“Republicans often seem to think if they could just get beyond immigration issues there’d be all kinds of opportunities for them with Latino voters,” John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, says. “That’s a little like saying if we could just get beyond civil rights we’d be good with black voters.”
.. Last month, at a candidates’ forum in Plano, Texas, the conservative activist Ralph Reed proposed a strategy that ignores the issue altogether: Republicans should just focus on the evangelical vote, which, he claimed, is “larger than the African-American vote, the Latino vote, the feminist vote, the gay vote, and the union vote combined.” He was resurrecting a popular G.O.P. theory that President Obama was reëlected only because millions of conservative, and especially evangelical, voters went “missing” in 2012. All the 2016 Republican nominee has to do is get those voters to return to the polls.
.. Before the start of last month’s debate, representatives from conservative Latino groups gathered in Boulder to issue some warnings about what would happen if the Party didn’t distance itself from extreme immigration politics. Their message was of a piece with the 2012 report, but even more blunt. Rosario Marin, who served as the U.S. Treasurer under President George W. Bush, said, “Don’t expect us to come to your side during the general election. You are not with us now, we will not be with you then. You don’t have our vote now, you won’t have it then. You insult us now, we will be deaf to you then.”
Germany’s Gathering Clouds of Discontent
Ominous street protests, outfitted with mock guillotines, are now almost daily occurrences. In Dresden, during a gathering of several thousand citizens who purport to defend Western civilization against the influx of barbaric Muslims, a man held up a homemade gallows with a dangling sign reading, “Reserved for Angela Merkel.”
.. And they’re angry about more than just refugees. Around the same time, in Berlin, protesters rallying against the proposed trans-Atlantic free trade agreement carried a guillotine.
.. What we see on the rise, in other words, is not the anger of a classic loony fringe, but rather mainstream people striking out at elites who they believe have lost touch with reality and common sense. To many here, the refugee crisis, the euro crisis, the Ukraine crisis and the threats seen in an unleashed global capitalism have converged in a fundamental question: Do the mighty still know what they are doing?
.. As a prominent member of the liberal Green Party, Mr. Palmer is the last person to stir up xenophobia. Yet even he has warned that the refugee crisis means that “the social peace in this country is at stake.”
.. To them, the fringe parties — Alternative für Deutschland on the right, Die Linke on the left — offer quick and easy certainties: no to refugees, no to free trade.
With Anti-Muslim Campaign, Canada Has Its Trump Moment
Effectively, Mr. Harper hopes to win his fourth term on Oct. 19 in part by demonizing those few who wear the niqab — and much of Canada’s Muslim population by extension.
.. In this fear-mongering, many see the hand of Lynton Crosby, the Australian political operative who had been advising the Conservatives, according to a campaign spokesman. A veteran of winning campaigns for the former Australian prime minister John Howard and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, Mr. Crosby is known for his use of divisive social issues, if only to spur political apoplexy from political opponents and populist outrage from the masses.
Jorge Ramos: The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down
Ramos worried that Trump would recognize him and not call on him. “It will be important to stand up,” he said. “Trump’s street-smart. If you’re sitting, he’ll use it, the visual power imbalance, and squash you.”
.. For those with little patience for the numbing rituals of the modern press conference, Ramos’s insistence on making unwelcome points had been refreshing, and it was Trump’s heavy-handed response that was worrisome. Certainly, the questions raised by Ramos had been unusually serious and substantial at a press event otherwise dominated by talk of poll numbers, campaign operatives, and personal spats.
.. KMEX was also Ramos’s introduction to the community role that the Spanish-language media fills, and is expected to fill, in the United States. The station sponsored health fairs and job fairs, and broadcast English lessons. People called the station to ask which school to send their children to, which doctor to go to. “That TV is your window into the new world you’re in, where you don’t have many friends,” a Cuban-American media consultant in Coral Gables told me. “Those stations are more than information sources. They’re certainly more than businesses. The on-air personalities become like old friends. If you get ripped off, you don’t call the cops, you call Univision or Telemundo. They have these watchdog shows—here in Miami, it’s ‘El 23 a Tu Lado’ [‘23 on Your Side’]. That’s activist journalism.”
.. Zabludovsky, a reedy government mouthpiece with rectangular eyeglasses, was one of the most famous men in Mexico, although he is now remembered for having opened a newscast in October, 1968, after the police and the military had massacred scores of protesting students in the plaza at Tlatelolco, in Mexico City, by intoning, “Today was a sunny day.”
.. Mexico recognized Fidel Castro’s regime—indeed, the two countries enjoyed warm relations—which made the Mexican government anathema to many of South Florida’s Cuban exiles.
.. Cubans ran the place. They understood how the system worked. They had the Cold War policy that said that any Cuban who made it to the U.S. was automatically legal. There were no undocumented Cubans.
.. But then the city began to change, to diversify, first with Central American immigrants fleeing the civil wars there. Next came the Colombians, getting away from the cocaine wars. Then came the Venezuelans, running from Hugo Chávez.”
.. Ramos used to routinely ask, “Is Fidel a dictator?” She laughed. “People would say, ‘Why are you always asking the same question?’ It was because he wanted these heads of state on the record.” His other standard question with Presidents, she said, is “How much money do you have?” “He likes to ask it when they first come into office, and then a second time, a few years later, if they agree to talk again, to see how much they’ve been stealing.”
.. Ramos’s questions often infuriate his interviewees. In Bogotá, in 1996, he demanded that the Colombian President, Ernesto Samper, explicitly state whether or not his election campaign had accepted drug money, and showed Samper a photograph in which he appeared with two alleged narco-traffickers.
.. In a 1994 interview with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the deeply feared Mexican President, Ramos asked Salinas if he had gained office by fraud, as many Mexicans believed. Ramos pressed him on regional vote totals that were mathematically impossible. He questioned Salinas closely about the murder, a few months earlier, of his anointed successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio. (Salinas moved to Ireland after his term ended, amid persistent reports that he did so to avoid murder charges in the Colosio case.) “It was unbelievable that I could sit there and confront him with the evidence of fraud,”
.. Ramos can’t get over the fact that the most trusted voices in mainstream TV news, as far as he’s concerned, are comedians: Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert. Ramos and Oliver have joked together on-air about being immigrants, defeated by telephone voice-recognition systems that force them to adopt American accents to make themselves understood.
.. Ramos’s daughter, Paola, who recently earned a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has a job on the Hillary Clinton campaign. She previously worked in the Obama White House, and for Jill Biden. Ramos insists that his daughter’s employment does not influence his work. His Republican critics don’t buy it. He did not disclose her work for the Obama Administration to his audience.