Hispanic Fanatic

This is apparently what counts as winning.

• Republicans have agreed that Iowa Rep. Steve King is kinda, sorta, a little bit fucking racist.
• A smirking teenage boy in a MAGA cap may or may not be a smug, sociopathic thug.
• Trump may have obstructed justice by telling his lawyer to lie to Congress, but we can’t be sure.

In the first case, conservatives have feigned innocence and shock. In the other two, they have gloated about vindication.

However, these recent events aren’t positive developments that shine brightly upon the conservative movement. They are either the acknowledgement of something horrible that was perfectly obvious for decades, or the absence of clear proof about something sinister.

In other words, the modern Republican Party has been reduced to celebrating basic decency and/or inconclusive evidence.

Clearly, actual victories are hard to come by.

To be fair, there is not much for Republicans to laud as we pass the halfway point of the Trump Administration. The government is still shut down, the economy is displaying troubling signs, and the president is more unpopular than ever.

The GOP’s one big victory of the past two years — a tax cut for billionaires — is widely regarded as a sham, and unless every liberal justice on the Supreme Court retires or dies soon, there is little hope that anything good will happen for conservatives for the reminder of Trump’s term.

Oh, and Mueller has yet to release his report, which even Trump’s allies believe will be “devastating.”

So why are Republicans still supporting a guy who has shown them the very best he has to offer, yet been an unqualified disaster, and who, in all likelihood, will now drag their party so far down that the shellacking they received in the last midterms will soon seem like a pleasant memory?

Well, we are talking about a political movement that still thinks climate change is a myth — despite the science being overwhelming that the world is getting hotter, and more Americans than ever believing in that scientific truth.

For that matter, Republicans are the only group that still insists the Iraq War was worth it.

Obviously, we’re not dealing with people who adjust to reality quickly. 

So this might take a little time. 

Humans are social animals. Yes, even you sullen loners, shy introverts, and lone-wolf bad boys out there — deep down, all of you need to connect with other people, at least on occasion.

One aspect of our social nature is that we take cues from one another. Although we want to believe that we think for ourselves 100 percent of the time, and are not subject either to the overt influences or the subtle hints of our peers, the truth is that we are constantly looking at, listening to, and measuring ourselves against others. Deny it all you want — science backs upthe idea.

By the way, if you bend too easilyto the will of others, you may end up a Nazi, and if you don’t bend at all, you may end up a sociopathic killer.

So once again, moderation is key.

However, it’s not just basic concepts such as personal space, small talk, and sarcasm that we learn from our fellow humans. We also learn how to be aggressive.

For proof of this, let’s look at the famous Bobo experimentsof the 1960s, which were held at Stanford University.

In addition to having the most adorable name ever for a psychological study, the Bobo experiments showed that children learn through the observation of adult behavior. 

The study used inflatable plastic toys called Bobo dolls, which are basically large cartoon clowns bottom-weighted so that they return to an upright position when knocked down. 

You’ve probably seen one, or at the very least, had a terrifying nightmare involving them.

The researchers divided preschoolers into one group that observed aggressive adult behavior, another group that saw nonaggressive adult behavior, and a third group that didn’t watch any adult behavior.

The kids in the first group saw adults punch, kick, and generally pummel the Bobo dolls. And you guessed it —  children in that group later modeled the adults’ behavior by attacking the doll in the same fashion.

In sum, if kids saw a grownup kick the shit out of the Bobo doll, they were more likely to be violent too.

The researchers said that the kids had, more or less, gotten permission to be aggressive little jerks because they saw an authority figure do it first.

OK, that’s all very interesting, you say. But certainly it’s not the case that grownup, voting American citizens “get permission” from authority figures to, for example, be racist — right?

Ahem.

Well, it may intrigue you to know that researchers have “found empirical evidencethat Trump’s rhetoric has indeed lead whites to express more bigoted views of ‘the other.’”

