How Latino Leaders Sold Out Their Own Voters

In the summer of 1954, twenty-two completely regular eleven-year-old boys arrived at an isolated state park tucked away in the San Bois Mountains. They were balanced, well-adjusted, middle-class kids—the kind of wholesome American children who played Little League, listened to popular music, watched movies, and wouldn’t dream of hurting a fly. By week two, they were armed with rocks in tube socks, secretly burning stolen flags at night, and ambushing boys they had never met.

All it took to turn civilized children into bloodthirsty factionalists was a handful of adults in white lab coats, silently pulling levers behind the curtain. The researchers split the boys into two arbitrary camps, staged a few fake competitions, created an artificial sense of resource scarcity, and dropped a single poisonous premise into the water supply: Those people over there are the reason you don’t have what you deserve.

The terrifying truth revealed in that Oklahoma forest wasn't that human nature is fragile. It was that hostility between groups doesn't require history, ideology, or a real grievance. It only requires a manufactured division, a manufactured scarcity, and a single sentence: those people are why you don't have what you deserve. Fast-forward seventy years, and the white coats have been replaced by Islamist strategists and hard-left ideologues. The isolated state park has been replaced by university lecture halls and high-speed algorithms. But the mechanics remain precise, mathematical, and identical.

This is the story of how that exact formula, arbitrary division, manufactured scarcity, and one poisoned sentence, was run on an entire generation of young Latino-Americans. All they had to do was drop a single sentence into the water supply and let it spread: “Until everyone is free, no one is free.” A slogan dressed up as solidarity, weaponized as a leash that chained an entire generation of Hispanic youth to somebody else’s war, convincing them that their own struggle for jobs, safety, and dignity was meaningless until they bled for a cause four thousand miles away that never once bled for them.

This is where the scam of the century reaches its peak. This article exposes how a rising class of Hispanic politicians, candidates, and self-appointed community leaders swallowed that lie, and in doing so, committed a monumental betrayal of the very people they claim to represent.

By weaponizing the cheap lie of “intersectionality,” the academic jargon claiming all struggles are magically the same struggle, these elite hacks convinced Hispanic leaders to trade their own constituents for a seat at the rage parade. Instead of fighting inflation, failing schools, and street violence, they fell for a brain rot operation: to care about their own people, they were told, you must first pledge allegiance to a radical Islamist playbook.

These politicians ran on a promise, they stood in front of their own communities and swore to work for them, to fight for their jobs, their schools, their safety. Somewhere between the campaign trail and the committee room, that promise got sold for a seat at the table where the progressive left decides who gets to be righteous this week. And once you’ve made that trade, you stop asking questions. You stop asking: what about our pain? What about the Hispanic father who can’t afford rent, the mother whose kid can’t read at grade level, the neighborhood that buries another teenager every summer?

You also stop asking why, if suffering is what moves you, you have nothing to say about the people being slaughtered in Sudan, Congo, and Ukraine right now, while you’re busy chanting “genocide” on a stage four thousand, and four thousand miles removed from your own district. They don’t ask these questions because parrots don’t ask them. They repeat what they’re handed, and that is the betrayal at the heart of this article: not just that they chose the wrong side, but that they stopped thinking the moment popularity told them not to.

The displacement of anger

The genius of this ideological scam lies in how efficiently it preys on real human suffering. Young Latino-Americans face genuine friction: structural mobility hurdles, complex immigration paralysis, and the grinding economic reality of modern urban America. Their frustration is real, their “lived experience” contains actual pain.

The machine behind this campaign isn’t theoretical. It’s an institutional pipeline, greased with dark money and run out of cynical campus politics.

At my son's high school graduation, just before the diplomas were handed out, I noticed a cluster of students wearing a distinctive stole. I asked what it was. A special club, I was told, for Black and Latino students. A club defined solely by the fact that the institution treats these two groups as sharing the same grievance, the same enemy, the same story of oppression, different histories, different struggles. different countries of origin, but none of that matters to the institution. What matters is that the connection is taught to them, drilled into them, until they believe it was always there. The liberal schools are creating this, sorting kids not by interests but by grievance.

