"You can draw a straight line from Jorge Ramos’s confrontation with Donald Trump to his new documentary Hate Rising, which premieres this Sunday night at 10 p.m. on both Fusion in English and Univision in Spanish.
“The documentary’s origin is precisely that press conference,” Ramos tells The Daily Beast in a new interview the morning after the third and final presidential debate. “Because that’s when I realized that hate is contagious.”
It was late August 2015, just two months after Trump launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and criminals, when the Univision anchor and Fusion host stood up at a press conference and tried to ask him about his anti-immigration rhetoric. “Go back to Univision!” Trump shouted at Ramos as his security guards removed him from the room.
Trump later said he was willing to sit down for an interview with Ramos, but never followed through on that promise. More than a year after their press conference clash, Ramos maintains that he was “right to confront Donald Trump right from the beginning,” unlike some other journalists who he believes came to that conclusion much too late in the election cycle.
In the film, Ramos meets with an Imperial Wizard of the KKK on a dark Texas night and watches silently as a group of neo-Nazis in Ohio burn an enormous swastika. Like the Trump supporter who told him to “get out of my country,” white nationalist leader Jared Taylor tells Ramos he doesn’t belong in the United States. “Unless whites are prepared to exclude people, then they will be shoved aside,” Taylor says. It is a position rooted in a deep fear about losing what he views as his rightful place in the social order, and is eerily reminiscent of Trump’s desire to “Make America Great Again.”
Though he did not speak to Ramos for the film, Trump dominates Hate Rising—especially in the exclusive clip below when the host visits a group of children in Texas who fear the prospect of their parents’ deportation should Trump win the presidency. “My dad is from Mexico and if Donald Trump wins, he’s going back to Mexico and we’re going to be separated,” one 8-year-old boy says. This, Ramos tells me, is “The Trump Effect.”
Jorge Ramos: How Trump ‘Emboldened’ Hate Groups in America - The Daily Beast
No comments:
Post a Comment