Another day, another racist caught on video.
Today’s story comes from Southern California, where American citizen Esteban Guzman endured—with remarkable grace and patience—hateful, xenophobic insults from an unidentified (as of yet) white woman.
Unsurprising and unoriginal in their bigotry, the woman’s insults seem to have been cribbed directly from the president’s thumbs or speaking hole. To be honest, it’s hard to tell.
The video, filmed by Guzman’s own mother in Running Springs, California, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles, begins with the angry grey-haired white woman aggressively waving her middle finger in Guzman’s face.
GUZMAN: I don’t know why you hate us. Why do you hate us?
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE: Because you’re Mexicans.
GUZMAN: Because we’re Mexicans?
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE: Yeah.
GUZMAN: We’re honest people right here.
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE (laughing): Yeah, rapists.
GUZMAN: Rapists?
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE: Animals.
GUZMAN: How many people I have I raped?
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE: Drug Dealers.
GUZMAN: How many drugs have I dealt?
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE: Even the president of the United States says you’re a rapist.
GUZMAN: Oh yeah? You believe everything you see on the news?
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE: Yeah, of course.
GUZMAN: You see how we’re working hard right here?
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE: I see what you’re doing. You’re also blowing it in everyone else’s yard.
GUZMAN’S MOTHER, in Spanish: No, tell her, she's seeing, tell her …
DEPLORABLE RACIST XENOPHOBE: (Mocks Guzman’s mother, then crooks her finger at him) Come here little boy, come here little boy.
GUZMAN’S MOTHER, in Spanish: No, tell her … She saw that we’ve finished.
Please take 35 seconds to watch the video, so that you might fully understand the level of disrespect this grey-haired monster inflicts on Guzman and his mother. Please take 35 seconds to see what’s become normal behavior for far too many white people in this country, thanks to Donald Trump’s campaign of hate against Spanish speakers, Muslims, and more.
In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Guzman, 27, who works as an IT systems administrator on Los Angeles’ west side during the week and does construction and landscaping with his brother on the side, explains what happened before the video begins.
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Through a referral from his mother, who is a professional house cleaner, Saturday marked Guzman and his brother’s first day working the property where the incident took place. His mother finished her cleaning before her sons finished the yard work, so she came outside to help with the leaf blower.
GUZMAN: Next thing I know, I hear this lady yelling at my mom, “Go back to Mexico, go back to Mexico,” and it’s loud, because you can hear in the video, my mom has the blower on, and I can hear her from the other side of the property, yelling at my mom.
And I rush over, and I say, “hey, what’s your problem?” She says “You’re all illegal, go back to Mexico!” And I say, “I’m a United States citizen, what are you talking about?”
In an interview with NBC4 on Monday, Guzman explains how terrifying such incidents are in the moment.
"I was born and raised here in California, and we're just trying to do good,I felt angry, and I felt scared. I thought she was going to call the police and, you know, we'd have to deal with that."
If the mystery bigot’s words sound familiar, it’s because they are. As she says so herself, she heard them from the American President.
Donald Trump, announcing his campaign in June 2015:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best — they’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Donald Trump, supposedly speaking about members of the transnational MS-13 gang, in May 2018:
“We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them ... You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”
He then compared all immigrants to MS-13 in June, making the profoundly hateful choice to insist that Democrats want undocumented immigrants to “infest” our country.
We no longer can ask ourselves where people are coming up with this hateful bile. While bigotry is a cornerstone of this country’s creation and history, it’s been a long time since people could cue up hate speech just by quoting the American president.