Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made significant inroads among Latino voters. At the same time, vitriolic ads are continually being released that feature racist and demagogic depictions of immigrants, especially Latino ones. And, if you remember, despite Trump’s relentless anti-immigrant rhetoric, he won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. With less than 20 days to go until Election Day, immigration policy continues to be front and center as one of the most polarizing issues this year. What is driving the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos? Paola Ramos is an award-winning journalist and an author. Her latest is titled, “Defectors: Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America.” She’s also a contributor for MSNBC and Telemundo. She joins WITHpod to discuss forces spearheading Latino support of far-right politics, the effects of radicalization and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Paola Ramos: I do think that the hate is real and it’s visceral. I think we need to believe in it. I think from now until the election, the hard work is that, you know, so much of this language has become so abstract. Now we’re so used to talking about mass deportations and this language and this insane rhetoric. And I think we need to ground people in what that means again, and sort of visualize it in the same way that we were able to do four years ago with family separation. You know, the same way that the country reacted to the clips of children crying. And I think it was very emotional and people felt it and think we need to do the same thing.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. I’m speaking to you and I think it’s important that I mark the time because we’re in campaign season. I’m speaking to you 20 days from the election. You’ll hear this a little afterwards. I’m saying that just in case something insane happens in the next few days, which is always possible. Just to mark that. And on the day I’m talking to you, Donald Trump is doing a town hall with Univision, which is one of the two major Spanish language channels in the U.S. Kamala Harris has already done a Spanish language town hall.
And one of the things really interesting, I was just watching it before I came on here, is well, a few things. One, we’ve seen that, you know, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump among Latinos in both exit polling and as far as we can tell from like the actual returns by an enormous margin. That margin shrank in 2020. Donald Trump made gains among both African-American voters and Latino voters, significantly among Latino voters, specifically and significantly in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley. And in the polling we see that trend has continued. So it’s moving in the same direction.
You have more and more Latino voters defecting basically from the Democratic Party to Trump. And that shows up across all sorts of polls and in all sorts of cross tabs. I think it’s pretty established. Now, it’s possible all this is wrong and when the election happens, this is all polling and measurement error. That is a possibility. I want to just stipulate that. We know pretty well from the actual returns that it’s not measurement error in say 2020. Like we can look at South Florida and we can look at the Rio Grande Valley and we don’t have to deal with polls. Like we know that those are heavily Latino places. We know what their history is. We know they swung.
So by and large, I think what the data is showing us is Donald Trump and the Donald Trump Republican Party has made significant inroads among Latino voters, also among black voters, although to a lesser degree. And that this has happened despite the fact that, you know, the Trump campaign really is, I think at this point, almost monomaniacally focused on a pretty disgusting message on immigration that, you know, people of all kinds of different perspectives can have different views on how much immigration should come to the U.S. But I think if you watch the visuals and the ads about immigration, they’re very frankly racist, bigoted, demagogic attacks on immigrants, lies about them, lies about what they do, and very specifically about Latino immigrants.
You know, there was an event in Aurora, Colorado the other day with enormous blown up pictures of Latino men who were alleged migrant criminals that, you know, Stephen Miller was sort of directing a two minute hate against. You know, this is, I think, really alarming, gross stuff, but it also seems to be working with large sections of the population, including Latino voters. And I don’t think there’s that much of a myth. This is less confounding, I think, to me than I think it is to some people, but it has been the source of a lot of consternation, a lot of hand-grinding, a lot of analysis and into this conversation comes a fantastic new book by my colleague, Paula Ramos. She’s a contributor for MSNBC and Telemundo, and she’s been a reporter for years. And her book is about basically this phenomenon. It’s called “Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America.” And Paula, it’s great to have you in the program.
Paola Ramos: Thank you, Chris. Excited to be here with you.
Chris Hayes: I have a lot of thoughts on this and I really enjoyed your book.
Paola Ramos: I know.
Chris Hayes: I want to just start maybe by centering it with your story, like just where you’re coming from because I think you have an interesting background, you have an interesting set of identities yourself, you write about them in the book. So you grew up in South Florida and in Spain, is that right?
Paola Ramos: That’s right. I was born in Miami to Mexican dad, Cuban mom, but very much in the sort of Cuban-American privileged exile community. So that’s just one side of the story. The other side is then when my parents separated, I then spent 15 years in Madrid, right? So then I was sort of ping ponging between Madrid and Miami and with a sort of limited idea of what it means to be Latino in the U.S., right? In Spain, it was this very like Eurocentric identity. In Miami, it’s this very sort of Cuban exile-centric identity. And so it’s not until I moved to New York City, I step in Barnard College here in the Upper West Side that I really sort of insert myself in a diversity that I think was really hard to see in a place like Miami. And I think Miami makes you believe that, you know, everyone that’s Latino is Cuban, that everyone has this very privileged story of immigration, a very direct pathway to citizenship like they do in Miami, only to come to New York and really understand what it means to really be part of that.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that Miami subculture is interesting because in many ways it was always viewed as sui generis, right? There’s for a bunch of reasons. One, sort of through the mechanisms of self-selection, the people fleeing Cuba tended to be the most anti-communist.
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: They particularly in the beginning tended to have the most means. They also had basically a complete part of the U.S. immigration code for them, right? Like they had the easiest time. This is not true anymore. We should be clear. In fact, it’s very much not true —
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: — but for a long time, the easiest time coming over.
Paola Ramos: Of course, yeah. I mean, to be Cuban for decades in the U.S. meant to your point that within a couple of years, you had residency and within a couple of years, you then had a very direct pathway to citizenship. And so even now, as we’re watching sort of Donald Trump campaigning in Miami and in South Florida, or even the vice president going to Nevada, the way that immigration sort of resonates with those two communities is deeply different, right. In a place like Nevada, where there’s so many mixed-status families, where there’s people that when they think about mass deportations, that means something to them. In a place like Miami, it’s just not the same. Immigration is in person on the same way. When you have people talking about family separation or the border, it’s sort of more distant. And so that sort of explains some of the inroads that someone like Donald Trump is able to make in a place like Miami-Dade County.