After analyzing white people’s attitudes toward race and individuals of different ethnicities, researchers found that since Trump began his campaign in 2016, many white Americans have expressed more bigoted views about Latinos, blacks, and other groups, and as a bonus, they are more comfortable saying these statements out loud.

The researchers conclude that “Trump is giving respondents tacit permissionto be bigots.”

You see, Americans heard a major party nominee for president begin his campaign by slurring Mexicans, and as a result, years later, we discover that “Trump’s language [about Mexicans] doesn’t just embolden people to say more negative and more offensive things about the group he’s talking about, but it actually leads them to say more offensive thingsabout all groups.” 

For these Americans, Trump has been an authority figure punching Bobo dolls. They think that if the president “is using this language, then it must be acceptablefor me.”

They have, psychologically speaking, been given permission to be racist.

By the way, the original Bobo study found that the effects of modeling violent behavior lingered in children for months after witnessing aggressive actions. The researchers believed that once people have deemed a behavior to be acceptable, it is difficult for them to regain their previous mindset. So the kids had their personality altered in the long term.

Feel free to draw your own analogies to that.

Good news — the most dangerous hostile force that America ever faced has now been defeated.

That’s right. The infamous immigrant caravan — a bigger threat than the Nazis, the Communists, and Al Qaeda put together — has been destroyed.

I know this is true because the Fox & Friends morning show “used the word ‘caravan’ an average 21 times per episode in the six days prior” to the midterms. Yet that same show “only mentioned the topic once on the day after the election.”

The only logical conclusion is that the immigrant caravan has been turned back… or destroyed… or vanished into thin air — who knows?

The important thing is that we are safe. After all, we’re talking about an invading army here.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: How could a group of impoverished people on foot, presumably unarmed, with absolutely no element of surprise, be a threat to the most powerful nation on Earth, which has built the largest military force in the history of the galaxy? And did we mention that a huge portion of the caravan consists of malnourished children? It’s not exactly an elite killing force that we’re talking about.

Well, that doesn’t matter. Because in the weeks leading to the midterms, many conservatives insisted that these immigrants were a Soros-funded plot to sway the midterms… although it has never been explained exactly how a group of refugees slowly walking toward the border could be remotely beneficial to the Democrats. If anything, the whole story has been a blessing for the Republican Party, which was briefly able to recapture that old xenophobic spirit of 2016 again.

In any case, these refugees — who apparently are going to reintroduce polio while providing cover for Isis agents— have so alarmed our nation’s right-wing overlords that they are spending taxpayer money to send U.S. troops to guard against bedraggled people fleeing for their lives from drug cartels. So we may soon have “up to 15,000 members of the world’s greatest fighting force, sitting in the desert, watching for poor refugees approaching on foot.”

But you see, it has to be this way. Trump supporters have to believe that the immigrant caravan is an invading army. That’s the only way to justify using military force to threaten people who are following U.S. and international law regarding asylum. Otherwise, these right-wingers might be the kind of people who advocate gunning down thousands of unarmed refugees, including children.

And that might make it difficult to sleep at night.

Fortunately for Trumpists, they already have a unique worldview that allows them to believe all kinds of factually inaccurate, conspiratorial, logic-defying propositions, including the following:

“The MAGA bombs were fake (they weren’t). There’s going to be a middle-class tax cut by the end of the year (there isn’t). US steel has opened seven new plants in the US (it hasn’t). The trade tariffs are working (they aren’t). The US is the only country with birthright citizenship (it isn’t).”

To be honest, it must be exhausting to come up with preposterous scenario after preposterous scenario, all designed to reinforce the delusion that Trump knows what he is doing, liberals hate America, scientists are making everything up, and that there is nothing racial about locking Latino kids in cages.

Yes, I have to admit that up until now, I have been empathizing with my fellow progressives, who are weary from the almost daily outrages that cascade from the White House.

But Trump supporters must be even more fatigued, coming up strained explanations, convoluted theories, and secret coded messages that, in the end, add up to no wall on the Mexican border, no locked-up Hillary, and no decrease in the number of pesky minorities in America.

