those lunatics indulge in all the behaviors that they condemn, plus a few straight-up vile acts that should disqualify them from society, well, the Republican Party will stand beside them.

This push for religious theocracy comes at an interesting time in American history. You see, about 28% of Americans say they are “religiously unaffiliated — a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is ‘nothing in particular.’ ” This makes them the largest religious cohort in the country.

In essence, America is becoming less religious even as the dwindling group of extremists among us get more fanatical.

God help us all.

What’s behind the GOP’s Ragnarokian rage?

It’s both an excellent question and a great excuse to use the term “Ragnarokian,” which I’m pretty sure is not even a real word.

But why are conservatives so determined to destroy America unless they can reshape it into a right-wing utopia?

Well, for decades, rich jerks tried to control our political system for their own economic benefit. And while they were successful (the wealth gap is a very real thing), they needed the middle- and working-class to vote Republican to maintain this system. After myriad culture wars and made-up threats, many of those voters came to believe they are in a literal holy war against satanic progressives. 

So now we have millions of religious fundamentalists “hellbent on overthrowing democracy to impose their religious will on the American majority.” I will quote the historian Heather Cox Richardson at length here:

“In the United States, [there is] a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in. It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.”

But don’t believe me and some egg-head historian. Conservative leaders have gotten up in public and shouted that they want to overthrow democracy and unleash “righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

Millions of Americans no longer believer in the Constitution, and “have no interest in the stewardship of American democracy.” Instead, these theocrats “seek to commandeer the ship of state, pillage the hold, and then crash us all onto the rocks.”

This is not a fringe movement within the Republican Party. No, the GOP threat to democracy is now systemic, and Republican leaders “tolerate or condone antidemocratic extremism because it is the path of least resistance.”

The guiding lights of the modern conservative movement are threatening violence if they don’t get their way, which consists of “restructuring the country so that the right — meaning primarily straight White men, as was the case 100 years ago — can decide how power and status are allocated.”

They want us to be like Hungary (only bigger) or Russia (only smaller).

And speaking of international trends, a recent study concluded that 71% of the world’s population currently lives in autocracies, which “constitutes a 48% increase compared to ten years ago.” And before you think despotism exists only in those sepia-toned third-world nations that provide anonymous villains for Hollywood blockbusters, please note that almost half of the population of industrialized nations “think a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts is a good form of government.”

That apparently includes America, where democracy is frail as it faces the onslaught of fundamentalist maniacs. 

After 250 years, it can all go away overnight.

Why are we even discussing this?

One candidate has been attorney general of the biggest state in the country, a senator, and the vice president, serving all functions without any real controversy and fulfilling her duties in a competent (albeit unspectacular) manner.

The other served as president, botched the biggest health care crisis in American history, drove the economy into a ditch, tried to overthrow the government, and is running based on a platform of hatred, conspiracy theories, authoritarian fantasies, and pure revenge. Also, he jabbers incoherently, mostly about himself, and displays total ignorance about basic governance.

Polls show a tight race.

Seriously, what the fuck? Who watched that debate, saw an easily flustered septuagenarian rant about immigrants eating cats, and thought, “I’m good with that guy having access to nuclear launch codes”?

It’s only recently that the media has started paying any attention to “Trump’s visible incoherence, cognitive impairment, inability to cogently discuss the simplest public matters, and increasingly strange flights of fantasy.”

But even as Trump’s slippery grasp on reality fumbles away, the GOP will stand by him, no matter what, further proof that we should “ever underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers” (i.e., the Republican Party).

Perhaps nothing can be done to rectify the “worm-eaten degeneracy of the GOP mind.”

But surely, those fabled undecided voters in swing states, the true source of electoral power, will now snap out of it and come to their senses. 

Well, apparently, many undecided voters are “still not convinced by Harris.” Yeah, they’re still considering voting for the aging lunatic with 32 felony convictions who talks openly about being a dictator.

Once again, I must ask, seriously what the fuck?

Look, we can all agree that some people just need killing. It’s common sense and not controversial in the least—nope.

OK, the idea of executing individuals you disagree with might strike you as bizarre, deranged, antithetical to American values, a conduit to chaos, and a powerful indication that society is collapsing.

But you’re not a Republican.

You see, the GOP has always had a violent streak. Witness their love of war and propensity for calling in the cops to bust some heads. But in the Trump era, this predilection for bloodshed has become overt and integral to the conservative brand.

It’s not surprising that a political party that welcomes Nazis would eventually embrace thuggery. But this trend has accelerated since the rise of Trump, a man who has never been in a fight in his life but who loves to act the tough guy.

The MAGA movement’s “violent threats are warping life in America,” and “there is no question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an instrument of politics that it has inflamed countless people to perverse action.” 