Chris Hayes: Well, and part of it too, right, is that the Cuban exile community and Cuban Americans have been pretty right-wing for a long time. They’ve been pretty Republican. So, I mean, when you go back to read about the —
Paola Ramos: The Red Scare.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. When you read about the ‘60s, it’s like all those folks like all that weirdness of the Bay of Pigs folks and the kind of people floating around Nixon, it’s like a wild world.
Paola Ramos: I mean, to this day, I mean, it feels like you’re still in the ‘60s, ‘70s, right? I mean, literally the word Kamala Harris right now is comunista. The word Obamacare is socialismo. Now there’s a reason why Donald Trump keeps saying comrade Kamala, right? Because it’s that same Red Scare that has been injected in the atmosphere for decades. It’s still very much present. But I think, you know, there was this debate maybe two months ago of whether or not that sort of paranoia about communism was really sticking. And there was a lot of experts from FIU that were saying, you know what, it just doesn’t stick anymore. But I think the differences, and you talk about this all the time, is that that paranoia of communism has now become the basis for other conspiracy theories to feed off from. So whether it’s the big lie, whether it’s the migrant crime wave, whether it’s your children are being indoctrinated, that foundation that has been the groundwork for so many years is just fueling all of these other conspiracy theories and that makes it even more complicated in a place like Miami.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the reason that I think starting with your upbringing in Miami and the Cuban community there is important is that it’s just an obvious point, but it’s like Latinos can be right-wing, obviously. And when you come out of the U.S. context, it’s like there’s been right-wing regimes up and down the hemisphere.
Paola Ramos: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: And those right-wing regimes were supported by, run by Latinos because it’s not like there’s like hegemonic left-wing or liberal politics through the Western hemisphere, obviously.
Paola Ramos: Exactly. And like even the idea that the U.S. government also sort of conditioned us to believe that in the name of curing the West from communism in certain instances, sort of strongman rule, right? And these military juntas were necessary.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: Right? And so I think that’s kind of where it gets really complicated, where there’s a lot of people trying to make sense of why there aren’t more Latinos that see Donald Trump as a really threatening dictator, no? And why they’re not really scared about that image. Well, I always say the same thing. We have a very complicated relationship with authoritarianism, particularly because of the way that we’ve been conditioned to believe that if we see the word communism, you know what? Sometimes the idea of authoritarianism seems kind of appealing.
Chris Hayes: Yes, because of the history of the Cold War in South America. And you write about that extensively in the book. Let’s talk about how you found your way. So, where did your politics come from, though? So like, how did you develop your own sort of views on this stuff?
Paola Ramos: Yeah, I mean, look, I was before being crazy enough like you and getting into the world of journalism, like I was in democratic politics for many years. I was in the Obama world and the Obama 2012 re-election campaign, worked for Hillary Clinton. And I think so much of what I was trained to believe and so much of what I believed was based on the idea that, you know, a year like 2024, imagine, and come a Republican candidate like Donald Trump that is promising all these things, that is talking about immigrants and the way that he is, that is promising mass deportations, that if we were ever to sort of step into that scenario as a country, that it would be Latino voters that would sort of drive this country away from that reality. And that is what we were trained to believe in Obama world. And so I think what drove me to write this book is kind of taking a step back and challenging some of those stereotypes and biases that I believed. No, I still do believe that we will continue to see the Democrats overwhelmingly winning Latino voters. Like that is —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: — a hundred percent of what will happen. But I do think that we need to question why we’re being fractured.
Chris Hayes: Well, and the key point there, right, is that post 2012, when they did the kind of, you know, RNC post mortem on the Romney campaign, there’s this whole thing of like, there’s this Obama coalition, young multicultural, we’re turning these people off and we need to do comprehensive immigration reform, we need to get right with that. That Lindsey Graham was saying that. The Senate tried to pass it. John Boehner never brought it up to a vote in the House.
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: And then Trump comes along as like, how about the opposite? And at first it had the effect you would expect because like Latino voters went way against him in 2016. But now it’s like, wait a second, what if using anti-immigrant populism and demagoguery, you could bring Latinos into a multiracial, coalition of people who are worked up about the foreigners coming on our shores.
Paola Ramos: Right, which is a tactic that, to your point, as you were saying, it shouldn’t be surprising, right? There’s a reason why xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments, like it’s not a new political strategy. Like it works for a reason. And I say this all the time, no one’s immune to that, right?
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Paola Ramos: Just because we’re the descendants of immigrants or Latinos does not make us immune to that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Stephen Miller is a descendant of immigrants —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you know.
Paola Ramos: Exactly, but then even when you think about specifically for Latinos, right, there’s scholars that write about this extensively around this idea of the Latino immigrant resentment theory. That this idea that it is immigrants that in a way sort of tarnish or diminish the social value of Latinos.
Chris Hayes: Oh, interesting.
Paola Ramos: This fear that as Latinos, sort of mainstream America and white America, if they see us lumped into the world of immigrants, will then discriminate us. So I think there’s so many factors going on there that have nothing to do with politics and more to do, I think, with this very complicated sort of racial dynamic that we have as a community.
Chris Hayes: That’s very interesting because part of the Occam’s razor theory I use here, and you trouble this, I think, usefully in the book, so I’m going to say it and then you futz with it.
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But it’s basically like, if you go anywhere in the world, okay, like in Pakistan, right, there’s been a big backlash against all the Afghan refugees in Pakistan. In fact, they did this crazy thing where they basically like had a mass deportation. If you look at Colombian politics right now, a huge strain in Colombian politics is anger at Venezuelan refugees because —
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: — as many Venezuelan refugees come to the U.S. there’s like a million, you know, order magnitude more in Colombia. And like, if you look at Brexit, people were ticked off about the Lithuanians and the Polish who were living there. Now in all those cases, there’s not really a racial issue. Like they’re ostensibly, you know, Poles and Brits are white, Venezuelans and Colombians are the same race. But like people do have xenophobia or feelings about strangers, foreigners, that can be detached from the racial categories that we in America create. So in that sense, it’s not that surprising, right?