Later on campus, when a young Latino student steps into a university group meant to advocate for their community, they expect to enter a space built to uplift them, navigate their challenges, and fight for their future. Instead, they walk straight into an ideological ambush. Radical recruiters slip into these community hubs and begin poisoning the water supply. They build an entire social world around this poisoned well. They offer instant belonging, late-night hangout sessions, and a powerful rush of solidarity. The student feels seen, heard, and deeply validated for the first time in their academic life.

But suddenly, without their noticing, their personal pain is redirected into someone else’s holy war. They aren’t taught how to build political power or fix local schools; they are taught whom to hate and whom to blame for their grievance. Their real-life struggle is neatly replaced by a manufactured global narrative, turning their hardship into fuel for a radical Islamist rage machine they never asked to join.

From Hard Work to Free Labor for Radical Islam

It’s one thing when guilt-ridden, trust-fund white progressives fall for Third-Worldist propaganda, that’s practically a rite of passage at elite universities. But to watch the Latino advocacy ecosystem, a culture fundamentally anchored in faith, strong family structures, and an unmatched work ethic, fall into the exact same trap of endless victimhood and grievance politics?

That is a special kind of tragedy, instead of putting their heads down and building generational wealth, an entire class of “community leaders” decided to become unpaid PR reps for radical Islamists who wouldn’t hesitate to crush their actual culture. Here is how the betrayal looks in practice:

Mijente & Marisa Franco: Selling “Border Imperialism”

Once dedicated to protecting families and navigating complex immigration law, Mijente, under the leadership of Marisa Franco, signed onto and helped amplify “Deadly Exchange,” a campaign built on a single manufactured premise: that Border Patrol and ICE agents are trained in brutality by Israel, and that dismantling the border means dismantling Israel first.

Never mind that the campaign originated with Jewish Voice for Peace, a fringe anti-Zionist outfit playing dress-up as a mainstream Jewish organization. Mijente picked it up, ran with it, and helped feed its base a border theory that has nothing to do with wages, visas, or deportations, and everything to do with laundering an old obsession through a new zip code.

Instead of securing legal status or labor protections for the farmworkers whose dues built this movement, Mijente’s feeds filled with maps and manifestos claiming a straight line from the fence in El Paso to the fence in Gaza. Mijente itself lists its work as running “from the US-Mexico border to Palestine,” in its own words, not mine. Instead of promising their base real help and support, they handed them an enemy. They convinced a base of undocumented families and their children, people trying to survive traffic stops and ICE raids in Texas, that the fence keeping them out and the fence keeping Gaza in were built by the same hand.

By doing that, they are stripping its own people of agency. Once you’ve convinced someone their suffering is entirely the work of an external enemy, they stop asking what they can build, demand, or organize for themselves. They wait to be liberated by someone else’s war. That’s not empowerment, that’s the oldest trick in the propaganda playbook, straight out of Goebbels: find the enemy, name them once, and repeat it until the people stop thinking and start reciting. Hamas has run the same script for decades, dressing up a terror campaign as liberation theology. These leaders didn’t invent a new language of hate. they just translated an old one into Spanish and handed it to a generation that trusted them.

Mijente protesting for Palestine. Instead of addressing the real, daily challenges of Latinxs, they are playing straight into the strategic misdirection formed by the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR. While they focus on distant international campaigns, they are turning their backs on the very people who built these organizations and trusted them to fight for the community’s immediate and essential needs.

United We Dream: The Dreamers Who Dream of Intifada

United We Dream built its brand on the backs of young, ambitious immigrants who wanted nothing more than to study, work, and contribute to the American Dream. Post-October 7, that mission got a new wardrobe. In February 2024, UWD organized a rally at Union Station where two hundred people showed up dressed head to toe in red, black, and green, carrying watermelons and poppies, to protest a Senate bill that bundled border funding together with aid to Israel.

