Axios has warned its readership about the latest development threatening public safety and our democracy: “The rise of white nationalist Hispanics.”
That bewilderingly titled article attempts to drum up fear about “a small but increasingly visible number of far-right provocateurs with Hispanic backgrounds who spread racist, antisemitic messages.” Authors Russell Contreras and Astrid Galván list a number of people of Hispanic ethnic background who attacked Americans of black or Asian descent, although there is no indication that white nationalism motivated the perpetrators.
One of the assailants, Jose Gomez III, “also stabbed a white Sam’s Club employee who intervened to stop Gomez from further assaulting the Asian family,” according to the Justice Department. The other, Alex Michael Ramos, asked pointedly, “You call me a f***ing white supremacist? I’m f***ing Spanish. I was raised in the [expletive] ghetto, a**holes.”
Axios acknowledges that non-white members of the white nationalist movement face a glass ceiling. “There are limits to how accepted some far-right Latino activists can become in white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles,” the website says.
The article met with instant derision online. Some commentators called its premise “amazing” or “hilarious.”Conservative writer Ryan James Girdusky tweeted, “Damn, even white nationalists have diversity outreach.”
Damn, even white nationalists have diversity outreach https://t.co/mNICD4xY0N
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) March 11, 2022
Others related the sudden attempt to reposition Hispanics as incipient neo-Nazis on polls that show portions of the Latino electorate inching toward the Republican Party. “Dear people of color, minorities and immigrants… if you do not bow at the altar of the woke [m]edia & the [D]emocrat [P]arty….. you are now labeled a ‘white nationalist,’” wrote Michael Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life. “Now that Latinos are aligning with the GOP, Latinos are the new ‘white nationalists,’” wrote conservative activist Jason Mattera. HotAir.com writer Jazz Shaw tweeted, “Translation: The rise of Hispanic voters who don’t vote for Democrats who have ignored them and taken their votes for granted.”
Dear people of color, minorities and immigrants… if you do not bow at the altar of the woke Media & the democrat party….. you are now labeled a “white nationalist”…. Please never pay for any newspaper or media service ever again. https://t.co/fEUGJfOCBj
— Michael Gonidakis (@MGonidakis) March 12, 2022
Now that Latinos are aligning with the GOP, Latinos are the new “white nationalists” 😂.
Axios = 🤡 https://t.co/qa1kcCG1Lr
— Jason Mattera (@JasonMattera) March 11, 2022
Translation: The rise of Hispanic voters who don't vote for Democrats who have ignored them and taken their votes for granted. https://t.co/LurmpT8EvE
— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) March 11, 2022
Whatever the website’s intentions, the legacy media have increasingly incorporated conservative and independent minorities into a vast white nationalist conspiracy. The movement began in earnest after the 2020 presidential election, when exit polls showed that President Donald Trump’s share of the Hispanic vote increased by 3% over 2016. Last January, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán wrote in The Washington Post that Hispanics had become the newest layer of “multiracial Whiteness.” A week later, Beltrán expounded on taxpayer-funded National Public Radio that “Americans have often learned how to create their own sense of belonging through violence and through the exclusion of certain groups and populations.” NPR interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro summarized Beltrán’s theory as teaching: “People of other races and ethnicities want to benefit from white privilege by supporting it.”
Beltrán wrote in the Post that white supremacy actually opposes categorizing people based on racial identity. “The politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to colorblind individualism,” she wrote. Minorities who have been taken in by this crafty form of whiteness “want to be understood as simply Americans outside of those kinds of identity categories,” she warned.
Nine months later, CNN’s website posted an article by CNN Enterprise writer/producer John Blake titled “White supremacy, with a tan,” which argued that the ideology of “white supremacy” is “elastic” enough to include people of other ethnic backgrounds.
Last June, a headline in the Los Angeles Times “warned” that conservative talk show host and California GOP gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder was “the black face of white supremacy.” Columnist Erika D. Smith said Elder’s decision to run against Democrat Gavin Newsom felt like “an insult to [b]lackness.”
In November, the left-of-center polling website FiveThirtyEight.com followed up the outcomes of the 2021 Virginia elections, which swept Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears into office, with a story originally titled “Why Racist White Voters Often Favor Black Republicans.”
Sears, the first black woman elected to a statewide office in Virginia history, called on MSNBC host Joy Reid to invite her on the show for a debate after Michael Eric Dyson accused her of spewing “white supremacy by ventriloquist effect.” Reid has yet to have Sears on her show.