Paola Ramos: It’s not, but I think we make a mistake by not talking about race when we talk about Latinos. I think one of the things that is happening is that as a community, even if you ask us, what is your race?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: How do you identify? We’re all going to give you very different answers. And that’s because as a community, we collectively haven’t really understood the weight that, and this is abstract and people are like, it’s too historic, but truly like the weight of colonialism and how that really distorted our own understanding of race. Like, I think we’re seeing that being manifested here. If you go to the Bronx, I’ve talked to many, many Afro-Dominicans that are now sort of in the Trump train that see their blackness built against African-Americans or see their blackness built against Haitians. And so that’s all stuff that we’re sort of carrying here. So that when Donald Trump says things like, well, Black Lives Matter, like they’re criminals, that sort of resonates in very different ways, right?
Even when it comes to sort of the racial dynamics between Venezuelans and Cubans, like the polls also do show, you know, that we discriminate against each other as a community. And of course, the color of your skin has a lot to do with it. And so I do think, obviously, you can’t explain everything through that. But I think that’s the problem that in politics, we never talk about how complicated that racial dynamic is.
Chris Hayes: I mean, even when you get into the categorization, right? Like even the U.S. census and the official statistics have this, can’t quite get their head around what the category is, right? There’s white, non-Hispanic. Like Hispanic is not a race. It’s a category that sort of overlays race, right?
Paola Ramos: Totally, but even think about that, right? I think as Hispanics, as Latinos, even the idea of reclassifying race has been something that we can do with a lot more liberty than, of course, like black people in this country, right?
Chris Hayes: Oh, 100 percent, yeah.
Paola Ramos: Exactly, but that, I believe that does manifest in politics, right? Like even the way that the Spaniards allowed for these permission structures to literally allow like racially mixed individuals to pay the Spanish kingdom a tax to literally change their race, right? Like that is something that happened in Puerto Rico.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: And so that racial dance that we’re accustomed to in Latin America, in the U.S., in this framing of racial binaries, it gets really complicated.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, so what you’re saying here is, even if I have the impulse to say, look, you don’t need race to explain people having right-wing politics of any background, because people have right-wing politics, and you don’t need race to explain xenophobia as a feeling people have distinct from what we call racism, right? Xenophobia towards people that are ostensibly in the same racial category. What you’re saying is, yes, but you also can’t detach the complexity of race —
Paola Ramos: One hundred percent.
Chris Hayes: — and the hundreds and hundreds of years of colonial and post-colonial obsession with it, the boundaries it creates, its construction and deconstruction from whatever politics we’re having here.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, I think race and I think our history with race and with colonialism sort of influences our identity in the United States and that helps explain why Trump’s language among certain folks and why Trump’s strategies resonate in certain ways, right. And I think even the very intentional image that he’s trying to put out there in the country, right, there’s a reason why we’re talking about Haitian migrants eating pets. Now there’s something about that image that really merges immigrants and black people and the image of disgust, which are at the end, these like powerful tools in politics, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Paola Ramos: It’s fear, it’s anger, and it’s disgust.
Chris Hayes: Disgust, yeah.
Paola Ramos: And I think it’s thinking about what type of effect that has. And if you’re a Latino, again, you’re not immune to that for many reasons. Yes, the xenophobia, but I think also the racial dynamics have a lot to do with it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s a great point. The other thing, I was talking about this yesterday in a call, we were just going through an editorial call. It’s like, you know, for all this sort of head scratching of like, how could Latinos support this guy who’s, we see his rhetoric, which just is so gross to me, obviously. But then if I think about myself, it’s like, if you looked at my income, it’s pretty high in the bell curve of America. And someone could be like, but Democrats are always railing against the rich. They’re always saying they’re going to raise taxes on the rich and how the rich are getting not paying their fair share. And it’s like, yeah, right, but I just don’t identify that way. I don’t care. So it’s like —
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: — at a certain level, we also just have different identities that can be front and center and different in how we choose to think of ourselves.
Paola Ramos: Completely. But I think where the delusion lies is in the belief among some Latinos that are now sort of, you know, infatuated by Trumpism, the delusion that they believe that they fit into Trump’s America.
Chris Hayes: That’s the question, right.
Paola Ramos: Or that they will be safe in Trump’s America.
Chris Hayes: That’s the question.
Paola Ramos: Or that they would not be victims of the racial profiling that would happen under Trump’s America. And I think that’s sort of where we have to do the work to ground us in that.
Chris Hayes: So this is where this idea because I was just watching the town hall and like the scariest thing to me is when he or the campaign appear to be attempting to do the following, put together a multiracial coalition of like immigrant haters basically like —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Or like literally trying to be like, we’re going to have a rainbow coalition of bigots, a rainbow coalition of haters —
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: — a rainbow coalition of people who get really worked up on the train’s menace —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — a rainbow coalition of reactionaries. And you can be in our coalition if you’re a Bronx Afro-Dominican, you could be in our coalition if you’re a sort of white-presenting Cuban from Miami, you could be in our coalition if you’re a sixth generation Chicano on the border, or just a black dude in Detroit. Like all of you can join —
Paola Ramos: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — our rainbow coalition of haters, which is a phrase Adam Serwer wrote. And like, that scares the hell out of me.
Paola Ramos: Well, it’s the perfect shield for them, right? I mean, this is what they did with Enrique Tarrio, right —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: — the former chairman of the Proud Boys.
Chris Hayes: I was going to, right, go to him, yeah.
Paola Ramos: He became the perfect shield, no, that would sort of shield the Proud Boys and white supremacists from being called white supremacists. I mean, when I would talk to them, they would literally be like, well, we’re not racist. Like, Enrique Tarrio is our boss, right? Like, there’s no way we can be racist. But then what happens, right? And I say this all the time. When Donald Trump loses that election in November 2020, one of the first things that the Proud Boys do once Enrique sort of doesn’t deliver in that Trump victory in 2020, they break up with Enrique, no? And they really clarify the idea that, in their own words, that the West was built by white race and white race alone and Enrique, leave us, goodbye. And I think that’s the story here, no?
