MSNBC THE KATIE PHANG SHOW
11/9/24
12:19 PM
KATIE PHANG: Paola, my friend, you and I have spent a long time leading up to this election talking about those disinformation campaigns, especially on Spanish-language media platforms. You’ve been pounding the pavement, speaking to the Latino voters, talking to them about these issues. You've written a book about it, you've done specials about it. And now when we look at all of these returns and we are seeing the number of Latinos and Latinas that voted for Donald Trump despite his racist rhetoric, it kind of makes me want to pull my hair out a little bit Paola, because not only is it voting against your best self-interests here, but Paola, explain how it is that this information was available and it could have been accessed, and yet we’re sitting here having this conversation now, when it has been something we are focusing on for a long time. I saw it happening in real time in Miami-Dade County.
PAOLA RAMOS: I know you did. You know, I think- I think it’s hard, because it is a very hard and uncomfortable truth to face what is happening. To face the reality that over 45% of Latinos voted for this person, a person that was actively promising mass deportations, actively promising to separate families, and talking in such vile ways. And I think what’s very important right now is not to just dismiss these gains as simply a result of economic anxiety. As simply a problem with the Democrats. I think we have to dig a little bit deeper and have those uncomfortable conversations. This goes beyond the MAGA movement in politics, in my opinion. This is really about Trump tapping into these very real racial and ethnic anxieties and grievances, that as Latinos we carry, and through this movement, that, in and of itself, sort of was able to expose that we, too, can carry anti-immigrant sentiment, and we too can carry anti-Blackness, and we too carry a form of traditionalism that really, really resonated with Trump's culture war message. And particularly, Katie, I have to say it. Because I saw it time and time again, particularly the anti-trans message. That message, of course, coupled with the anti-immigrant message- but the anti-trans message was able to invoke a very specific moral panic among some Latinos that felt deeply threatened by the way these patriarchal norms were suddenly evaporating in the United States and I think that, I have to say, was very powerful.
