The Growth of the Follón

Mornings begin when I open my cel and begin to read the news, mostly these days from El País in Spanish. In English, the New York Times, and the Guardian. 

While the technology has changed, from newsprint to laptop to cel, the habit has stayed the same. Indeed it is one I inherited from my father. He would sit at the breakfast table with the morning paper open in front of him.

To be honest, I do miss going looking for the big fat Sunday Times and spending a good part of the day and then the week reading it. 

Criticisms of the news are also par for the course. One learns to read multiple sources and look for patterns and what is more or less trustworthy and verifiable. 

Of course, all this is a small part of my reading, but a key one. 

Spain has a rich tradition of journalism and for years I have read El País, although not daily, unlike now. I have loved they way it supports writers such as Vargas Llosa whose conservatism came increasingly to trouble me.  

Now, of course, V. LL. would seem quaint in the face of the bombastic and mendacious ultra right propaganda that increasingly dominates air waves as well as print media.

That is not yet the case in Spain where there is still a strong culture of print journalism. 

Yet, you could wonder how would I really know since I only watch TV when in a café where it is on. I miss out on this important site where opinion is manufactured and played out. I also miss out because I do not watch the right influencers nor spend much time on news Tik Tok or Instagram. 

Evidently, according to El País, I am really missing an important phenomenon in which the ultra right interests are strongly invested.

I read a few articles about a handsome youth and right wing trouble maker, Vito Quiles, native of near-by Elche, Italian Father and Spanish mother. 

He could just be one of the seemingly infinite number of attractive faces, bodies, and provocative personalities that trouble the waves around us and appear whenever we turn on out machines. 

However, Quiles is becoming more and more celebrated by Spanish media as a provocative voice of the Ultras with all the hormonal passion of an undereducated  young man. 

Though more handsome, he is reminiscent of the recently martyred man of the eternally boyish name, Charlie Kirk. In fact, El Pais mentioned them both in an article where it claimed Quiles, despite trying to upend college campuses, does not have the talent of St. Kirk.

But he is the young male face of the ultra right which is increasingly gaining force among college age males. 

Like Kirk, it appears he is dependent on the sponsorship of older, wealthy men. El País also noted that the Ultra leader, Santiago Abascal, through his foundation,  spends an ungodly amount of money supporting right wing media. He hopes, following the model of the US, that right wing media will open the door for the growth and support Abascal and his party Vox's inflammatory arguments.   

In this is something key, a vicious circle of citation in which external facts play little to no role. Instead the currency is support for its politicians and ability to agitate the public. The keystone of this edifice is a web site, “La Gaceta de la Iberosfera”, which trolls for voices and ideas that would support Santiago Abascal, the head of VOX in his and other partisan's arguments. 

Abascal then cites the Gaceta in his speeches and arguments which then quotes him. El País notes that much information on the recent focus on immigration, particularly from Africa—north and Sub Saharan, is false and never corrected. 

I respect journalists who, despite having a stance, actually go into the world and gather information. I suppose phone calls or emails are a legitimate substitute at a time of limited resources and enormous pressures on their day. But the do not replace in my mind getting out into the streets to see and to interview.

This does not include helicopter journalism. dropping from the air for a few camera shots and sound bites before being beamed up again to go somewhere else. It should mean spending time weighing and living the story they propose to report. 

Sigh, helicopters and emails are for more popular, especially if they give verisimilitude to what the journalist already thinks or what his or her employers already know. 

I love to see journalism that respects the task of the reporter to gather and verify information, especially when it runs counter to established ideas. And, I love thinkers with the depth of Vargas Llosa, even if I came to dislike his liberalism no matter how well he established it and argued for it.

His bias came to seem to me not unlike the passion the character Fonchito felt for his step mother in one of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Elogio de la Madrastra, in Praise of the Step mother. 

In reading authors like Vargas Llosa or like the many writers for El Pais, The New York Times, and the Guardian, you learn the back-feelings of thinkers and actors of your day. 

And through the reading, you can also learn much about the day’s events and challenges. 

You also learn language. While reading about Vito Quiles in El País I learned a new and useful word, follonero, he who makes follones. A follón is a mess and follower is, for me, the translation of the English trouble maker.