Chris Hayes: You don’t think it’s actually a genuine broad-minded vision of putting together a rainbow coalition of haters?
Paola Ramos: I don’t think so. But again, listen.
Chris Hayes: Who knows? I mean, I don’t think so either, but —
Paola Ramos: I don’t think so.
Chris Hayes: — you talk to Enrique Tarrio, and Enrique Tarrio to me is one of the main people I think of when I think of this. Tell us just briefly for folks who don’t know who he is and what your conversations with him are like.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, so Enrique Tarrio, we know him as the former chairman of the Proud Boys. I met him for the first time in 2018. Enrique Tarrio is not the first image that comes to mind when you think of the Proud Boys. He’s an Afro-Cuban, Afro-Latino and his parents are immigrants from Cuba, Cuban exiles. And so I met Enrique in 2018. And I think that’s sort of the beginning of his journey towards being completely radicalized. Now, when I first met Enrique, my impression of him initially was like, all right, here’s this like super tough man with his sunglasses and his sort of tattoos. But then what you really understand in conversations with him is that, you know, this is someone that as a black Cuban never really fits in the sort of Cuban exile community of Miami. And he’s someone that in his own words was always considered too black to be Republican, too independent to be a Democrat and was sort of this like misfit in that Miami community.
And here comes Trump that is then praising him. And then comes Roger Stone and he praises him and Ted Cruz is praising Enrique Tarrio. And so all of a sudden, within months. He finds this power and belonging in the Proud Boys, and he runs with that power, particularly when you have a group of, you know, white supremacists and Proud Boys that are telling you to run with that power. And so I saw this sort of transformation of Enrique really being corrupted by that power. And, you know, now we know where Enrique is, behind bars.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I mean, he was convicted on a bunch of different things, including, I think, sedition, right? I mean, I think he was one of the big sedition convictions.
Paola Ramos: That’s right. And I think what Enrique, of course, exemplifies is a very extreme version of what we’re talking about. But I think he is also the culmination of a lot of things that I try and talk about in the book. You know, this idea of tribalism, which is the us versus them. You know, they talk about this all the time. The idea of traditionalism. And Enrique was obsessed with this notion that, you know, women had a role and that it was men that had to, you know, really take the country back to these traditional roles. He obsessively talked about, you know, trans people. And then the idea of the political trauma, the communism.
One of the things that Enrique said, which I also found among other Latino insurrectionists in Miami, was that part of the reason why they were driven to the Capitol on January 6th was really this idea of the paranoia of communism taking over. Now they truly believed that Joe Biden would take this country into communism. And I think, again, when you put all those elements together, it radicalized people like him.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You just mentioned these sort of three themes you talk about in the book, tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma as sort of the three main drivers for this kind of conservative line of politics. Just talk me through that argument more broadly. In Tarrio’s case, it’s pretty clear, but it seems like you encountered this in a bunch of places.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think when we’re talking about sort of the, you know, the quote, unquote “rightward shift,” it’s a small one, but when we’re talking about that, I think the tendency is to think about it through politics, or through the MAGA effect or Trump effect. And I think what I find more interesting and telling is that there is something about the sort of history and culture and psychology of what it means to migrate from Latin America to the U.S. And I think those are the things that are harder to pinpoint, you know, and to even sort of get language around it, right. When I talk about tribalism, I’m talking about understanding how the weight of colonialism impacted our own internalized racism in the United States and then how that manifests in American politics.
When I talk about traditionalism, same, how the weight of colonialism influences our own moral compass, right? So that when Donald Trump uses transphobic language or anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, there’s something about that language that really invokes a moral panic among people, particularly some few Latino men. And then of course, trauma being the political trauma, we always often talk about the trauma of communism, but like we said at the beginning of this conversation, sort of the trauma of our complicated relationship with authoritarianism. So I think, you know, many years in my own reporting, I didn’t have language to understand any of this, no? The colorism, the racism, the trauma.
And so I think this book, the beauty of it is that, you know, as you know, like you just finished yet another book, like to be able to pause and make sense of everything and have historians and scholars and psychologists help me make sense of it all, like, that’s where I really learned a lot.
Chris Hayes: I was thinking about the part in trauma because my wife and I went down to South Beach for a weekend, which like we do maybe once or twice a year, which is awesome and whatever, love it —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — just go by the pool and I love Miami. I love the people there. I love the culture there. It does feel appreciably more right-wing than it used to —
Paola Ramos: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which is pretty notable.
Paola Ramos: It is.
Chris Hayes: But there was a Cuban woman I was talking to who had recently come over in the last few years. And she just like, we were talking and then she says something about Cuba. I asked her about her family and she just very casually, but with a lot of pathos as, oh, you know, communism is a cancer.
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And it was just sort of like, obviously we know, but there was a lot of trauma in the way she said that her parents are still there, her family struggling, like, oh, you know, communism is cancer. And it just like, it cuts to the bone.
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: She said that to me as I was reading your book and I was like, yeah —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — there’s a pretty good example of it.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, yeah. And like, that’s the Miami I grew up around, right? Like I grew up around uncles and aunts that literally told me that Fidel Castro was the devil knowing that would I ever to read anything about in any form of socialism that like I would go to hell, right? Like that’s how deeply ingrained it is. I was able to leave, but going back to the Republican strategy there, like they exploit that trauma, right? There’s a reason it works.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, all the comrade Kamala stuff. I mean, it’s funny, that also clicked together for me in reading your book. And this is also true, like I interviewed Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who was a congresswoman who lost her reelection in 2020, was running for Senate in Florida. And I did a sort of post-mortem with her about her race. And she was like, look, the socialism stuff really worked. Like Bernie Sanders identifying as a socialist and sort of the rise of DSA and all that stuff, whatever you think about it, anywhere else, I’m just telling you in my district, like that killed us. Like that really hurt.
