Democrat Candidate: Latinos Should Be Loyal to Latinos

Karla Hernandez-Mats, running mate to Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie C
AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
Neil Munro

American Latinos should be loyal to Latinos, not to their fellow Americans, according to the Democrats’ contender for the post of Florida’s lieutenant governor.

Democrat Karla Mats-Hernandez is running against the incumbent GOP Lt. Gov. Jeanette M. Nuñez.

“Technically, [Nunez] is considered a Latina, but I think that her Latina card should be revoked,” Mats-Hernandez said in a video posted on October 27 by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign, adding:

The moment that she said … she was okay with putting [illegal-migrant] Cubans on a bus and sending them to Delaware …

She is a Cubana arrepentida [an apologetic, self-ashamed Cuban]. You don’t do that. You don’t lose touch … She’s completely, you know, out of touch with her [Latino] community.

So I like to think that I’m the only Latina running for this seat. And really, that I represent all of our [Latino] issues, all of our [Latino] communities.

Florida Governor-elect Ron DeSantis, left, listens as Lieutenant Governor-elect Jeanette Nunez speaks to members of the media after attending a school roundtable, Monday, November 26, 2018, at the Brauser Maimonides Academy, an Orthodox Jewish day school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

The statement echoes the identity politics and diversity ideology of the Democrat party, which claims that each group in society must be represented by a member of that group.

The ideology rejects the view that immigrants should integrate into Americans’ society, that political candidates owe a duty to legislate for the entire society, or even that politicians should favor Americans over illegal migrants.

The ideology also encourages zero-sum politics where each group decides that a gain for a different group is a loss for their own group. The diversity-and-rule policy helps wealthy elites because it distracts and divides the public that might overwise join together at the ballot box.

The diversity claim spurs civic conflict by encouraging groups and their political leaders to minimize the importance of other groups’ demands. It also creates political conflict by encouraging groups to resent even the commonplace, complementary, and beneficial differences between groups.

The endless conflict caused by a diverse society also fuels the growth of a political class that tries to profit by encouraging conflicts and favor trading among many rival and resentful groups within American society.

Diversity politics are celebrated by many of the same Democratic activists who shout “Racism!” to muzzle Americans’ worries about the civic impact of large-scale migration and demographic change.

Even the children and grandchildren of immigrants must stay loyal to the group they were born into, not Americans as a whole, according to Mats-Hernandez:

I was born and raised in Hialeah [in Florida]. I’m an American, but I’m very proud of my Latino heritage. And very proud of everything that we represent.

Mats-Hernandez is a teacher and is considered the running mate for the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Crist. However, Crist is widely expected to lose badly to incumbent DeSantis.

The group-destiny diversity politics view is common in the Democrat party. For example, the Democrats’ Congressional Hispanic Caucus recently denied membership to a GOP representative from south Texas.

However, many polls show that immigrants drift slowly away from diversity politics, especially when immigration curbs encourage migrants to integrate into American society.

By the third generation, the children of immigrants tend to vote like other Americans, largely because they want their sons and daughters to integrate into a low-conflict, high-trust, prosperous society.

This trend has become a 2022 problem for legislators and strategists in the Democrat party who expected Latino voters to vote in lockstep for Democrat candidates.

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