Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas gave a commencement speech to the College of Communications graduates of California State University, Fullerton. Some of her remarks did not sit well with the audience.
She then began speaking in Spanish … This left non-journalism grads and non-Latinos/non-Spanish speakers feeling excluded. Parents in the audience and even students in the ceremony began demanding Salinas switch to a more inclusive tone by shouting phrases such as, “What about us?!”
Tensions worsened as Salinas began offering advice to journalism students to use the tools of media to rebut political figures such as Donald Trump. That’s when folks began yelling things to Salinas such as, “Get off the stage!” and “Trash!”
If you are booing a working journalist for asking journalism students to be more vigilant in policing lying crapsacks like Donald Trump, you are Doing It Wrong. It doesn’t matter what "It" is, you're doing it wrong. Apparently some of the graduates were not journalism students, and made it through the College of Communications without anyone ever suggesting to them that maybe there ought to be some ethics attached to their new duties in Communication, and they'll be durned if they're going to listen to it now.
The question before us is this: Would this have happened in a pre-Trump world? Not the general white resentment at someone speaking a few minutes in Spanish, but shouting at someone to get off the stage because of it. It likely wouldn’t have. The Trump "movement," such as it is, is premised on an emboldening of xenophobic tendencies. It's why the white supremacist movement is so enamored with him, and is precisely what his audience praises often about him: "He says what we're all thinking," and so forth.
Since the speech, she said she has received a lot of ugly comments on social media, including people telling her to go back to Mexico (she was born and raised in California) and worse.
It really does seem that Trump has emboldened the nation's racists, only a single election cycle after the Republican Party finally came to the conclusion that their goose was going to be cooked if they couldn't stop their people from doing that. Chalk it up to the ongoing rebellion of the base. Nobody's going to tell them to stop being racist jerks, damn it, and now they've finally got a leader who will praise them for all the things the intellectuals of the party suggested they maybe try to put a lid on.