The controversial co-chair of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley resigned his post, but not before embroiling the right wing governor in what critics say is an even more unenviable position than her Tea Party affiliation.
Fellow Tea Party activist, Roan Garcia-Quintana is also an admitted white supremacist so deeply rooted that even on his way out of power in the Haley 2014 reelection campaign, he remained unrepentant about some of his dogged right and anti-immigration views.
Haley named Garcia-Quintana as one of the 164 co-chairs of her campaign’s steering committee even though the Southern Poverty Law Center has long noted his separatist views and lists him as a leading board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is also noted as a deeply-rooted white nationalist hate group.
SCLC officials further describe the group as a “linear descendant” of White Citizens Councils, which was founded more than six decades ago for the express purpose of combating school desegregation. The Anti-Defamation League also described it as a group that not only actively rejects immigration; it’s also on record in considering mixed-race marriage “the mongrelization of the races.”
Through it all, Garcia-Quintana remains unapologetic. “Is it racist to be proud of your heritage,” said the native Cuban. “Is it racist to want to keep your own heritage pure? Racist is when you hate somebody so much that you want to destroy them.”
Despite Garcia-Quintana’s long apparent views, Haley campaign staffers insist the governor was “unaware of some of his previous statements.” Yet only days before, in perhaps a far more telling and forthright response, Haley campaign manager Tim Pearson told The State Newspaper “there is racial about this Cuban-American’s participation in the political process.”
Garcia-Quintana also runs an anti-immigration group known as the Americans Have Had Enough Coalition that prides itself on fighting what he calls the “illegal alien invasion.” And, just last month, in a Facebook post he boasted of having recently attended the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” event, which was touted as a grassroots effort to stop the bipartisan push for immigration reform.
In 2010, the Washington Post featured an NAACP-backed report that all but concluded many white nationalist groups and the most raucous Tea Party activists were one in the same. Among the subjects most prominently featured in the piece was Garcia-Quintana.