Proud Boys couldn’t have infiltrated Miami-Dade’s GOP if racism were unacceptable | Opinion

Welcome to your evolving Miami-Dade GOP — from spying Watergate burglars in the 1970s to racist Proud Boys in 2022.

How low can today’s Florida Republicans go?

Pretty far down the road of normalizing racism, according to the alarming but not shocking report from The New York Times, “How the Proud Boys Gripped the Miami-Dade Republican Party.” It chronicles the newfound political stock of members of the male, white-supremacist hate group in what’s supposed to be a mainstream political party.

Current and former Proud Boys not only serve on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee “seeking to influence local politics from the inside,” the national newspaper reports, but have sought public office.

It’s not exactly breaking news.

The Miami Herald has covered the Proud Boys incursion into GOP politics, but what’s stunning now is how GOP leaders are justifying the radicalization of the party — and accepting the prevalence of racist people, known for hate speech and acts of political violence, as worthy of inclusion.

This is how René García — county commissioner, former state senator, and chairman of Miami-Dade’s Republican Party — rationalized to The Times the infiltration of Proud Boys who are radicalizing the party and possibly rising to power in local leadership positions.

Validating racism

“Yes, we have fringe elements,” García said. “Yes, we have different points of view in our party. That’s how we are. And my job as Republican chairman is to protect everyone’s First Amendment right, however wrong they may be.”

But, since when is the embrace of racists a political virtue in modern times?

According to García, outright racism is merely a point of view in need of protection — and the radicals who spew hate speech and practice political violence are to be embraced and accepted into the fold of the mainstream.

Poor little orphaned infants, they need their casa, too.

This couldn’t possibly be the same young man I met while reporting a sweeping piece on 1990s Hialeah. Young García had the noblest feelings about serving his community then. And, later, when he was the junior senator he did his damnedest to persuade the Rick Scott administration and fellow Republicans to expand Medicaid, and he was clearly frustrated by his failure in the endeavor.

I reached out to García Thursday, but he didn’t answer my text.

I’d love to know down what rabbit hole have García and many other Cuban American elected officials —and their voters — fallen? You wonder which came first, the racist politician or the racist voters who put them in office.

The bar for selecting leaders has been low for quite a while.

But since clownish Donald Trump swept into our already zany political landscape and gave people permission to take out of the closet all those ugly feelings about race and immigrants kept entre nosotros, there’s no shame left.

It was bad enough to gain national prominence by entering the political arena as President Richard Nixon’s hoodlums — the laughingstock of Watergate then and now, thanks to the new STARZ series “Gaslit.”

But this generation of politicos aspiring to the higher shame of participating in and condoning the Jan. 6 attack on democracy to keep Trump in power — the Cuban Americans in Congress voting to sweep the act of treason under the rug, for example, brings the level of ignominy to a higher plane.

For being a key plotter of the attack, Miami homeboy Enrique Tarrio, who rose to the post of national boss of the Proud Boys, is serving prison time. He was charged Monday along with four other Proud Boys with seditious conspiracy to forcibly oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power.

This is the same Tarrio who participated in 2018 in another attack — along with the chairman of the Miami-Dade GOP — this one at the Miami campaign headquarters of congressional candidate Donna Shalala during a visit by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

“You don’t belong here, you f--king communist,” Tarrio screamed in the company of the door-banging GOP party chief. “Open up, it’s the Proud Boys in here.”

Afterward, GOP chairman Nelson Díaz, who helped organize the protest (and originally lied to the Herald about this), apologized for his “unbecoming behavior.”

But, at least, there was that recognition of the bad company.

Today, it’s a new normal, validation that the racists are at home in the GOP.

Proud Boys facing criminal charges for participating in the Capitol attack are your run-of-the-mill Republican Executive Committee members in Miami-Dade: Gilbert Fonticoba, charged with obstructing Congress, and Gabriel García, charged with interfering with law enforcement. García’s defense is that he’s no longer a Proud Boy.

Worse yet, the GOP chair, my county commissioner, sees his role as protector of their right to be in the no-longer Grand Old Party.

Then, why do Republicans oppose the inclusion of other types of people?

We just endured a legislative session in which Republicans quashed the rights of women, Blacks, gays, teachers, and Disney World.

If freedom and democracy mean inclusion of extremes as valid political players, then why are Republicans so worried that Democrats, who aren’t even doing so, show communists and socialists the same welcoming courtesy?

Republicans are kings when it comes to excluding people with a different political point of view from accessing public dollars, performing in public venues, having their books read and telling their side of the story in educational institutions.

Blame voters, too

Indeed, the Miami-Dade GOP isn’t alone in legitimizing the Proud Boys by giving them a political forum. They follow national and state party bosses, and chieftain Gov. Ron DeSantis has made his predilections clear.

Who’s the party, anyhow, if not its elected leaders — and those who put them there, the voters?

They’re both front-line enablers.

And that’s why the Proud Boys easily found a home in Miami-Dade’s Republican Party.

This story was originally published June 3, 2022 at 9:20 AM.