Paola Ramos: Well, there was a post-mortem analysis by Equis Lab. They did it in November 2020. And they found that 40 percent of Latinos believed that the Democratic Party was inching towards socialism and there were more Latinos that were scared of that than they were Republicans sort of flirting with fascism. And so again, that tells you sort of the gap in obviously the effects of misinformation. But again, all of that just is so much more powerful because of that political trauma.
Chris Hayes: Obviously, these trends are complicated and, you know, there’s a whole bunch of things for different reasons. There’s a few things though that jump out. So you talked about the gender dynamics. Like this is happening much more among men than it is among women, and we’re seeing the same thing among black men. Again, it’s all polling, but like, to the best that we could tell, this is real. And to me, that’s not really rocket science. Like, there’s a form of gender traditionalism and male supremacy that Donald Trump embodies, that the people around him push for. You know, every woman around him is, you know, accused to a certain, extremely specific mold about how women should look —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and how they should present themselves and roles they should have. And so that’s appealing to certain men, you know.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, you just laid it out perfectly. I mean, look, I think the gender gap is really widening now. I think particularly with Latino women, what you found in the midterm elections is that the issue of abortion for the first time in years became a top voting issue for the community. We’re talking about Latina Catholics and evangelicals —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Paola Ramos: — and conservative women that are able to humanize the issue for the first time, even if morally they’re opposed to it. What you saw is that it really has mobilized the community because it’s become a matter of life and death for many people. And I think that sort of survival instinct is really hitting. But then I think you’re right with Latino men, yes, right. You know, I think what I’m noticing in conversation is that there’s something very discomforting to them. Again, we’re talking about a small group of men —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: — but there’s something that is really discomforting around the way that the country is changing, the gender norms that are changing —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: — the sexual norms that are changing, sort of the powerful black women stepping into power. There’s something about that evolution of the country that I think Trump, again, is trying to create that image of you don’t need that, No, we need to go back to the days —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: — when you are in power. And that of course resonates with some people, of course.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I think it’s very powerful. So you got the gender stuff. There’s also, you know, and this has been a fascinating aspect of Latin-American politics. There’s the religious aspect, which is the broad movement from a hemisphere, again, overgeneralizing that was just overwhelmingly Catholic —
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: — to one that is increasingly evangelical. And you’re seeing that, you know, that has been a defining feature in politics in a whole bunch of Latin American countries, in Brazil particularly. It is one of the main drivers of the politics there, and particularly Bolsonaro’s election, the first time. So that’s happening here too and it seems like that’s also a significant part of what’s happening.
Paola Ramos: It’s all connected, right? You’re right. There’s literally been an evangelical boom in Latin America in the last decades. A place like Guatemala now has over 40 percent of the population are evangelicals. You mentioned Brazil. Well, Brazil and El Salvador, over 30 percent of the country are now evangelicals. And so in the last 20 years, a lot of the asylum seekers that were coming to the U.S. were of course carrying a lot of these evangelical beliefs. And now the country, you see that it is, Latinos are the fastest growing group of evangelicals in the country.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the craziest thing about this is that the great replacement theory, which is that Democrats are importing these people to turn them into voters who will reliably vote for them is just not even born out.
Paola Ramos: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: I think a lot of these folks are going to like, if they get citizenship, become conservative Republicans.
Paola Ramos: Well, what’s interesting is that they may say that, but at the same time, as they’re seeing their own levels of white Christian sort of decline, they have understood that they may say all they want to say about, you know, non-citizens voting, and we don’t need them. Actually, they need them. They are seeing an opportunity in Latino evangelicals.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Paola Ramos: And they have understood that they need to be organizing in those churches if they want sort of the Christian right to succeed. I think that’s what’s interesting, the transformation of, you know, so many of these spaces that are spaces of refuge, safe spaces, places where a lot of these first and second generation immigrants have always felt sort of secured. And now all of a sudden and certain churches, you’re seeing the way that they’re really politicizing it in. I think a lot of 2020, a lot of his inroads had to do with that community. I mean, there’s a reason why Donald Trump launches his National Evangelicals for Trump campaign in Miami-Dade County, right? Like he specifically —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: — talked to the community, to Latinos, or because they see something there.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, when he did his Bronx rally, he had a very sort of notorious and infamous evangelical —
Paola Ramos: That’s true.
Chris Hayes: — figure in the Bronx.
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And even, you know, the Bronx where I’m from, which is an overwhelming Latino burrow, I’ve seen it over the course of my life there. Like just the transition from the Catholic Church as sort of the main place to evangelical churches in Bronx neighborhoods, you know, popping up, growing, like —
Paola Ramos: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you could see it almost at the physical street level —
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: — in a place like the Bronx.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, and it’s funny because one of the first questions I always have when I’m interviewing people from the community or immigrants, it’s, you know, what is the first thing that you do when you come to the U.S.? And typically it’s, I find a church, you know, I find my community in the church. And so it’s been incredible to see the amount of new evangelical churches that are popping up because they saw the sort of need in the community to find a form of healing or purpose that I think a lot of members are looking for. And then it’s just been incredible to see the way that these pastors have really politicized them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and I want to also just be very clear that like, you know, people can have a whatever faith tradition —
Paola Ramos: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — they have and have whatever politics. Like it’s not like, you know, at the individual level, this is determinative. It’s just —
Paola Ramos: Of course.
Chris Hayes: — as a broad sociological trend.
Paola Ramos: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: Everyone knows that, but I just want to say it. So those are two things. So the sort of gender gap, the sort of this kind of religious evangelical. And then the other thing that I just love to hear you talk about is that at one level, what we’re seeing among black and brown voters, African-American, Latino is that this education polarization, which has happened among white people, people who identify as white, coming for everyone else. So like this sort of degree divide, which is just in the NBC polling is just like craziness.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, and that’s true across the board.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: I mean, we’re seeing, yes.
