MEXICO
When the Swamp Things Surface
Image by Mitchell Luo.
Dispatches from the Terminal Ward of the Western Echo Chamber
From the Edge of the Confirmation Bias Abyss
Something is cosmically wrong with the primordial ooze.
For years, decades, maybe longer, maybe since the first cable news anchor discovered that outrage was more profitable than information, a certain subspecies of political creature has been evolving in the lightless, pressurized depths of the ideological swamp. Deep down there in the fetid dark, nourished by the warm thermal vents of their own inane certainties, surrounded by the bioluminescent glow of sycophantic media organs pulsing in perfect, validating unison, these things have evolved. Better said, mutated. They have developed thick, rubbery hides impermeable to fact. Extra organs capable of converting contradiction into confirmation. Their eyes evolved sideways, like deep-sea squid, capable only of detecting praise and televised applause.
They are, in their natural habitat, magnificent in a terrible sort of way. Like watching weaponized algae bloom under a Pentagon microscope.
The problem, and it is a problem of almost Biblical grotesquerie. is what happens when they surface.
Because occasionally, through some malfunction of the billion-euro life-support aquarium of television producers, party handlers, pollsters and think-tank necromancers, these creatures breach. They claw their way up through the layers of sedimented delusion, through the thick strata of favorable polling, friendly broadcast hours, handpicked audiences and yes-men with law degrees, and they emerge, gasping, blinking, hideously unprepared, into what the rest of us have been living in all along: the actual, unfiltered, indifferent, merciless world of reality — that ancient, badly managed wilderness where consequences still roam free.
And Jesus Christ, the light.
You can see them recoil from it. The pupils dilate. The mouth opens. The whole magnificent apparatus of bubble-adapted physiology suddenly, catastrophically, encounters the one thing it was never designed to process: feedback. Real feedback. Not the warm, synthetic, nutritive kind that says yes, you are right, you are brilliant, they hate you because they fear you, but the cold, hard, ancient feedback of a universe that does not know their name and does not care about their brand.
The emperor is not merely naked. The emperor, exposed to daylight for the first time, is revealed to be not merely unclothed but anatomically improbable. Covered in the barnacles of accumulated falsehood. Trailing long tropes of ideological seaweed. Blinking those enormous, useless, dark-adapted eyes at a sun that has no interest whatsoever in their narrative.
What follows is always spectacular. Always, in a way that combines the horror of a car crash with the pure aesthetic pleasure of watching hubris detonate in slow motion, magnificent.
Let us take the field notes, one specimen at a time.
Specimen A: the Mar-a-Lago strain. Creatures so thoroughly marinated in televised nationalism that they emerged genuinely believing Iran was waiting for the right American strongman to straighten the place out like a casino acquisition. That Cuba, after sixty years of embargo and intervention, would gaze upon the latest emissary of the Monroe Doctrine and say: yes. Finally. Salvation in a red tie and motorcade. The creature surfaces. The world declines the offer. The creature calls them ungrateful.
Specimen B: somewhere in the Brexit nostalgic badlands of the English Tory shires, now Reform, the parade of bubble-adapted politicians who emerged from their hermetically sealed world of empire-adjacent fantasy to discover, with genuine howling astonishment, that the European Union was not going to fold under the awesome force of British exceptionalism, that Ireland would not dissolve its border on request, that forty years of economic integration could not be unwound in eighteen months without consequence, and that the rest of the world had, peculiarly, continued to exist and form opinions during the years these creatures had been marinating in their own mythology. The creature retreats. The creature calls them globalists.
But for sheer, crystalline, museum-quality grotesquerie, for the specimen that makes the naturalist set down his field notebook and simply stare, we must turn to Mexico City. First week of May, 2026. Because what unfolded there was not merely a political miscalculation. It was a masterwork. A perfect, terrible, unforgettable emergence event.