Really, it’s got to be fucking exhausting.

Now in its fourth century of existence, the United States of America has withstood the birth pangs of violent revolution, a bloody civil war, the enslavement of millions of its residents, the brutal forces of racism and xenophobia, the Great Depression, multiple recessions, the murder of some of its most brilliant leaders, two world wars, Vietnam, Iraq, and the September 11 attacks.

But you know what we can’t possibly endure? You know what would break our back and destroy the nation?

That would be the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Yes, according to many commentators, impeaching the lunatic of Pennsylvania Avenue would be bad for the country, even a “grave injustice.” And plenty of Trump supporters have threatened to “begin a second civil war in the U.S. if President Trump were impeached.”

Even our old friend Nancy Pelosi said “pushing Trump out of office would further ‘divide the country’ and suggested it could do more harm than good.”

Oh, I know that two other presidents have been impeached — one just a couple of decades ago. And nobody ever suggested that trying to remove Bill Clinton from office might result in America’s collapse. Although to be fair, that was all about a blowjob, which is far more of a crisis than silly things like selling out the nation to a homicidal dictator of a hostile country. I mean, it’s about priorities.

And I know that this nation has endured warfare, natural disasters, civil rights outrages, drug epidemics, economic collapses, rioting in the streets, and even the rise of disco (that one really stung). But clearly, we’re just fragile princesses when it comes to the strain of a Senate trail of the president.

It’s best to just avoid the whole thing and go about our business.

After all, we wouldn’t want to upset Trump’s hardcore supporters, who as we know, are a minority of the population, have had their every concern or insecurity elevated to national prominence, and are driven primarily by racism, hatred, fear, and ignorance. No, let’s just kowtow to them even more than we already have.

It’s just a good thing that we’re not implying that if a subsection of America threatens violence, we’ll all give in — oh wait, that’s exactly what we’re implying. Never mind.

Well, at least we’re not saying that corruption, incompetence, and neo-fascist tendencies would actually be rewarded, rather than punished, which is horrifying in both the present and because of its ramifications for future presidents. Check that — I guess we are saying that too.

And we’re certainly, most definitely not saying that all the talk about the rule of law, and the importance of checks and balances, and the sanctity of the Constitution, and the strength of America’s institutions, and the integrity of its very culture — all that is meaningless. Oops, wrong again — we are not just implying that but screeching it from the rooftops.

But still, whatever horrors the Mueller investigation uncovers, we should all just ignore them. Yes, only good things can come from denying reality and appeasing madmen.

We should do this, you know, for America’s sake.

In the good old days, you could always tell who was what.

For example, just a few decades ago, every Latino in America — at least according to pop culture — was Mexican with dark brown skin, and probably worked as a gardener. I mean, it was pretty simple for Americans to get out their handy bucket of clichés and then start stuffing Latinos into them.

Life was simple.

But then things got messy. Hispanics started coming in different shades, with terms like “second generation” banded about, and not all of them spoke Spanish, and some even went to college when nobody was looking. And don’t even get us started on “Latinx.”

Yes, it’s gotten so complex that very real questions about identity and culture are cartwheeling through the Latino community, with the result that voices get raised, metaphysical quandaries turn into quagmires, and your basic simple-minded racist can’t even keep straight whom he is supposed to hate now.

Because the truth is that “Hispanic identity is fluid to begin with,” and “the gray area that Latinos inhabit in this country’s historical black/white binary inevitably leads to shifts in identification.”

Basically, who or what is Latino has always been a question, and it has never been more open to debate. Even age-old signifiers of culture are fading away.

For example, even in my generation, just about every Hispanic person was also Catholic. Being a member of La Raza and displaying an almost fanatical devotion to the pope was a natural combo.

But leave it to those wild, trend-setting, selfie-lovin’ youngsters — the millennials — to mess with that.