Chris Hayes: Right. So I’m just curious if that’s been your experience as well in talking to Latinos at like, that same like people that go to four-year schools that, you know, have like their information environment is I think a little different generally. People that subscribe to newspapers or whatever. And again, I’m making these broad sociological generalizations or people without college degrees who do that. There are people with college degrees, but as a broad matter, I wonder like, do you see that education polarization happening?
Paola Ramos: Yeah, look, and from a surface level, yes, I think that’s true across the board. I will say in the research that I focused on, I was mostly focused on these sort of historical trends and less so on that. But yes, there’s certain obvious elements that I don’t discuss in the book because they’re so obvious, right? The economic anxiety that a lot of Latinos are feeling, like that’s a big driving factor. There’s a reason why —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: — you know, that’s working across the board. And then of course, the sort of educational gap is another external factor that definitely is also true among Latinos, of course.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Well, you write about this. So, you know, there’s a famous book called, “How the Irish Became White.” That was sort of a foundational book in what came to be known whiteness studies. And it’s sort of about the fact that if you go back and you read the literature in the newspapers of the 1850s and ‘60s, the Irish are considered racially other, uneducated and uneducatable, possibly incompatible with self-governance in American democracy, all sorts of racist slurs directed at them. And of course, there’s a Know Nothing party and all this stuff. And over time, essentially they migrate from being like any other, whose racial identity is like distinct and not white, to being white. And the same happens for Italian-Americans, for Greeks, for all kinds of different groups that come over from Europe. Is something like that happening to Latinos? Is that a process that doesn’t function in the same way anymore? How do you think about it?
Paola Ramos: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s kind of the, you know, and I’ve been on the road for the last two to three weeks and that question comes up all the time. And as a question mark, because I think what we’re all sort of wrestling with is a question of identity. I think there’s a big sort of gap between the way that the country sees us collectively as these sort of like brown people of color with immigrant stories and perhaps a perception that a lot of Latinos have of themselves. And I think in conversation, what you’re realizing is that there are some people including brown people and white Latinos and Afro-Latinos that are kind of starting to see themselves more under this lens of whiteness. And again, it goes back to history, you know?
The racial caste system that the Spaniards institutionalized always created a permission structure for all of us Latinos, whether you’re Black Latino, Brown Latino, Indigenous, but it created a permission structure for all of us to always draw this direct line to the Spaniards and to the colonizers and to whiteness.
And I think in sort of Trump’s America, right, where he’s really creating this division between the in-group and the out-group. And in this America where it is true that we are now more Americanized and assimilated and speak English, what you are seeing is that there is a surprisingly growing group of Latinos that do see themselves more reflected in that American whiteness. Now, and I think we go back to the same question. It’s a matter of perception. We’re all sort of seeing each other in very different lenses, but what we do need to understand is what I was saying before, like the racial lens is so complicated among us. Now because I’ve talked to dark skinned Latinos that consider themselves white or more Spaniard. I’ve talked to Afro-Latinos that consider themselves black. I’ve talked to Mexican-Americans at the border that tell me that they’re Spaniards. I’ve talked to Mexican-Americans in California that tell me they’re Chicanos.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: And so there’s kind of this like —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: — you know, this collective identity crisis of all of us kind of come to terms with one simple question. It is like how do we identify collectively? And like can we even come up with a common answer there? And I don’t know.
Chris Hayes: Well, let me stay on this for a second. You know, the sort of story of assimilation that you’re talking about, like in the Irish-Italian version, at least in the Northeast, right, the way it goes is like, your first or second generation, you live in the city and you’re a Democrat, you know, and then you move out to the suburbs where you like become Republican basically —
Paola Ramos: Right.
Chris Hayes: — and become like white. Essentially —
Paola Ramos: Right. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — this is the migration pattern, right?
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I’m oversimplifying. But the assimilation question to me is like, how important is the label itself? Like, what does it even mean tangibly? Like, blackness has a very distinct history in America because of slavery distinctly, and because of the way that it was legislated specifically as the focal point of the Republic in many ways, sidestepped and then fundamentally reckoned with. How productive is the label I guess is a weird question.
Paola Ramos: I think that’s the question. Look, I think it is productive because I think that there are sort of these common goals and that we’re all fighting for collectively, right? I think we’re trying to protect ourselves against systems that haven’t always, of course, sort of taken Latinos into consideration. And so I think there’s a lot of power in this collective identity. And I think the theory was always that we would have these sort of values around social justice that were different from the values that sort of white America wanted to impose on them.
And so I think that so much of the sort of progressive theory and democratic theory of change was based on our collective identity, you know, that we would sort of push the country alongside black people and other minorities towards the sort of better version of the United States. And so I think it’s important. But then I think what’s interesting is that what you’re seeing in assimilation or in the third and fourth generation Latinos is actually two very different stories, right?
There’s a sort of part of the story, which is the one that we’re talking about, around this idea of more Americanized white Latinos. But then you look at the younger generation of Latinos and some of them that are actually kind of creating this new version of us that is more diverse, that is not scared to lean into their rights, that is sort of not scared to say that they’re queer and that they’re indigenous and like that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: They’re doing that with a lot more freedom than the older generations, right? And so I think those two things are happening at the same time.
Chris Hayes: Right, like basically a more like proudly and self-declared sort of left-wing or progressive or you know, version of that identity.
Paola Ramos: Perhaps young people that saw their parents being told that they had to assimilate —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: — that they had to speak English and they’re actually choosing something different —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: — I think where we typically mischaracterize that is that there’s a tendency to think of these younger Latino voters as people that are leaving the Democratic Party or becoming independent, but I think they’re simply just challenging the party a lot more —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Paola Ramos: — and expecting a lot more.
Chris Hayes: They are not moving to the right. The reason they’re leaving the party becoming independent is not because they’re getting more conservative —
Paola Ramos: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — it’s actually, right, it’s in the other direction.
Paola Ramos: There’s other demands, yeah.