Picture the scene as it must have appeared from inside the bubble: Isabel Díaz Ayuso, President of the Community of Madrid, is the kind of regional politician the global reactionary right manufactures at scale these days — a telegenic culture warrior who has made her career converting every confrontation into content, every controversy into martyrdom, the Spanish-language answer to a type you will recognize immediately. Toast of the international right-wing think-tank circuit, idol of every outlet that runs historical revisionism as a form of competitive sport — this woman boards a plane at the considerable expense of the Madrid taxpayers (ten days, May 3 to May 12, a sovereign “business trip” of the kind that makes one wonder what the business was and who exactly was conducting it) and flies herself and her retinue to Mexico City with a sense of mission that could only be produced by years of breathing pure, uncut, ideologically filtered air.
She arrives accompanied by Nacho Cano, a faded Spanish pop star of the 1980s who has found, as faded pop stars sometimes do, that culture war is an excellent second act — impresario, author of a stage production about the Spanish conquest so aggressively tendentious it might have given pause even to the original conquistadors, who at least had the modesty to do their rebranding after the fact rather than before. Together, these two creatures have assembled an event and given it a name so staggeringly, so operatically tone-deaf that it deserves to be reproduced in full, to be savored in all its clueless grandeur:
Celebración por la Evangelización y el Mestizaje en México: Malinche y Cortés.
CELEBRATION. For the EVANGELIZATION.
In Mexico.
In 2026.
On the taxpayers of Madrid.
Diplomacy, as a discipline, continues to evolve.
They applied, and here is where the magnificence becomes almost unbearable, to hold this event in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City. Which is to say: they looked at a building constructed on the ruins of the Templo Mayor — the ceremonial heart of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital — on the sacred ground of the civilization that Cortés systematically dismantled, and they thought: yes. This is the right venue for our celebration of the whole business. A gold and baroque tribute to the imposition that replaced what was demolished to build it. What better stage? At no point during this process did anybody appear to experience what medical science refers to as a warning sign.
The Archdiocese of Mexico City, demonstrating considerably more diplomatic instinct than the President of Madrid, determined the event had “ideological implications,” lacked the necessary permits, and declined, with what one imagines was some ecclesiastical throat-clearing, to host it.
At this point a normal political delegation would have reconsidered the optics. But normal political delegations generally avoid staging conquest pageants atop the graveyard of the civilization being conquered. Standards vary.
The circus relocated to the Frontón México. One imagines there were lanyards involved. Perhaps branded folders. Madrileño-themed margaritas. Certainly bottled water.
Outside, indigenous groups were already in the streets.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum — the first woman and first person of indigenous and Jewish heritage to hold the office — played a card with the calm of a woman who knows exactly what she is holding. She posted a document online. A royal decree. Valladolid, 1548. Carlos I of Spain, writing to the Royal Audiencia of New Spain. In it, even the Spanish Crown, never exactly a monastery of anti-colonial ethics, eventually found the excesses intolerable enough to document and command the liberation of the indigenous people enslaved by one Hernán Cortés, Marquis of the Valley. The document named the places: Tepeaca. Texcoco. Cuernavaca. Oaxtepec. Cholula. It described the branding of women and children with hot iron, the seizure of men for forced combat, the capture of people who had already made peace. It ordered that the living be freed, their children and descendants be freed, and that the decree be read aloud in the plazas and markets of New Spain.
That is the document they marched into Mexico to “celebrate.”
“Those who seek to rehabilitate Hernán Cortés and his atrocities,” said Sheinbaum, with an economy of language that would make a surgeon envious, “are destined to fail.”
Confronted with the protests, the cancellations, the cold wall of an entire country’s historical memory pressing back against her, Ayuso assumed her habitual role of victim, the martyrdom reflex firing like an immune response, later claiming her delegation had been forced into extraordinary security measures that included beach time. That they had been in danger. That anything could have happened. They did have sunscreen.
The creature, so magnificent in the depths, had surfaced. The daylight hit like a police flashlight. The creature was revealed.
And here is where the comedy develops its second, darker movement. Here is where the laughter catches in the throat.
A political scientist examining the wreckage might suggest quietly that Ayuso had been seeking this. That the confrontation with Sheinbaum, impossible through diplomacy — Ayuso leads a regional government roughly equivalent in federal standing to a US state governor, and Sheinbaum would simply have ignored her — was precisely the point. That the grotesque spectacle of colonial rehabilitation was a product, manufactured for consumption back home in Spain, where a certain base finds this kind of defiance not repellent but intoxicating. Not a creature emerging blindly from its bubble, but a creature deploying the appearance of blindness as a weapon.