You see, “Latino millennials, overall, are becoming less religious the more they assimilate to American culture.”

Yes, we could point out that this might not be Latinos assimilating to America, as much as the other way around, but let’s save that debate for another time.

The basic truth is that “the longer Latinos are in the United States and the more Americanized they become, the more secularized they become.” In fact, “the fastest growing [religious] group among millennials is the nones” (i.e., those who align with no specific religion).

Of course, many of these Latinos are still spiritual, in their own individualistic kind of way, but many others are becoming straight-up atheists, a trend that is also true for America overall.

I guess many Hispanics are finally asking exactly what, other than eat up a lot of their Sundays, has the Catholic Church ever done for them. Personally, I believe this is a very fair question.

However, for now, let’s turn our attention to another sign that it is getting more and more difficult to pinpoint those Latinos among us.

A recent study has found that “although recent immigrants identify as Hispanic at a rate of almost 90 percent, this number drops to around 50 percent after the fourth generation.”

The reasons for this are complex. One motivator is simple self-loathing, as many Latinos who can pass for white sometimes prefer to do so. Another variable is fear, because slipping below the radar of Trump supporters is “a strong motivation for avoiding identification as Hispanic.”

Some commentators theorize that the lessening of ethnic pride “in later generations can be due to increased assimilation.”

Finally, there is the fact that the longer Latinos live in America, the more likely they are to intermarry with other groups and produce multiethnic children, and this can lead to “U.S.-born Hispanics who sometimes find their identities challenged by natives of their home countries who don’t think they’re Hispanic enough, and come off as too American.”

Regardless of the specific reason, at present, “11 percent of adults with Hispanic ancestry do not identify as such, and 23 percent of Hispanics most often refer to themselves as ‘American.’”

So what does it all mean? Well, it could indicate that in the near future, Latinos will be considered white Americans, whether they want to be or not.

Indeed, many people have pointed out the historical parallels to the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews — all of whom were considered non-white until the intensity of cultural change and the force of societal pressure suddenly made each of them, more or less, white.

Or maybe white people just got together for a secret vote and decided to let the O’Reillys and the Rizzos and the Goldsteins in — I don’t know for sure.

Regardless, it is undeniable that it is a time of great change for Latinos, and this shift can be difficult to notice when Hispanics have more concrete issues on their minds — like surviving three more years of a xenophobic toddler who would gladly depart everyone with a Z in their last name.

But it is happening.

Life is no longer so simple.

“Who could possibly have known?”

Sorry, that wasn’t overwrought enough.

Let’s try it again: “For the love of God, who — who? who? who ? —could possibly have known?”

That’s better.

I was just providing some tips for all those staunch Republicans who have justified, rationalized, or otherwise legitimized the reign of Trump.

You see, as I’ve written before, people who voted for Trump will someday be so embarrassed at their moral lapse that they will outright deny it. They will insist that they didn’t cast a ballot for a deranged racist who dragged America into a dark period of rage and hatred. Nope — that wasn’t them.

What I didn’t expect was that the day of reckoning would come so quickly.

As you no doubt know, the book Fire and Fury has revealed that Trump is an ignorant, befuddled, tantrum-prone egotist who didn’t even want to be president and is appallingly unqualified for the job. Oh, and his inner circle knows it too, because according to the book, “the people around Trump, all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”

And that’s where the denial comes in. Because all of this — the delusion, the incoherence, the blind rage, the rambling that may actually be dementia — was obvious on the campaign trail. It was perfectly clear.

And yet more than 60 million Americans chose to overlook it, and the Republican Party continues to deny it.

So when it all finally crumbles into disaster, when it becomes so piercingly obvious that no one can refute it, that’s when we will hear the sickening chorus of “Who could possibly have known?”

The answer of course, is “You knew. We all knew.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good thing it wasn’t racism.

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

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

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

Or maybe we just can’t offend white people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now its our turn to gloat.

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

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

Gone. Gone. All gone.