Somehow follonero seems to me less serious than the English troublemaker, kind of like Quiles with his youthful looks and actions.

It makes the Ultras seem playful, while in the US they seem deadly serious and painful, a plane dropping shit on the public. In both cases, they stink. 

 

 

Binaries, Retirement, and the Long Fight

 El País, the paper that trumpets throughout Spain, loudly, published an interview with the Princeton bioanthropologist Agustín Fuentes. 

The main subject was Fuentes’ new book in Spanish and in English. Its title mildly says Sex is a Specturm; The Biological Limits of the Binary.  HIdden in that academic prose is a confrontation, an explosion of the basis for Trump’s attacks on Trans people and on so-called “wokeness in general around gender. 

The interview is much stronger. Fuentes, the American son of a prominent Spanish scholar Victor Fuentes who spent his career publishing and teaching in US Universities. Agustín states that the binary of man / woman, or indeed any binary to understand sex and gender is a failure. It is more philosophy than science, he avers. 

Other than the vigor of his argument and a tsunami of recent data pushing it, this is not new. Many of us have been teaching, writing, and arguing the same for more than two decades as the idea very slowly made its way into the scientific mainstream against great resistance and against data. 

That is not what I want to write about.  Instead, I note Fuentes’ courage to publish this when Trump is charging protection money from Universities and demanding they, as well as the whole scientific establishment establishment censor such ideas. 

Trump and the Republican party he has stormed know how Gramscian control works and how closing off institutional venues while stigmatizing ideas and giving them real costs changes discussion. It creates a new world of the given and makes the older the unspeakable. 

Fuentes acknowledge this and says to the interviewer, Matthew Raspanti, that he is working to recuperate Spanish citizenship for when Princeton is forced to get rid of him or it becomes too costly for him to research and write in Trump’s America.  

Curiously, Fuentes was on one of the last panels I attended at my last American Anthropological Society meetings, held ironically in Toronto, Canada.

He is impressive but I did not know that I was setting out on a path he might tread soon, academic exile. In my case, it was under the cover of retirement and was not the first time i had faced exile. 

I saw the thickening clouds of the ultra right and their attacks on higher education, especially on issues of gender and sexuality, as well as more generally what they loosely term ‘Marxist” ideas, 

I came of age during the early stages of flourishing of Western Marxism in the Academy. We read and critiqued it deeply. Nonetheless, I am strongly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, E.P Thompson, and many more. My basic approach is political economy with a focus on social formations and historical change. 

After being forced out of BYU because of my research and, even more, writing on guerrilla groups who attacked the LDS Church in Latin America, I found myself without a job, cut off from sources of funding for research, and so on. An important part of why has to deal with stigma, blacklisting, and so on.  

I kept writing and kept researching as best I could and found myself back in the Academy but in the wilderness of a department of Evolutionary Anthropology, and a bit later in a small program at a state college in the most right wing county of Utah. The very idea of academic freedom was contentious if it circumscribed power and collective political and social thought. 

Many of us professors fought and opened a space, as the college became a university and grew—driven by demographic demand. Nevertheless, the university faced constant vigilance from Ultra and less rigid conservative powers in Utah governance and in society. 

As they became more connected with a new ecology of Ultra Rightwing focus on higher education that was growing in importance and in Florida let to the take over of a college, I could see sharply carved writing on the wall. 

It seemed it would be less and less possible to teach what I was trained in and in which i had worked. When combined with personal physical issues, I decided to retire to Spain. It has been refreshing to be in a country where socialists are at the helm and are a strong force (though I am banned from working but not writing as a condition of my visa), such that even conservatives accept many basic ideas though the Ultra Right is growing.

I wish Fuentes well and encourage people to obtain his book and read it. This is the cutting edge of a great thrust of biological science that may be on the edge of erasure by power. I hope it continues to find a home on the margins. 

P.S. The following might interest some of you.  The Decline and Fighta for Academic Freedom and Integrity 

https://davidclarkknowlton.blogspot.com/2025/07/binaries-retirement-and-long-fight.html