Driena Sixto is Spanish Media Director at the Lincoln Media Foundation, where she has run the Spanish-language media operation since November of last year. She hosts a weekly Spanish-language news program on Claro y Directo América, appears regularly on Fox Noticias, and spent six years at Turning Point USA beginning in 2016 before helping build the voter registration and ballot chasing operation at Turning Point Action. She grew up in Hialeah, Florida, and this is her second appearance on the show.
Jenny Beth Martin hosts. This is the long-form conversation about how Sixto came to be who she is, rather than the news of the day.
Key topics:
- Her grandparents leaving Franco's Spain for Cuba, and everything the family built there before Fidel Castro took power
- Her grandfather dying young of a heart attack, and what her father believes caused it
- Her father arrested as a political dissident, and the refugee visa he obtained at the United States embassy after his release
- Why her parents stayed married ten years in Cuba and refused to have children until they could leave
- Remembrance events, and learning as a child about boats full of women and children shot down by the Castro dictatorship
- Growing up in Hialeah, the city with the largest Cuban population of any city outside Cuba
- Why Cuban Americans are, in her account, the only Latino bloc that votes majority Republican
- Ten years in the movement: Turning Point USA starting in 2016, then Turning Point Action
- Why she says the right ceded Spanish-language media to Univision and Telemundo for decades, and what that cost
- Losing the mother tongue, assimilation, and why she believes learning English is a matter of respect
- Using artificial intelligence to translate and dub American political clips so Spanish speakers hear the words directly instead of reading captions
- Claro y Directo América, and where Spanish speakers can watch daily news without a left-leaning filter
- The hardest part of her job, which is finding one politically fluent Spanish speaker who can also create content
- Taking a camera out to Doral and to the Versailles restaurant to let Cubans and Venezuelans speak for themselves
- The Cuban American entrepreneurs organizing capital in South Florida to rebuild the island the day it is free
- Her case for abolishing the Department of Education and ending federal student loans and federal grants
- Tuition outrunning inflation, and holding universities accountable for degrees with no career prospects
- Why Republicans were wrong to stay off TikTok, and how young audiences actually take in news
- Why she says conservatives left academia to the left, and the two ways she thinks it gets taken back
- The clip of an assistant professor telling future school staff that parents are not to be trusted
- Why she plans to homeschool, and what she says parents give up at the door of a private school
- The Chinese student at Florida Atlantic University who would only speak about the Chinese Communist Party with his face blurred
- Immigrants who, she argues, hold more American values than many Americans
- Jenny Beth Martin on the border sheriffs, and what happens when the world learns the door is open
Timestamped breakdown:
00:00 — Cold open: a family that escaped two dictatorships
00:42 — Meet Driena Sixto
01:12 — Take it all the way back
01:38 — Franco's Spain to Cuba, and what Fidel Castro took
02:19 — Her father, arrested as a political dissident
02:35 — Ten years married, and no children in Cuba
04:05 — Finding Turning Point in her last year of college
06:10 — Hialeah: Cuba with freedom
07:14 — Freedom can be lost in one generation
08:08 — Spanish Media Director at the Lincoln Media Foundation
10:56 — Nature abhors a vacuum
13:39 — Her weekly Spanish-language show
14:30 — Claro y Directo América
14:50 — Training the people who will replace you
18:54 — Let them say it in their own language
20:30 — Who is actually watching
21:52 — Out in the street with a camera
24:37 — The Cubans organizing capital to rebuild the island
26:10 — Reaching young people who think socialism sounds good
31:03 — Abolish the Department of Education
35:49 — Why academia was left to the left
37:54 — The professor who said not to trust the parents
39:00 — Why she plans to homeschool
42:09 — The Chinese student who would not show his face
46:43 — The era of information
47:06 — What she watched happen in Ceuta, Spain
53:41 — What the border sheriffs told her
Links: jennybethshow.com, teapartypatriots.org