El Speakeasy

Why are so many men drifting away from the Democratic Party? In this episode of El Speakeasy, the hosts debate whether men have been politically sidelined by the Left — or are reacting to long-overdue shifts in power. From party messaging and education gaps to the rise of hipster masculinity and countercultural rebellion, the conversation traces how identity, culture, and grievance intersect. The episode asks whether today’s political divide is less about policy — and more about where men feel they belong. The three amigos take the gloves off and square off, delving into how these forces shape our conversations around male agency and our conception of the gender divide.

In the essay How Hipsters Gave us Trump by Matthew Schmitz in "First Things," the author argues that Trumpism didn’t come out of nowhere, it grew out a long cultural shift where “rebellion” stopped looking like left-wing bohemia and started looking like white, masculine defiance of liberal norms.

In the article, Have Democrats Given up on Men, by Daniel A. Cox, in "Survey Center on American Life," the author argues that Democrats are facing a growing, and largely self-inflicted, problem with male voters. The DNC’s own “Who We Serve” list, he points out, includes sixteen groups but not men, a symbolic omission that reflects deeper cultural assumptions within the party.

El señor Bill Kelley Jr. has been re-reading and adamantly recommends The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz narrates the major campaigns of the conquistadors, from the early Yucatan expeditions through the march on Tenochtitlan, offering vivid descriptions of Indigenous cities, leaders and religious practices, often mixing admiration with fear or misunderstanding. His portrayal of Moctezuma and tense diplomatic encounters provide the richest eyewitness window into the fall of the Aztec world.

Don Francisco Ortega feels passionate about his re-reading of Love in the Time of Cholera by the late, great Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Widely considered Márquez's masterpiece, it's a story about longing and becoming a way of living, and about how the heart, even in old age, can still surprise us with its stubborn, foolish, beautiful hope.

Music lover Juan Fernando Devis has been captivated by the music of Zoe Gotusso and has been particularly touched by the album Cursi. Gotusso leans into tenderness without irony, singing about affection, longing, and emotional transparency with a kind of soft bravery. The song, and the album it anchors, celebrates being unabashedly sentimental in a world that often treats sincerity as a risk.

In this episode, the hosts explore three recent films — Hamnet, Sentimental Value, and Jay Kelly — that revolve around fathers who sacrifice family for art, fame, or legacy. The conversation asks whether great work justifies emotional absence and abandonment. Are these men tragic figures of narcissism or great artists? The hosts connect these stories to their own lives, reflecting on fathers, regret, and the compromises men make between creation and responsibility.

· Sentimental Value – Director: Joachim Trier. Cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. A Norwegian family drama about an acting dynasty grappling with memory, art, and the emotional weight passed down through generations. Sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged father, Gustav, a once-renowned director who offers Nora a role in what he hopes will be his comeback film. The two siblings must now navigate a complicated relationship with their father.

· Jay Kelly – Director: Noah Baumbach. Cast: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup. Famous movie star Jay Kelly and his devoted manager, Ron, embark on an unexpectedly profound journey through Europe. Along the way, both men confront the choices they've made, relationships with loved ones, and the legacies they'll leave behind. An ensemble piece set in elite professional circles, examining ambition, legacy, and fractured family dynamics.

· Hamnet – Director: Chloé Zhao. Cast: Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley. William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, celebrate the birth of their son, Hamnet. However, when tragedy strikes and Hamnet dies at a young age, it inspires Shakespeare to write his timeless masterpiece "Hamlet." It is a drama about exploring grief and domestic life rather than the writer’s fame.

· Bill Kelley Jr. recently read the great short story The Aleph written by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1945. A grieving Borges glimpses the elusive Aleph and later doubts both the vision and even his own memories, turning the story into a meditation on infinity, language, and the slipperiness of memory.

· Juan Devis has been busy reading The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Hershel – published in 1951. The author argues that Judaism is fundamentally a religion of time, where true meaning is found in the sanctification of moments rather than in material possessions or spatial conquests.

· Francisco Ortega has been obsessed with the book Pedro Páramo written by Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo in 1955. The story unfolds as Juan Preciado travels to the ghostly town of Comala to find his father, Pedro Páramo, only to discover a place populated by murmuring spirits trapped in memories of tyranny, desire, and betrayal.

· Willie Colon & Ruben Blades – Plastico

· Bad Bunny’s Superbowl Halftime show

Did the promise of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela fail? How do we feel about the U.S. Special Forces' removal of Nicolas Maduro in early January 2026? In this episode of El Speakeasy, the hosts examine Venezuela after Maduro — from the rise of the Pink Tide and Chávez’s oil-fueled revolution to renewed U.S. intervention and shifting sanctions. As they debate whether Maduro’s removal represents liberation or imperial overreach, they revisit Germán Arciniegas’s critique that Latin America has long been treated as background rather than co-author of history — spoken about, rather than listened to — and ask whether that dynamic still shapes hemispheric politics today. Ultimately, the conversation circles back to Latin American identity for all three hosts and how they navigate that identity in their personal and professional lives.