That same month, more than a dozen of their own youth were arrested in the Cannon Rotunda on Capitol Hill, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Not immigration reform or DACA. A ceasefire for people they have never met, who do not share their language, history, or values, because make no mistake: this was never a shared struggle. It was a manufactured one.

Let’s be precise about who these young Dreamers were handed a police record for. Terrorists who, on October 7, and for many years before, have been massacring, raping, and kidnapping. If you think they only do it to Israelis as part of a resistance, you are delusional. They are the same people who stone women for adultery, mutilate girls before they can vote, hang gay men from cranes, marry off children, and treat an honor killing as a cause for celebratory gunfire in the street.

But I am sure the Latin leaders don't know or don't want to know any of that, because they only believe in lived experience when it fits the entire business model: find a generation hungry to believe in something, hand them a slogan instead of a source, and watch them walk themselves into a police report for a cause that was never theirs, while the strategist who built the campaign sits in a luxury hotel in Doha, glass of champagne in hand, laughing at how stupid you are and how easy it was.

United We Dream apparently ran out of immigrant battles to fight. Now they're just unpaid PR interns for causes with zero connection to their mission. Won't lift a finger for other people's genuine suffering if it doesn't come with the right hashtag.

The AOC Illusion: Trading Bronx Priorities for Anti-Israel Activism

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her seat in Congress on a promise to be the voice of working-class Hispanic families in New York’s 14th District, one of the poorest congressional districts in the country. But her own legislative record tells a different story than her media presence. In 2022, she introduced fewer bills than all but four members of the entire New York delegation. By independent tracking, not a single bill she personally sponsored in the 117th Congress became law.

That same energy, directed at Israel, and she holds nothing back. A genocide accusation delivered from the floor of the House, a call to cut off weapons to Israel, a wave of criticism that followed, conferences, interviews, a viral video almost every week. Ocasio-Cortez has found a formula that costs her nothing and pays out in clicks, riding a wave of populist hatred dressed up as moral clarity. The rhetoric borrows the oldest tools in the book, an enemy to blame, a crowd to enrage, a slogan simple enough to fit in fifteen seconds of video. It works because outrage travels faster than policy, and she has built her entire public identity on knowing the difference.

What she has not built is anything for NY-14. Legislating takes patience and produces no applause. Sitting for an interview about housing costs or failing schools in her own district does not trend. So she doesn’t do it, not with any consistency, not with the energy she reserves for Israel. Her district didn't get a housing bill or a jobs bill. It got a talking point, delivered relentlessly, while NY-14, which still carries one of the highest poverty rates in New York State, sits a few blocks from her own district office.

Darializa Avila Chevalier: Weaponizing Identity to Serve a Radical Agenda

Darializa Avila Chevalier mastered the art of identity politics to capture New York’s 13th District, weaponizing her background as a Dominican-American Afro-Latina to promise working-class voters child tax credits, rent caps, and immigration protections. But beneath the localized facade lies a career radical whose real obsession has little to do with Harlem or Washington Heights.

A Middle Eastern Studies graduate from Columbia, Chevalier built her entire activist pedigree around anti-Israel agitation years before she ever ran for office. In 2020, she publicly declared that “Israel doesn’t exist,” not a critique of policy, an erasure of a state and everyone living in it. As a student in 2014, she helped raise bail money for Rasmea Odeh, a convicted terrorist who helped plan a supermarket bombing in Jerusalem that killed two people and who also planted a bomb at a British consulate.

She went on to co-found Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group whose stated mission includes acting “in full support of the Palestinian resistance.” And on October 8, 2023, one single day after Hamas massacred, raped, and kidnapped its way through southern Israel, she showed up to a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square to declare solidarity, a rally so overtly celebratory of the attack that even fellow progressives publicly condemned it.

