Hispanics

Three prominent civil rights organizations in America have launched what appear to be coordinated attacks designed to hobble both Florida’s critical tourism industry and Governor Ron DeSantis’s impending campaign for president.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, and Equality Florida, an LGBT advocacy group, issued advisories warning travelers of the dangers of visiting Florida, a state one Democratic strategist says is becoming a “terrorist state.” The attacks will likely fail, but they illustrate how these groups now function solely as advocates for the narrow interests of the Democratic Party, rather than the interest of the groups they purport to champion.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, or what’s left of it, is in shambles. The Democratic group’s staff has dwindled down to nothing, following months of turmoil under its newly elected chair, Representative Nanette Barragán, who took over in December. In the weeks since, the group’s staff have all either left voluntarily or been fired. Most recently, Barragán fired the group’s lone survivor, executive director Jacky Usyk — news that was first publicized by the anonymous Instagram account, Dear White Staffers, which has been prolifically documenting the CHC turmoil. While Barragán has only been in Congress for six years, Legistorm data show that she has the third highest turnover rate of congressional staff in the past twenty years.

Anna Paulina Luna is a bad girl. Why else would the Washington Post be so eager to discipline her? Reporters Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites, truly a modern-day Woodward and Bernstein, appear convinced that the freshman congresswoman representing Florida’s 13th congressional district is a George Santos retread. The pair of bullies went rummaging through Luna’s panty drawer in search of skeletons. The result? A lengthy article intended to punish her — to which several corrections and clarifications have been added in the days since its publication.

The news that Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel is planning on conducting an "autopsy" of the 2022 election brought horrible political flashbacks to a decade ago. That was when the post-2012 election autopsy of Mitt Romney's failure gave the GOP all the wrong lessons about what was making them lose. You might remember that 2012 autopsy. It was the one that prescribed moving left on immigration policy as essential to appealing to Hispanic voters. As a now-infamous three sentences put it: We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.

The resignation of Nury Martinez, the first Latina president of the Los Angeles City Council, is a dramatic development that could have wide ranging ramifications for the future of LA politics. In the wake of the release of an October 2021 conversation where Martinez and other council members made racist remarks in the context of a discussion of redistricting, acting council head Mitch O'Farrell has also demanded the resignations of Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, saying the "people's business cannot be conducted" until they step down. https://twitter.com/MitchOFarrell/status/1580386608729112576 There are immediate consequences to this explosive story, but then there are also potential long-term implications which are worth considering.

Jill Biden apparently thinks Hispanics are tacos and vice versa. At a conference in San Antonio on Monday, Dr. Biden said Latinos were "as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio." And just as there's a plethora of Hispanic Americans, so too is there an incredible variety of tacos. Here now are five tacos that may remind Jill Biden of various Latinos she knows. The Crunch Wrap Supreme from Taco Bell This is the most un-Mexican of the bunch (i.e. not Mexican at all, nor is it even a taco). Taco Bell’s Crunch Wrap Supreme is full of things that will upset your stomach but will satisfy your hunger. Unfortunately Jill Biden won't be able to try one given that it would come too close to eating an actual Hispanic.

This week brought revelations that a consortium including multiple interested leftist participants has banded together to attempt to buy a number of Spanish-language radio stations across the country. The effort, backed in part by George Soros, is unsurprising. But it is also an underrated indication of the weakness of vision on both the left and the right. It illustrates an approach used by the left toward Hispanic outreach, which has been consistently top-down. As opposed to listening to the priorities of these communities and making any effort to meet them where they are, the left has instead tried to assert and propagandize to them. Univision, Fusion, and a number of other left-driven media outlets have attempted to control the narrative heard by Spanish speakers in America.

A piece in Politico titled “Democrats fall flat with ‘Latinx’ language” dropped yesterday, and as is always the case with such stories, activists and pundits took to Twitter to decry or defend “Latinx.” What was interesting this time around, however, is that some big-name progressives came out against the term. Fernand Amandi, an MSNBC analyst and the principal at Bendixen & Amandi International, the polling outfit quoted in Politico, tweeted: https://twitter.com/AmandiOnAir/status/1467843020838080512?s=20 According to the poll, only 2 percent of Hispanics refer to themselves as Latinx; 68 percent prefer Hispanic and 21 percent identify as Latino/Latina.