Chris Hayes: You interviewed a bunch of people and that the story of Raul, I think, who’s the border patrol agent, is just a fascinating one, just because what we’ve been talking about is, in line with the structural changes that we’ve seen between 2016 and 2020, 2020 to now in the polling, this movement. Again, it’s among a relatively small group of people and we’re always talking about millions of people who each one is a snowflake and an individual creature with all the, you know, contradictions and complexities that entails. But you talk to a few people, including this guy Raul, who sort of moved in the opposite direction in a really interesting way. And I wonder if you could tell us his story.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, so Raul is from Mexico, but he was a border patrol agent for over 20 years and, you know, found his purpose in the border patrols, found his community. He was a big Trump supporter. He was at the border during Zero Tolerance Policy. What’s interesting about Raul is that a couple of years ago, he finds out in a sort of by mistake, but he actually finds out that he was undocumented. And he was like, yeah, plot twist. But so he finds out that he’s undocumented. And so I, I focus on him because Raul then kind of emerges with this identity crisis —
Chris Hayes: It’s so fascinating.
Paola Ramos: — where he thought that he belonged, was in the border patrol sort of community where he thought that that gave him, you know, the sort of pride and essence of his being was in the border patrol agency, only to then sort of have himself question and come to terms with this idea of like, who am I now as a Latino? Like, who am I as an undocumented person? Who am I as a very person that I was patrolling and sort of criminalizing under Trump for many years? And I think what Raul shows you is almost a lot of the through lines that I find through the book and through many people that I talk to, which is that, you know, when you actually take a second to understand if you really were welcomed in these sort of like groups, no? But when you really take a second to ask yourself, like, was that what power looked like, no? Was I really respected? Oftentimes the answer is no.
And so Raul now the former border patrol agent is in this like very beautiful journey and to kind of discover himself. And in that he discovered that he actually isn’t just from Mexico, but he’s specifically from Coahuila, Mexico, which is a town where there were so many slaved people that fled from Texas and created this incredible black Mexican community and Raul finds out that he’s a black Mexican man. And even when he was doing his DNA testing, like he couldn’t believe it. So he had to do it a couple of times because he was like, wait a second, am I? And so again, it’s like, once you put these sort of systems to a side and these ideals of what power and identity is supposed to look like, and once you kind of imagine that for yourself and you discover it on your own, it can lead you somewhere else. And I don’t know if, you know, where he stands now politically, but it certainly isn’t where he was 10 years ago.
Chris Hayes: That’s really fascinating. I mean —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, just that it —
Paola Ramos: You need to have him on your show, Chris.
Chris Hayes: That is an incredible plot twist. When I read that, I was like, oh wow, yeah, that is quite something —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — just in terms of like the paperwork and all that.
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that does get back to sort of these questions about, like right now the mass deportation question, right?
Paola Ramos: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I thought “The Times” did a really good piece. Yesterday I cited it in the A block of my show of just like, basically you’re viewing a bunch of people who are like, it’s all B.S. Like he’s not going to really do it. And I’m sympathetic to why people feel that way because he is basically the world’s most famous liar and he says a lot of things. So sorting through like, you know, he say he wants IVF for everyone —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — covered by insurance. It’s like, well, we —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — progressives and people who follow the news, I understand that that’s B.S., that’s never going to happen. He’s not going to do that. He also says he wants to mass deport millions of people. And so other people are like, well, he’s not going to do that. So there’s always a little bit of the like, choose your own. I think they’re serious about it.
Paola Ramos: I do too.
Chris Hayes: I think Stephen Miller is very serious about it. I think they’ve studied the state capacity issues. I think they’ve actually like put some thought into it. I think they’ve got a plan.
Paola Ramos: I agree.
Chris Hayes: I think they will hit the ground running on day one. I think that afternoon or the next day, you will start to see —
Paola Ramos: I agree.
Chris Hayes: — people in cuffs.
Paola Ramos: Literally, I am getting goosebumps as you say this because I agree. And I had that same question. I was in Arizona a couple of weeks ago talking to organizers there. And the answer that I had was he will try it, no? He may not succeed, but he will try it. And I think as we’re talking, there are many groups on the ground in Nevada and in Arizona that are literally having conversations with the community around the idea of going back to the days of Joe Arpaio, putting plans together, the Know Your Rights campaign, what happens if, you know, these policemen are deputized and they start knocking on your doors again. And who will take care of your kid? Who has custody?
So like these are real conversations that people are having right now. I do think they will try it. I do think that the hate is real and it’s visceral. I think we need to believe it. And I think from now until the election, the hard work is that, you know, so much of this language has become so abstract and that we’re so used to talking about mass deportations and this language and this insane rhetoric, and I think we need to ground people in what that means again and sort of visualize it in the same way that we were able to do four years ago with family separation. The same way that the country reacted to the clips of children crying. And I think it was very emotional and people felt it. I think we need to do the same thing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. There’s a few things that I’m really worried about. That’s like probably in the top three. I do think one of the things that I’m really wrestling with and having a hard time with right now is that the polling shows that they have the better part of the immigration argument, although that’s come closer. I think that the Harris campaign has probably, in a tactically wise way, made some moves towards the center on that. I’m not sure I’d buy the substance of it, but I also understand what they’re doing politically, right? But I just got to say, like, my dad was over. We were up late watching football or something. We watched the local New York evening news, okay? And I never watched the local New York evening news, but I was with my dad and he does and we do.
And so it’s all campaign ads in the commercial breaks. And there’s a bunch of contested races around New York. Now these are things like in the Hudson Valley, in Upper Westchester, like far from the city, Long Island, every ad, Democrat and Republican, is about the border.
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I’m sorry, it’s mass hysteria. It’s like, there is a genuine policy problem, a genuine one —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and it’s not racist or hysteria to talk about that, which it genuinely is an issue. But the way that it has been covered, talked about on the campaign, it’s just frankly mass hysteria. And I’m like, the idea that in New York’s 19th district, which is a district I know well in the Hudson Valley, that the border is the number one issue —
Paola Ramos: It’s crazy.
