October 15 marks the last day of this year’s Hispanic Heritage Month — one the administration of leftist President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats marked with a string of embarrassing gaffes and episodes of discrimination that will likely do little to improve the party’s poor prospects with Hispanic Americans.
Hispanic Heritage Month — centered around October 12, the day Christopher Columbus and his Spanish fleet are believed to have reached the Western Hemisphere — was always expected to be a challenging time for the “breakfast taco” presidency and its supporters. Democrats outdid themselves this year in both style and substance, however, from Biden’s bizarre claim to being Puerto Rican to the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) complaining that America needs more Hispanics to “pick the crops.” In foreign policy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent much of the past four weeks in Latin America promoting “dialogue” between the repressive socialist dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the popularly rejected socialist “opposition” — all while reports surfaced that the Biden administration was gearing up to lift sanctions on Maduro that would produce windfall oil profits.
Even the Hispanics on the left tarnished the holiday when leaked audio of Los Angeles City Council members partaking in outlandishly racist conversations, even calling a black child a “little monkey,” surfaced this week.
The month began with the bizarre spectacle of the hard-left luxury getaway island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, melting down over the arrival of just 48 mostly Venezuelan Hispanic migrants, sent its way by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Martha’s Vineyard is known as one of the country’s most expensive vacation spots, famously frequented by the Obama family, and an overwhelming Democratic voter base. The migrants lasted less than two days before Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker ordered them deported to a military base.
Locals did not let the migrants go without taking celebratory photos to commemorate their brief hospitality.
Pelosi closed out the month outraging Hispanics with a comment reducing the contributions of those of Hispanic heritage to agricultural labor.
“We have a shortage of workers in our country and you see even in Florida some of the farmers and the growers saying, ‘Why are you shipping these immigrants up north?'” Pelosi said during a press conference on September 30, apparently attempting to criticize DeSantis’s policy that resulted in the Martha’s Vineyard debacle.
“‘We need them to pick the crops down here,'” Pelosi claimed that American farmers were insisting, prompting a wave of indignation from Hispanic Americans.
October did not bring much better tidings for Democrat-Hispanic relations.
Following the passage of Hurricane Fiona, which resulted in the entirety of Puerto Rico losing power, Biden visited the island to lend help. He admitted that his administration had largely abandoned Puerto Ricans — “they haven’t been taken very good care of” – before bizarrely claiming Puerto Rican heritage.
“I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home politically,” Biden claimed.
The president was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and later moved to Delaware, a state he represented in the Senate for decades. Despite being in public life for nearly half a century, his remarks this month were the first time he mentioned his alleged Puerto Rican heritage.
Puerto Ricans responded to the comment with a torrent of memes mocking the president.
While Biden alienated Hispanics at home, Blinken toured Latin America, engaging in friendly meetings with Marxist presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia, Gabriel Boric of Chile, and Pedro Castillo of Peru. With Petro, Blinken insisted on forcing the Venezuelan socialist opposition to engage Maduro, who is not the legitimate president of the country. Years of polling has shown little to no appetite among the vast majority of Venezuelans for “dialogue,” which has consistently resulted in offering cover for Maduro to commit a wave of human rights atrocities against dissidents.
“Our strong hope for Venezuela is that the Maduro regime and the Unitary Platform [the socialist opposition] are able to pursue a dialogue that ultimately leads to the necessary conditions to have free and fair elections,” Blinken said in Bogotá, Colombia, “to restore Venezuela’s democracy, to restore support from the international community, and to create a much better environment and – for all Venezuelans.”
Blinken engaged in an extremely warm public exchange with Petro, who prior to being president was mayor of Bogotá and a member of a communist terrorist organization, that concluded with Petro gifting him a traditional ruana garment.
Blinken also supported calls from leftist Chile for the same “dialogue,” without addressing the distaste for such a measure among Venezuelan citizens.
Blinken’s Latin America tour was accompanied by widespread reports that Biden was considering lifting sanctions on the Maduro regime’s oil production, which would result in at least one American company, Chevron, being able to refine Venezuelan oil.
In another, particularly grotesque move, Biden liberated Maduro’s nephews — Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas — from U.S. prison, where they were serving 18 years in prison after being convicted of trying to smuggle 800 kilos of cocaine into New York from Haiti. The “narco-nephews,” as Venezuelans call them, were freed in exchange for the liberation of American hostages imprisoned in Venezuela while attempting to profit from oil deals with the Maduro regime.
Hispanic Heritage Month rolled on after the “narco-nephews” affair with some of the most prominent local Hispanic officials in the Democrat Party — the leadership of the Los Angeles City Council — being exposed engaging in racist, offensive rhetoric in leaks that surfaced this week. Three Hispanic Democrats on the council — Nury Martinez, Kevin de Léon, and Gil Cardillo — can be heard offending black people, Jews, and Armenians, most dramatically referring to a black child as a changuito (“little monkey”). Martinez went so far as to offend Mexicans in the clips, as well, referring to Oaxaca natives as “ugly” (as of the publication of this article, Oaxacans in Los Angeles organized an anti-racist protest in response to the insults). National Democrats are currently striving to put distance between themselves as the controversy in Los Angeles continues.
As Columbus Day, the holiday that Hispanic Heritage Month is built around, arrived this weekend, the White House completely omitted any mention of Hispanics in its proclamation to honor the day, which leftists have been demanding the abolition of for the past decade on the grounds that the arrival of Europeans to the Western Hemisphere is racist.
“In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed from the Spanish port of Palos de la Frontera on behalf of Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II, but his roots trace back to Genoa, Italy,” Biden’s proclamation read, deliberately undermining the role of Spain, Columbus’s Spanish crew, and Spanish Catholicism in his feats.
A poll published this weekend by WPA Intelligence and the Hispanic non-profit Bienvenido found that Columbus was significantly more popular among Hispanic Americans than either Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. Columbus was nearly ten percentage points more popular than Harris.
As the midterm elections approach, Democrats may find it a relief for Hispanic Heritage Month to be in their rearview mirror, moving the spotlight away from their catastrophic outreach to a pivotal voter base. While addressing issues such as freeing convicted cocaine traffickers, Biden has done little to reverse skyrocketing inflation, which 74 percent of Hispanic Americans consider “very important.” Under Biden, inflation has risen to 40-year highs, affecting the prices of nearly every basic good. A poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal published last week found that conservative Hispanics had swung from preferring Democrats by nine percentage points to preferring Republicans by 56 percent — a 69-percent swing between 2012 and 2022 — so the damage, however, may be done.
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