Amanpour & Co. helpfully tried to explain the bizarre stubbornness of Hispanics who risk voting incorrectly for Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election – by hosting author-activist Paola Ramos, who worked both in the Obama administration and as Deputy Director of Hispanic Media for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign against...Donald Trump.
That’s taxpayer-funded “objectivity” for you.
The very title of Ramos’s book should have precluded her from appearing as the single source of information on Hispanics and Trump: Defectors -- the Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. But they love bashing the "far right" on PBS.
After Amanpour lamented that “Despite a history of anti-immigration rhetoric, Donald Trump has been making inroads with this constituency, which was once reliably Democratic,” Ramos was interviewed by Hari Sreenivasan. It was Ramos herself, not the show’s own journalists, who stated that she’d worked for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, alongside a clip showing her with the failed Democratic candidate.
Ramos: ….so much of what was supposed to be the winning formula for Hillary Clinton, I remember perfectly, was this idea that in the face of someone like Donald Trump, at that point was saying things like Mexican immigrants were criminals, they’re rapists, words that everyone heard, the idea was the Latino voting bloc would sort of rise in these unprecedented numbers in the face of someone like Donald Trump. Regardless of whether they were Democrats or Republicans or independents, that's what everyone believed.
And then fast forward, of course, to November 2016, and the case is that less than 50% of Latinos showed up. And then comes November 2020. And after four years of Trumpism, after the country sees family separations, after the Biden campaign shows the electorate sort of those videos reminding people of the cries of those children being separated, after four years of that, Donald Trump does better with Latino voters in 2020 than he does in 2016....
Sreenivasan: You break the book down kind of into three big subsections: Tribalism, Traditionalism, and Trauma. Explain the role of what tribalism is and how it contributes to this rise.
Ramos: Absolutely. I think when we think of the idea of Latino Trump supporters, the first thing that comes to mind is to really think about the MAGA movement. Or even politics. I think what I discovered in the book is that the real answers, the hardest answers, are the ones that are perhaps more uncomfortable to talk about. By that I mean really understanding the sort of racial baggage that I believe a lot of Latinos, including myself, a lot of us are carrying from Latin America. What it means to sort of have been colonized for so many years, the weight of colonization. That in and of itself creates I believe a lot of internalized racism, a lot of colorism, that manifests in American politics….
When Ramos wasn’t plopping this cohort of self-hating Latinos onto the therapist’s couch to explain their support for Trump, she was engaging in psycho-historical analysis, harkening back to the traumas of the caste system of Spanish colonizers….during the 15th century. As an example she psychoanalyzed a Trump-supporting hair salon owner named Isabel, an “Afro-Latina” who had apparently rejected her blackness.
Sreenivasan: You write about a woman named Isabel, what did she represent about this idea, this anti-blackness?
Ramos: ….It has so much to do with the 15th century, the way that the Spanish colonizers really instituted a caste system and gave so many Latinos regardless of your race and background and ethnicity, it gave everyone the permission to always sort of draw direct line to your whiteness, always draw a direct line to the Spanish colonizers….
Sreenivasan didn’t challenge that ridiculous explanation, but let Ramos introduce another lost soul:
Ramos also wrote on the topic for The Atlantic last month -- “The Immigrants Who Oppose Immigration” -- where she put border-journalist "Conservative Anthony" on the couch, as if to be a Hispanic anti-immigration activist by definition proved you needed therapy: “I got the feeling that by hunting them, he was distancing himself from them, and from his own foreignness.”
(Amanpour & Co. airs on tax-funded PBS after first showing on CNN International.)