GOP leaders have encouraged right-wing vigilantes to “take matters into your own hands” and advised their supporters to “strap on a Glock.” Conservatives have issued death threats, attacked progressive protestors, and expressed a great willingness to commit violent acts to get their way. Over 40% of Trump supporters “are open to violence from ‘true American patriots.’”

Now, you might think that acquiescing to the demands of these gun-toting goons would protect you. But giving in to bullies just makes them bolder. So now even Republicans are feeling the wrath of the easily provoked. 

GOP members of Congress have resigned out of fear for their lives, and the threat “of physical violence from Trump supporters has kept certain Republicans” from criticizing Trump. In fact, Republican state legislators “reported seeing a greater increase in the ‘volume of abuse’ than Democrats.” Republican officeholders are often targeted “by the party’s far-right for refusing to back extreme positions.”

So whimpering, “But I’m a Republican” will not save you from the billy clubs.

Looking at all this data and anecdotal evidence, combined with our knowledge of how conservatives rioted when they lost the last presidential election, it is a given that there will be political violence if Trump loses in November. Actually, there will likely be political violence even if he wins because, hey, why not?

Until then, we will go on pretending that the GOP is a stable political party, devoid of violent tendencies, while we explain to kids that some conservatives just want to bomb their library, and that’s perfectly normal.

Yes, there’s nothing to worry about here.

One side offers an optimistic view of America and hope for the future. They offer coherent policies designed to improve the country.

The other side insists we are living in a hellhole dystopia. They offer only blind rage and the punishment of everyone who isn’t a straight white Christian.

This is not an oversimplification. As others have pointed out, Democrats want to give schoolkids free lunches, while Republicans want them to work in slaughterhouses and pump out babies by age 16.

Tell me that I’m getting it wrong.

There is a bizarre obsession that permeates the Republican Party. This ironclad mindset holds that government exists solely to give money to billionaires, build the largest military in the history of the world, and oppress the shit out of people who don’t genuflect at the altar of 1950s suburbia.

Conservatives view any attempt to help people — by offering affordable healthcare, improving education, or lifting individuals out of poverty — not as socialism, or even communism. According to the GOP, these endeavors are demonic and evil. Virtue is banning books, harassing trans people, jailing immigrants, and forcing women to carry dead fetuses to term. 

When one looks at the different philosophies, it’s worth asking the following; Is there anyone voting for Trump who is not an oligarch, a conspiracy nut, a Christian nationalist, or a right-winger with violent tendencies? Well, that covers much of his base, but there is another contingent of supporters. 

There are millions of Americans who are deeply unhappy with how their lives turned out. And they want someone to blame. They have found a home in the GOP, which has become a party of grievance and wrath (and straight-up weirdoes).

The energy and good vibes that the Harris/Walz ticket exudes is in direct contrast to the anger and contempt that the Trump/Vance campaign has made its hallmark. The GOP is offering literally nothing to voters other than fear and vengeance.

Aren’t we all sick of the nonstop anger?

Why not try just a little fucking optimism and basic decency this time?

Is it a cult? Perhaps it is more cult-like or cult-adjacent. Maybe it’s merely cultish or cult-light. How about cult-curious?

In any case, we long ago ran out of ways to politely describe, rationalize, or justify the unwavering support of Trump’s hardcore followers. About 20% of Americans will vote for Trump no matter how many felonies he gets convicted of, no matter how many women he assaults, no matter how much bigotry and hatred he provokes, and no matter how much he promises to become a dictator if he is re-elected.

This is beyond political identity or cognitive dissonance. It is far past the affection usually reserved for sports teams or nerd obsessions. It is even beyond the unconditional love one feels for family. This obsession is comparable only to religious mania, and the similarity is no coincidence.

Trump fans sincerely believe that “a man who has demanded the execution of people he dislikes is a better candidate for the presidency” than a woman who believes the federal government should create jobs, protect the environment, and promote health and education.

Even when confronted with the fact that Trump hates his own supporters, these true believers indulge in, at best, “skepticism, a momentary denouncement, then an eventual conclusion that Trump is still a man worth their vote.”

Their motivations range from psychological issues to deep-seated fear to bubbling fury to straight-up bigotry, with tangents for ignorance, delusion, and a thirst for vengeance. What’s intriguing about that last item is that they want revenge not just for their own misbegotten lives but on behalf of a pampered billionaire, who like them, “can’t accept what’s happened over the past several years” to an America that has had the audacity to change without their permission.

Even the conservatives who say they oppose Trump eventually fall into line. Recall that early in the campaign season, the other Republicans vying for the nomination accommodated Trump’s behavior “and made excuses for his criminality,” which pretty much gave the green light for “Republican voters to return to Trump, all but ensuring his rise.”

The result is that today, “the potential for political violence from his supporters if he isn’t elected in November” is sky-high. 

It is the behavior of cultists. And it cannot be reasoned with or wished away. This is what blind faith looks like, and it is terrifying.