If the blinking is a performance, if the bewilderment is calculated, then we are not watching incompetence. We are watching something older and colder. Someone looking at a five-hundred-year-old wound, documented in the Crown’s own handwriting, and deciding it is useful. That the pain of Tepeaca and Cholula and the branded children of the Marquis’s campaigns can be converted, with the right staging and a friendly audience, into something approximating a political brand.
This is the question that will not leave you. Because the technology of the modern echo chamber is now sophisticated enough that its inhabitants can be simultaneously genuine and cynical — truly believing the parts that are comforting, performing belief in the parts that are useful, incapable even of distinguishing between the two because the distinction dissolved long ago in the warm bath of unquestioned consensus.
Are these creatures blind? Or do they simply find blindness convenient?
For the Mar-a-Lago strain, the calculation is obscene in its clarity: the crisis with Iran, the standoff with Cuba, the deaths and the sanctions and the regional chaos are not miscalculations, they are the product. Crisis is the content. The base requires an enemy, the enemy requires a crisis, and other people’s suffering pays the production costs. For Ayuso in Mexico: the indigenous protesters, the cold shoulder from the presidency, the diplomatic wreckage of a ten-day taxpayer-funded provocation, all of it converts, back in the studio audience of the Madrid echo chamber, into exactly the footage that feeds the machine. She was attacked. She was brave. She told the truth and they — the vague, conspiratorial they of every bubble’s mythology — couldn’t handle it. She is the perpetual victim.
The wound is not an obstacle to the performance. The wound is the performance.
But if you think the Mexico episode was a sufficient serving of historical irony, wait.
Nacho Cano, undeterred, apparently energized, in the manner of all true believers, by the hostility of the non-converted, has packed up his traveling snake-oil minstrel show, his revisionist historical pageant, his celebration of the warm and fuzzy aspects of civilizational demolition, and is bringing it to the land of the conquistadors, to Extremadura — the impoverished Spanish region that supplied a disproportionate share of the men who went to the Americas and whose noble families built their palaces on what those men sent home. To Cáceres. To a conference room in a luxury hotel where he will deliver his lecture on the glories of the conquest.
The hotel is the Palacio de Godoy. Curio Collection by Hilton.
The Palacio de Godoy was commissioned in 1548 by Francisco de Godoy Aldana, one of the principal lieutenants of Francisco Pizarro, the man who did to the Inca Empire approximately what Cortés did to the Aztec one. Godoy came home to Extremadura flush with the profits of that particular enterprise and built himself a palace. It stands in the UNESCO-designated old city of Cáceres, which is itself essentially a monument to the wealth that flowed back to Extremadura from the systematic dismantlement of pre-Columbian civilization. Every noble family crenellation, every carved escutcheon, every Renaissance courtyard, architectural residue of conquest.
And who restored the Palacio de Godoy? Who poured millions of euros into its rehabilitation and turned the conquistador’s house into a luxury hotel?
Scipion Real Estate. A Peruvian investment company. Founded by a man who had spent years working in Lima, who celebrated the project explicitly as a way of connecting Extremadura and Peru, who decorated the restaurant and suites with textiles from the Amazonian Peru his investor’s ancestor helped to subjugate. The hotel’s restaurant is named Mamay Aldana, after María de Aldana, Francisco de Godoy’s mother, an Extremaduran woman whose son helped Pizarro take Peru, and whose descendant’s palace was then restored and made into a luxury hotel by the money of the country that was conquered.
The wheel of history has, it appears, a sense of humor. A very dark one.
Into this baroque labyrinth of colonial irony, the five-star hotel built on conquest profits, paid for by Peruvian capital, in the ancestral lands of the men who went and took it, stride Nacho Cano and Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, fresh from their routing in Mexico City, to explain that actually, the conquest was fine. Better than fine. It was a celebration. It was evangelization. It was mestizaje — the message of hope and joy — and we should all be more grateful.