Jonathan Paz, the Latino Community, and the Intersectional “Snowflakes”

Jonathan Paz is the reason I am writing this piece. He is running to represent Massachusetts’s 5th Congressional District, challenging incumbent Katherine Clark, a different species of progressive parrot, but a parrot nonetheless. When I met Jonathan Paz I didn’t know his politics. It was a salsa and bachata pool party at a good friend’s house last weekend, part of a community of dancers I have belonged to for over fifteen years, a multicultural crowd built on nothing but a shared love of the music. Long before anyone told us who was allowed to stand next to whom, I moved through rooms full of Latinos, Asians, Black and white dancers, and nobody once asked what I believed or where I came from. All that mattered was the music and whether you could keep a good body roll.

Then Jonathan Paz walked into it, bringing his divisive politics with him. I didn’t know it at the time, but the poolside gathering I showed up to that weekend wasn’t just a dance party. It was a campaign stop he organized to poison our community with his rot. I showed up and saw his sign all over, announcing he was running for Congress in my district. Jonathan Paz and a handful of his political operatives were working the crowd at a party that was supposed to belong to all of us, using a decade of trust as unconditional love to spread their venom, blood libel, and hatred.

One of his people struck up a conversation with me, assuming, because of how I look, that I was safe to listen to his rot. Three minutes in, he told me Jews used to raise money in churches to fund the killing of Palestinians. Then he said, standing in the pool at a salsa party: "I come from a family of KKK. I can recognize them in a second. They're just the same, don't you think?" No, I said. The KKK hated people for no reason, people who did nothing to them. Jews have spent generations helping every community, Black, Hispanic, LGBTQ, women. And what happened in Gaza is self-defense, not genocide. He didn't seem to hear a word of it. He just kept going, more passionate than before: "I knew they were white supremacists and evil the minute they cut off Gaza's water." I told him the truth: Israel built and funded Gaza's desalination plants, and Hamas dug up the pipes to build rockets and tunnels instead. I didn't raise my voice. I didn't need to. Facts don't require volume.

He looked at me with those scary, piercing blue eyes and screamed like the snowflake he is: “You’re a fucking Zionist. I fucking knew something was wrong with you, fuck off.” Then this cracked egg of a man went running to Jonathan Paz, and the two of them scurried off together to tattle to the host that the Zionist had hurt his feelings.

Let that sink in. A grown man stood in front of me and recited a modern blood libel almost word for word, Jews go to church to raise money to fund killing, Jews are shutting off water, Jews are white supremacists, and when I answered with facts instead of applause, he didn’t defend a single word of it. He just screamed the only weapon he had left, fucking Zionist, and ran to complain like a child who lost a game he made up the rules for. Two grown men, one running for the privilege of representing actual human beings in Massachusetts, and neither could survive one sentence of pushback, just like any progressive coping strategy: screaming, swearing, and then melting down like a toddler denied a toy in the checkout aisle.

These are the men who want your vote; this is how progressive snowflake politics actually looks up close. Not principle, not courage. Only lies, blood libels, and a script memorized from someone else’s talking points, performed with total certainty right up until the moment it meets a fact, at which point the whole performance collapses into a tantrum and a run to the nearest adult.

Jonathan Paz and all the Latin leaders riding the Jewish-hate vehicle to Congress, you could not handle me face-to-face, but maybe you can read my words without melting down this time:

The Jewish community stood beside Latino immigrants for sixty years. Marched with farmworkers, funded scholarships, filled courtrooms, showed up without asking for anything back. And it’s fine, we will manage without your support. The real crime here isn’t against us, it’s against your own voters. They trusted you with their time, their energy, their money, to invest in their grievances, not in men who murder their own daughters for walking outside without a hijab. You call it winning because your candidates get elected. Look harder at who you’re running with. If your allies have no problem raping, murdering, and kidnapping in the name of “resistance,” what exactly stops them from doing the same to you the moment you stop agreeing with them?

