Topic: Media Research Center
As part of its perpetual seething hatred of Barack Obama, he Media Research Center has to reinterpret to find a way to be offended by what he says. Thus, we have a Nov. 27 post by Jorge Bonilla attempting to claim that Obama's statement that "People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump" because their "views on gay marriage or abortion" supercede any outrage at Trump's racist smears of Hispanics was really offensive, not just a statement of fact:
President Barack Obama’s interview with The Breakfast Club, released the day before Thanksgiving, garnered significant news and reaction due to a simple line about Hispanic evangelicals who vote their conscience. But by narrowly focusing on what Obama said, most (if not all) subsequent analyses miss the broader point about which is why that remark is offensive.
[...]
The widely cited partial quote (starting at “People were surprised…”) comes off as factual and non-controversial, as if Obama were merely stating that there do, in fact, exist Hispanic evangelicals who give greater priority to life issues than they do to immigration. But he didn’t really just make an assertion of fact. Viewed within its full context, Obama’s remark was an expression of contempt similar, in tone and substance, to his infamous “bitter clingers” remark- the exact opposite of an acknowledgment of ideological diversity within the Hispanic community.
Obama’s smears, though, are nothing new to us. And if he feels free to vent about conservative Hispanics who don’t toe the line, it is because there is on the left a permission structure to do so.
Bonilla then asserted that an earlier statement by Obama that "the religious issue, the importance of family, the abortion issue ... explains, in part, why one out of three Hispanics vote for Donald Trump and is so conservative" -- for the vast majority of people, just an uncontroversial statement of fact -- was somehow just as offensive:
The common thread between these statements is, aside from the whiny sense of entitlement to the Hispanic vote and seething contempt for those who don’t toe the line, a default labeling of Hispanics who voted for President Donald Trump as social conservatives. But this reveals a further disconnect with the community that both Obama and Ramos claim to champion.
Trump’s 2020 Spanish-language messaging was narrowly limited to anti-socialism, economic empowerment, and law-and-order. There were no Trump ads about abortion or the Supreme Court. The Trump coalition is diverse and the same is true for Trump supporters within the Hispanic community, from Miami-Dade to the Rio Grande Valley and from Lawrence, MA to Los Angeles.
And therein lies the offensive nature of Obama’s remarks. They are not merely a statement of fact but an expression of sneering contempt for those Hispanics who do not conform to what is expected of them. The expectation being, in this case, that Hispanics be single-issue immigration voters that turn out en masse for whomever flings open the border- La Raza über alles. Economic empowerment, personal liberty, school choice, free exercise of religion- all these other issues must become subordinate to immigration and if you vote your conscience or, as Ramos puts it, “feel totally identified with this country” then you are a race-traitor. That’s precisely the point Obama was trying to make within his broader discussion of what gets taken for granted in big liberal cities.
Obama’s been out of office for four years but his demagoguery game, aided and abetted by a Spanish-language media that looked the other way as he smeared a big chunk of the community they claim to champion, is as strong as ever.
It seems that Bonilla is reading into Obama's statements something that really isn't there and just looking for something to be offended by. Then again, that's part of his job as director of MRC Latino as well as a way to keep up the MRC's war on Hispanic media and hosts such as Jorge Ramos.