Zunzunegui, a Spanish writer and self-appointed philosophical defender of the conquest, who in Mexico asserted there was no conquest, “it was the birth of Mexico”, who questioned whether the whole business could properly be called a genocide, will stand in the house that Pizarro’s lieutenant built with Inca gold and deliver the same performance. Perhaps with the same slides. With the same absolute, serene, climate-controlled conviction that the evidence of the room around him, the walls, the courtyard, the very Peruvian money in the walls, does not constitute a rejoinder.
The echo chamber has not merely followed them home. It has checked in. It has been given a room with a rooftop bar and views of the Extremaduran countryside.
Which brings us to the word at the twisted center of this entire carnival. Not conquest. Not mestizaje. The word is evangelization, and it is worth pausing here to look at it directly, without flinching.
Evangelization. The gift of the faith. The introduction of the one true God to the benighted millions who had, through some cosmic administrative oversight, been left entirely alone for forty thousand years by a deity who apparently only remembered their existence in 1519, when he dispatched the appropriate delivery mechanism in the form of smallpox, steel, and a man from Medellín with a financial interest in the outcome.
Let that settle for a moment.
The argument — delivered with a straight face, in a luxury hotel, in the twenty-first century — is that it was a good thing to arrive among people who had built cities, mapped the stars, developed writing, raised temples, cultivated maize and chocolate and political philosophy, and inform them that their entire cosmological framework was wrong, that the gods worshipped across a hundred generations were demons or hallucinations, and that the correct deity — who had, strangely, shown no previous interest in the Western Hemisphere despite his alleged omniscience — was now available, at sword-point, for immediate subscription. And if the conversion was imperfect, if the newly baptized retained inconvenient attachments to their previous metaphysics, well. There were instruments available to address that. There were always instruments.
This is what evangelization means, stripped of the festival lighting and Nacho Cano’s production values. The imposition of a Bronze Age creed, assembled in the Iron Age Levant, refined in the courts of Constantine, weaponized in the Inquisition, upon people who had committed no offense against it beyond existing on the wrong side of an ocean. The favor being commemorated is the favor of being informed, under duress, that you have been theologically overlooked and incorrect from birth and that your correction is now non-negotiable.
The narcissism required to frame this as generosity is not merely breathtaking. It is, in the clinical sense, remarkable. The grandiosity of the self-image that can look at that history, the iron, the fire, the children of Cholula, and arrive at the word celebration.
That is not historical revisionism. That is a personality disorder with a press office.
You can debate the balance sheet of colonialism, and there is a balance sheet, however ugly the math. You can acknowledge that Spain built universities, that mestizaje eventually produced a civilization of genuine complexity and beauty, that history is not a simple story. None of this requires you to perform amnesia about the branding irons.
What you cannot do, what no honest engagement with the record permits, is call it a celebration. The word is not a position. It is a symptom.
And so the show comes to Cáceres. The creatures dry themselves off, shake the primordial ooze from their extremities, adjust their lanyards, and check in to the Peruvian-funded palace of the man who helped take Peru. The rooftop bar has panoramic views. The Amazonian textiles in the suites are tasteful. The irony hangs over the whole enterprise like carbon monoxide — colorless, odorless, quietly lethal to anyone left in the room too long.
The walls know what they are. The walls were built on what they were built on. The money that restored them came from where it came from. The wheel turned, as wheels do, with the bleak, grinding, impersonal humor of things that do not require our permission to be what they are.
The creatures will not feel it. They never feel the ground shift. That is what the ooze is for.
But the documents survive. They always survive. A royal decree, Valladolid, 1548, sat in an archive for nearly five centuries and surfaced, with perfect timing, on a phone screen in Mexico City. The children of Cholula are not a rhetorical inconvenience to everyone. To some people they are a memory that requires no maintenance because it was never allowed to become a memory in the first place.
Down they’ll go, eventually. Back into the pressurized dark. Back into the warm thermal vents of their own certainties, the bioluminescent pulse of the approving apparatus, the perfect, sealed, nutritive darkness where the light cannot find them and the documents cannot reach them and those same children of Cholula are just a rhetorical inconvenience that someone else will deal with.
And the ooze will close over them like it always does.
Patient. Warm. Waiting for the next emergence.
