by Howard Simon, MSN
Soon after I arrived in Miami in the late 1990s, Marco Rubio of West Miami was elected to the Florida legislature.
Even back then he was railing against “the Left.”
He was not alone. Numerous Miami politicians pandered to the Cuban American community, directing anger at those allegedly ideologically aligned with the revolutionaries who seized power (and their property) on the island. Rubio’s then-roommate and buddy, former U.S. Rep. David Rivera, now a convicted felon, was skilled at this dark art.
They frequently had to convince the community that freedom for people on the island sometimes required censorship in Miami: where Cuban band Los Van Van was denied a performance venue; a member of the film advisory board was fired for suggesting that Cuban artists be permitted to perform in Miami; and the School Board removed a children’s picture book portraying the lives of children in Cuba from school library bookshelves.
Rubio has a bigger stage now, but the script has not been significantly revised.
On July 16, now Secretary of State Rubio sponsored a Conference on the “Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” His opening remarks surveyed political terrorism around the globe. But it was his skewed version of political violence in our country that drew my attention.
He reached back decades listing violence by the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation and Symbionese Liberation Armies, violence during protests following the police murder of George Floyd, and the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Not one word about our history of racially motivated violence — from the Ku Klux Klan to the murders of parishioners at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, the murder of abortion providers, the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, recent violence directed at Jews, Muslims and immigrants, or threats against judges who courageously defend constitutional principles.
Of course, he overlooked thuggery at our nation’s Capital on Jan. 6, 2021 and failed to acknowledge studies consistently showing right-wing extremism far more frequent and lethal than left-wing political violence.
But this isn’t a “what about-ism” column. Focusing on Rubio’s unsurprising bias trivializes my concern.
What captured my attention in Rubio’s remarks was a hint of a program to address “radical leftism,” defined as “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation.”
Leftists, he said, “may wear different slogans and ideologies” (calling themselves “anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist”), but “the same reign of deadly terror, [is] motivated by the same wicked ideas.”
“It is time to crush this evil forever,” he demanded.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller warned that “One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence.”
Rubio prodded the audience not to fear “raising the alarm too loudly. If you wait until the point where the worst outcome is so obvious that no one can deny it, you’ve already lost the battle.”
The day after Rubio’s Ministerial Conference, I was touring the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, located 25 miles north of Berlin. Sachsenhausen was the ingenious architectural model for the complex of concentration camps operated by the Nazi regime. It was designed for indefinite detention of trade unionists, religious dissidents and political opponents of the regime. Later, Jews, Roma and about 10,000 Russian prisoners of war were systematically murdered. From 1936 to its liberation in 1945, approximately 35,000 perished at Sachsenhausen.
I understand that introducing the word “Nazis” into a conversation is often a conversation stopper. But while viewing exhibits depicting the detention of political opponents of the Third Reich, it was difficult to suppress thoughts of Rubio’s and Miller’s remarks.
If our current government has such a skewed understanding of political violence, blaming political violence only on those harboring leftist ideology; if they see freedom of speech and civil liberties as a cover for terrorism; if democratic elections are insufficient to defeat a despised ideology; if we can’t “wait until the worst outcome is obvious;” and if “It is time to crush this evil forever” — can an American Sachsenhausen be far behind?
As noted, in this country political violence inspired by far-right ideology has been more frequent and more deadly than violence inspired by the left.
That’s the reality those now in power cannot be permitted to ignore. They put our democracy in danger unless they take politically inspired violence seriously, regardless of its ideological origins.
The November elections are an opportunity we can’t afford to miss — to remove those in power who, like Rubio, are so overcome with bias that they only see danger on the left.
Howard L. Simon served as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida from 1997 to 2018.