Let me say this plainly, once, so there’s no ambiguity left to hide behind: yes, I am a Zionist. I was born a Zionist, and I carry it in my identity, in my truth, with a certainty nothing has ever cracked, and I will die a proud Zionist. I sat through three academic degrees soaked in progressive ideology, and not once did I stop asking the one question that apparently never occurred to you: who benefits from me thinking this way? Who wants me stripped of agency, convinced I’m nothing but a victim, kept small, oppressed, and grateful for the scraps of pity they hand me? That question is exactly what saved me from becoming what you will never stop being.

You dared to walk into the purest community in the world. A community that spent years building real multiculturalism, where everyone dances together, enjoys together, and leaves their politics at the door. And what do you do? You spread poison. Division. You sort people back into camps, the exact thing your movement claims to be fighting against. That is precisely what you did: demonizing Jews and Zionists, lying, to advance yourself politically on the back of your own community and on the back of the people who have helped you for years.

I’ll close by calling on everyone reading this: do not vote or donate to these people. If you’re in my district in Massachusetts, or anywhere else where a Hispanic candidate tells you that they are running for a marginalized community. I know how tempting that is. We Jews love to help. But no. These are not our friends anymore. Now they work for CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Qatar. Look at Jonathan Paz’s own Instagram, where he proudly posts his endorsement from CAIR. Do you think he knows CAIR’s connections to the Holy Land Foundation, sitting in prison for terrorism financing? Their ties to Hamas and terror funding? Their connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and the broader push to Islamize the West? I’m sure he has no idea. Because that’s exactly what today’s useful idiots are.

Photo Credit: Jonathan Paz Instagram

What I didn’t put in the article is that I also spent an hour crying in a bathroom that night. I know how to stand my ground and defend who we are, our values, the people who stand beside us. But knowing how to fight doesn’t make the pain any less real. So I cried, more than a little.

Afterward I talked to Kile B. Jones, who used to be anti-Zionist himself, before he actually did the reading, sat with the discomfort, and refused to look away from what he found. Of everyone I could have called that night, it was him I broke down in front of. He told me: write the pain. It’s okay. So here it is.

Kile B. Jones, Melissa Brodsky, Ido Singer and I have been writing something together, each of us putting into words what it actually feels like to be a Jewish/ Zionist in the place we call home. Melissa and Ido have already published their pieces, and they are extraordinary. Kile’s is coming next. I wanted to get this pain out of my system first, before I make room to tell you what it actually feels like to be an Israeli Zionist living in Boston.

As always, this piece took me days. I’m still putting it out from behind a paywall, because some things are too important to lock away. But if it moved you, if it mattered to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can also support with a one-time gift, or pick up one of my books.

Thank you, more than I can say, for reading, for sharing, and for being part of my life. I don’t take a single one of you for granted.

^{MUCH LOVE,}

^{Yama B}

Sources: Mijente · Deadly Exchange FAQ · ICE and Deadly Exchange, Deadly Exchange Campaign · ADL US-Israel Police Exchanges, Jewish Voice for Peace · Over a Dozen Immigrant Youth & Allies Arrested in the Cannon Rotunda, United We Dream · United We Dream and Allies Demand Permanent Ceasefire and Immigrant Protections, National Priorities Project · Rep. Ocasio-Cortez 2022 Legislative Report Card, GovTrack · How Many of AOC’s Bills Have Been Enacted, Factually · AOC Decries “Unfolding Genocide” in Gaza, Al Jazeera · AOC Accuses Israel of Genocide in Speech on House Floor, JNS · Darializa Avila Chevalier, Wikipedia · NBC News Recasts Avila Chevalier’s Support for Terror as Being a “Vocal Critic of Israel,” CAMERA · Against Peter Beinart’s Pushback, Avila Chevalier Doubles Down on Attending Oct. 8 Pro-Palestinian Rally, JTA · Special Interview: Chavez: “Don’t Eat the Grapes,” JTA · The Forgotten Story of Cesar Chavez and the Jews, United Farm Workers / HuffPost · Jewish-Latino Relations: Rooted in a Shared Immigrant, Working-Class Experience, Barrio Boychik