Chris Hayes: — is nuts. It’s nuts. It’s not true. It’s crazy that anyone has been led to believe it is.
Paola Ramos: I know. And, I mean, you’ve done an incredible work and your show of really debunking the migrant crime wave theory and the migrant crime with rhetoric and you’ve done it time and time again. And so it comes down to that, but you’re right. I mean, since Joe Biden won the election, they have been trying to reenact the 2016 moment. And they understood that to do that, the only thing they have left is to weaponize the fear mongering and to weaponize the issue of immigration and to go back to a more powerful, visceral, angrier, disgusting —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: — version of build the wall and it’s send them back.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: And if they can make someone here in New York City from where you and I are talking, if they can make us believe that that existential threat is in our door, then that’s success for them.
Chris Hayes: But I mean, the crazy thing is like, okay, in New York City, which is a place that saw tens of thousands of asylum seeking migrants come and actually like had to deal with a whole bunch of like genuine policy problem trade-offs, there’s a law in New York that requires housing them, there was not enough space, I mean, there were real issues. I’ve been trying to navigate this for people that I know, but the idea in these other districts. There are real issues, for instance, just housing prices. You could be a Republican running on housing prices against the Democratic —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — incumbent and be like, why the hell can’t my kids afford to buy. There’s real issues. It’s not like there’s no real issues, but the idea that this issue is so nuts to me. It’s nuts. And I just feel like something has gone terribly wrong that this is the terrain that this campaign is on three weeks from election.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, because at the end of the day, people vote out of fear or out of inspiration. Trumpism doesn’t have inspiration so it’s just voting out of fear and that’s all they have. But to your point, it’s more a question for the vice president. And I understand at the national level what they have to do.
Chris Hayes: It’s hard. It’s not easy, yeah.
Paola Ramos: I understand. But that’s the hard work.
Chris Hayes: It is the hard work and I wonder, I think there’s ways. I do think, we cover her big border speech down in Arizona and there were parts I really liked, there were parts I didn’t love, but again, it’s not for me. You know, Barack Obama, like there are ways to talk about this that fight back against this just disgusting dehumanizing. I mean, they’re all but calling human beings cockroaches.
Paola Ramos: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They’re a millimeter away from that.
Paola Ramos: Yeah. And I think it comes back to the basics again, no? Obviously you have, you have the Harris-Walz campaign that has to be more moderate on this at the national level. The question is, will that work with the Arizona voters that delivered that 1 percent victory for Joe Biden, that will be the question. But I think to your point, it’s a matter of language, you know, and really instilling in people again that we are talking about human beings. And I think that’s where I worry, Chris, about, you know, in the long-term, will it be worth it, no? I remember when you had that conversation, when the vice president was doing the speech in Arizona and Mariano Hossa (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: I saw you guys going back and forth and Mariano Hossa (ph) kept being like, well, I wish you would flip the script.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Paola Ramos: And I think there’s this larger question among Democrats. Like, you know, I think in the short term, it makes sense to sort of have this tougher stance on immigration. But in the long term, I think there’s a question of like, how much are we compromising our values? And in the long term, will it be worth it? And I think it’s fair one.
Chris Hayes: Well, and I think, you know, to me, again, I basically think that the tactical choices they’ve made on this are informed by the data and responsive to public opinion and defensible. I really do think that and I think not even defensible, probably necessary. Okay.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, I agree.
Chris Hayes: The bigger thing I have is just like, this is an issue across the world. We have, because of a combination of, essentially what colonialism has wrought hundreds of years later between the developed world and the developing world, right? Between places of relative stability and prosperity and places where people have a harder time living in peace and security. There is demand to move from —
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — one place to another. There are the means to do it, and climate change is going to exacerbate that. And like every sort of developed democracy is wrestling with this question and no one’s doing a great job.
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I’m just worried about what it portends for the future because, okay, you can make these tactical choices, but someone’s got to sort of lay out a vision that’s both orderly and lawful and humane that can get people on board because there is a powder keg here. There is an explosiveness to this politics that is very dangerous if it’s allowed to go off.
Paola Ramos: Yeah, and I always say the same thing. Like when you’re reporting at the border, when I’ve been in the Darién jungle, like you really understand the basics of migration, which is that desperation knows no deterrence and knows no walls and knows no policies. And so I think any mother and father, aunts and uncle can understand that at the end, that human feeling.
Chris Hayes: Well, say more, because I think, you know, that point about desperation to me is really key because I think there’s two things about it. One, I think people have a very hard time of thinking themselves as having come out on another roll of the dice in the natural lottery.
Paola Ramos: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, could have been you.
Paola Ramos: Yes, and I think that’s why Joe Biden’s closing argument in 2020 was so powerful because it was literally along the lines of distancing Democrats from Trump’s cruelty at the border. And it worked really well because he was able to tap into something that moms in the Midwest understood and fathers in Nebraska understood, which is the feeling of children being separated.
Chris Hayes: We’re better than that.
Paola Ramos: Yeah. And that we’re better than this, right. And I think that humanity, that message, which was really simple, you know, we are better than that, I do think that had a lot to do with the last few weeks of Joe Biden’s campaign with Trump. And so I think going back to that and not to humanizing, these beings that have been criminalized to the point that we’re now thinking of them as animals and as threats. Like we have to bring people back to reality. And after four years of Trumpism, that’s a really hard thing to do.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that is the challenge. Paola Ramos is an award-winning journalist, contributor for MSNBC and Telemundo. Her latest book is titled “Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America.” That was an awesome conversation, Paola. Thank you so much.
Paola Ramos: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to my colleague, Paolo Ramos. The book is really fascinating. It’s called “Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America.” We’d love to hear from you and I know lots of people feel in all kinds of ways about the election. Just hit us up. E-mail us, withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod across social media sites. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me personally, @chrislhayes. I’m on Threads, Bluesky and the site formerly known as Twitter. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why is this Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Cedric Wilson, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening