The Sherlock Holmeses out there might’ve already spotted an incongruency in that my last name is Powers.  If you’re good, you’ve already deduced my father isn’t Mexican, and if you’re really good, you’ve deduced I’m half-Irish, leaving me in a unique middle ground regarding the tiresome insistence that identity politics operate as the fulcrum of political affiliation. 

My grandpa and his 10 siblings are first-generation Americans who grew up dirt-poor on a farm in Torrance, California.  His parents came from Mexico legally.  Half of them went to college, two of them served in law enforcement, two of them are multi-millionaires, and my grandpa is a retired aerospace engineer who spent his career with the United States Air Force and still tutors math at a local elementary school in Sacramento, California at the age of 82. 

Our family has been to Mexico and back more times than I can count.  When I was 15 we helped build, fund, and donate a library, computer lab, and ambulance to a rural village on the outskirts of Culiacan; his parents’ birthplace.  They always remember their roots, but they’re eternally grateful and proud Americans above all else.  It might surprise you, but Mexican immigrants who came here legally aren’t fans of illegal immigration. 

Fast-forward to 2008, my senior year of high school, helping my neighbor and their family load his furniture into a moving truck because he refinanced his mortgage so many times he had nothing left. 

Fast-forward to me in 2012, a business major in my senior year of college, applying to more unpaid internships and staring despondently at my computer screen at the Occupy Wall Street movement and wondering how my generation could possibly prosper in a broken system with corrupt politicians who watched us scream from the inside of a burning building only to tell us, “Don’t worry, everything will be OK.” 

Much like the Baby Boomers, anti-American sentiment was and is strong with millennials, but unlike the Baby Boomers, it’s justified.  Our parents had their Summer of Love acid tab melt on their tongue and passed a joint around a fire pit while the country sold the next generation down the river, but once they woke up hung over on Haight and Ashbury and the regret sunk in, they picked up the newspaper and called handful of companies and walked into a cushy job, started a family, and the “lazy millennial” meme spews from their hypocritical lips. 

Identity politics and the excessively nuanced and abstract civil rights movements is the millennial’s acid tab; this insistence that what matters above all else is whether or not you support gay marriage, feminism, Black Lives Matter, abortion, and legalized fucking marijuana.  If you don’t, you’re a bigot and here come a handful of phobia-suffixed words from a George Soros-funded “activist” to shame you off of Facebook and back onto Craigslist to look for another unpaid internship. 

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but doesn’t this never-ending “progressivism” feel a bit like an elaborate ruse?  That maybe these issues are meant to keep us divided along the thinnest lines so we can’t collectively agree on something?  For fuck’s sake, I’ll argue identity politics all you want, but before I do I’d prefer a sense of financial optimism and the prospect of starting a family before I’m 40. 

Enter Donald Trump; a self-funded billionaire swooping down on the political landscape like Batman and demolishing the corporate media like Bane.  The man who wrote The Art of the Deal wants to renegotiate America’s deals in our best interest instead of Bernie’s government-enforced wage manipulation that’s unsound to anyone who’s taken Econ 101. 

For decades we’ve watched these mannequin politicians, shells of human beings, tell us what we wanted to hear, only to leave us with the uncomfortable feeling that they had no control in the matter, and the political establishment has the gall to give us another Bush and Clinton. 

The corporate-media and self-righteous “progressives” have called Trump racist, sexist, xenophobic, the Antichrist, and Hitler to no avail, his poll numbers keep rising, even with Hispanics.  He’s scorched the brush of neo-Orwellian political correctness with a flamethrower so we can all finally gather beneath the only identity politics that matter—American ones. 

“How could you support Trump, you’re Mexican….Isn’t it time for a female president, you’re not a misogynist, are you?”  These “progressives” that divide us and foist an identity and political affiliation upon us are the true bigots; with their emotionally charged rhetoric the politicians and media thought they could blind us and redirect us like a stimulus response, but they can’t, and they’re afraid.  And like Thomas Jefferson said, “When government fears the people, there is liberty.”