• Latin America: A Cultural History (in Spanish the book is called El Continente de los Siete Colores) written by German Arciniegas presents a nuanced and sometimes critical vision of the relationship between the United States and Latin America. His argument for a kinship and a need for closer ties is not based on a simplistic notion of similarity, but on a shared revolutionary origin and a common, unfinished project of New World democracy.
• Los amigos cite the blog Los Relojes del Chavismo, the take a quiz on Good Neighbor Policies, discuss a famous speech by Hugo Chavez, and remember an Oliver Stone film.
• Bill Kelley Jr. recently read Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin , a novel about a depressed agricultural engineer who slowly abandons his career and wonders through Paris and Normandy while reflecting on the failure of the EU, his own relationships and the collapse of his own desires. His medicated numbness becomes a bleak lens on a society – and man – sliding toward quiet ruin.
• Juan Devis has been busy reading The Fire Is Upon Us by Nicholas Buccola: the book traces the explosive 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., using it as a lens to explore the clash between Black freedom struggles and conservative resistance in the U.S.. Buccola weaves biography, history and political theory to show how their confrontation still shapes America’s ongoing battle over race, power, and the meaning of democracy.
• Francisco Ortega has been obsessed with the book Here and Now, co-written by Paul Auster and JM Coetzee. Here and Now is an intimate, years-long correspondence in which both writers wrestle with friendship, art, politics, aging, and the strange moral weather of the twenty-first century. Their letters become a quiet meditation on how two brilliant, very different minds try to stay honest, humane, and attentive to the world and each other in a time of accelerating uncertainty.

In this second installment of “El Speakeasy” our hosts take on fatherhood, the masculinity question and the disillusionment of leftist revolutionary narratives in contemporary culture. The fellas engage in a lively and personal discussion around the new movie release by Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle Battle After Another” which sparks conversations around our current political moment, fatherhood and the role of art in social change.

• One Battle After Another, Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor. The three compadres engage multi-layered conversation around why this film either resonates or does not in this particular cultural moment. Our hosts dive deeper into character, plot development and more nuanced ideas around the idea of revolution, fatherhood and resistance.
• Bill Kelley Jr has been reading The Two Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney. She argues that the number of parents in one's household is the single greatest determining factor in a child's life and that the decline of married, two-parent households, especially among college-educated Americans, has widened inequality by limiting children’s access to time, stability, and resources.
• Francisco Ortega recommended we all watch the Netflix Documentary Film Come See Me in the Good Light, which focuses on the relationship between Poet Andrea Gibson and her partner Poet Megan Falley as they grapple with Gibson’s terminal cancer diagnosis. This is a moving depiction of two deeply creative and expressive individuals coming to terms with death and mortality.
• Juan Devis recommended we watch Apocalypse in the Tropics, another Netflix documentary film that tracks the growing influence of the evangelical movement in Brazilian politics, especially during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure as President of Brazil. This film depicts eerily similar dynamics of the growing political power the evangelical movement in Brazil that mirror what is taking place here in the United States as well.

In this episode of El Speakeasy, the hosts dig into Monuments: The Art of Un-Monumenting and Cancellation, using the MOCA / The Brick exhibition as a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation about statues, power, and how societies confront racist histories.

With differing reactions, the three amigos debate the show before moving into broader questions about Confederate monument removal, cancellation, and consequence — including a personal story that complicates easy narratives about accountability. Through candid debate and lived experience, the episode examines what it means to take something down, how to reckon with the past, and who is affected in the process.

Monuments runs until May 3rd 2026 in Los Angeles at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA/The Brick.

At the end of this episode, Bill, Francisco, and Juan share their recommendations for the week.

• Bill Kelley Jr. loves Shop Class as Soulcraft dives into why rolling up your sleeves and doing hands-on work is kind of a game-changer in our tech-heavy world. It covers the changing nature, and consequences, of our public education's shift from manual labor to cognitive labor.
• Francisco Ortega swears by Yoga Beyond Belief by Ganga White who has been a teacher and practitioner of Yoga for over 50 years. This book has a foreword by the musician Sting and gives a detailed view of the origins of yoga and a roadmap to the current practice of Hatha Yoga.
• Juan Devis was moved by the works of the 2025 Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Hungarian writer, Lazlo Krasznahorkai for his visionary oeuvre, and his novel The Last Wolf & Herman which details the account of a weary writer drawn into the tale of the final wolf hunted in the desolate Spanish region of Extremadura.