A former Reagan administration appointee – deputy director of the National Institute of Education – Roan Garcia-Quintana is an experienced South Carolina political operative, executive director of the anti-immigration group Americans Have Had Enough, and a lifetime member and board member of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). The CCC’s statement of principles state that the group opposes “all efforts by the state and other powers to weaken the structure of the American family through toleration of sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents” as well as “all efforts” to “force the integration of the races”, and they call for the U.S. to maintain its European “composition and character.” In fairness, Garcia-Quintana denies having read those principles; he remains a central member of the group, however.
Primarily, Garcia-Quintana is concerned with immigration, or what he deems to be “an illegal alien invasion”, and he has been involved in organizing numerous anti-immigration protests. Himself a Cuban immigrant, Garcia-Quintana easily navigates potential cognitive dissonance by emphasizing that he doesn’t consider himself Latino but “European-American” since his ancestors allegedly came to Cuba from Spain.
In 2013, his CCC affiliation forced him to to resign from then-South Carolina-Governor Nikki Haley’s campaign re-election steering committee. He defended his support of Haley by pointing out that despite being the daughter of Indian immigrants, “she has the features of a Caucasian: her nose, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth. That’s really how you describe it.” Garcia-Quintana denies being a racist, however, rhetorically asking his audiences “Is it racist to want to keep your own heritage pure?”
Diagnosis: Sure, this kind of stuff struck us as more obviously shocking a decade ago, but that observation does nothing to rehabilitate Garcia-Quintana and his nonsense.
This American certainly has had enough...of wackos like Roan Garcia-Quintana.
ReplyDelete