Politics & Government

Tune in to a Donald Trump rally and there’s a decent chance you’ll see Maurice Symonette — better known as Michael the Black Man — standing front and center behind the president while waving his hand-drawn “Blacks for Trump” sign. He was there through much of the presidential campaign and then again last night in Phoenix, wildly cheering during CNN’s live feed as Trump trashed the press and defended his pro-neo-Nazi remarks after Charlottesville.

The 2016 GOP presidential primary proved Sen. Marco Rubio isn’t particularly great at thinking on his feet. He was infamously nicknamed “Robot Rubio” after getting caught repeating the same, scripted anti-Obama talking point four different times during the debates last year. Robot Rubio was then immortalized on The Simpsons, in what we hope will be the only video clip of Lil’ Marco that survives the coming nuclear winter.

On September 7, Frank Meeink, a former skinhead leader and neo-Nazi recruiter, will “speak out against hate” at Eckerd College, sponsored by the Florida Holocaust Museum. After serving time in prison, where he befriended fellow inmates of other races, he became an activist, denouncing white supremacy and right-wing extremism. Weeks after the August 12 terror attack in Charlottesville, the reformed skinhead will comment on the escalating violence in America.

Planning on getting a marriage license, paying a traffic ticket in person, or filing a motion for the eviction of your tenants? That’s about to become much more difficult in Miami-Dade County.

When Broward County state Rep. Shevrin Jones protested in Hollywood, Florida, to demand the city rename streets honoring former Confederate generals and a Ku Klux Klan leader, a group of counterprotesters shouted racial slurs at him, calling him a “nigger” and a “monkey” and telling him to “go back where [he] came from.”

On September 7, the Miami-Dade Commission will convene to review the mayor’s proposed budget, which includes cuts to transit funding. Protesting the cuts are members of the Transit Alliance, who believe the new budget will cripple Miami’s public transit system.

Yesterday, in the wake of the Charlottesville violence, Tallahassee mayor and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum begged Gov. Rick Scott to take down a Confederate memorial in Tallahassee’s Old Capitol. Scott’s spokesperson sheepishly told reporters the governor had “received” Gillum’s statement. Nothing else.

Confederate monuments are falling across the United States, torn down by angry mobs in North Carolina and removed in the dead of night by Baltimore officials. The movement is a long-overdue reckoning with racist symbols that were often installed decades after the Civil War simply to intimidate black people.

When a South Florida Uber driver shot and killed an armed attacker late last year, Jose Mejia thought the company should have congratulated the guy. Mejia, who’s also a local driver, couldn’t believe it when the man’s job was called into question instead, thanks to an Uber policy barring firearms.

Save Southern Heritage is a national network committed to keeping monuments to the pro-slavery South alive and gleaming across the nation. At least one member of the group from Virginia attended last weekend’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where mobs of white nationalists beat people with sticks and drove a car into dozens of peaceful counterprotesters.

Julio Calderon, a undocumented immigrant from Honduras, clutches a megaphone in the sweltering August sun and wipes tears from his eyes. He has a message for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is speaking to a crowd of Miami-Dade police and political leaders just down the street. “I don’t think I should be criminalized and deported because I want to stay here,” Calderon says.

Yesterday the pro-Confederate group Save Southern Heritage Florida issued a news release blaming leftists, members of the movement Antifa, and Black Lives Matter for the terror attack by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez is already a national embarrassment thanks to his yellow-bellied decision to cow to Donald Trump’s nationalistic immigration demands. Now, one of the most racist and ghoulish beings on Planet Earth will make that honor official by holding a speech in Miami tomorrow to praise our dear county mayor.

In June, a group of avowed white nationalists harassed a gathering of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters who’d gathered in Hollywood to demand that the city change three streets named after Confederate generals and the original grand-wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive, multi-day PR boondoggle, the city…

Over the weekend, a white supremacist drove a silver Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. The terror attack killed 32-year-old Virginia civil rights activist Heather Heyer and severely injured 19 others. Police have charged the driver, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., with second-degree murder.

This past Saturday, a Nazi-obsessed 20-year-old plowed a car into a crowd of peaceful protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a brutal act of domestic terrorism that left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead and dozens seriously injured — even though the president of the United States has so far refused to call it terrorism or even criticize the violent racist mob that the terrorist had come to Charlottesville to support.

In any race for the Florida governorship, it’s fair to question why a candidate’s political committee took $200,000 from a Ukrainian-born billionaire oligarch who owns a huge stake in an aluminum company with direct ties to the Kremlin. It’s doubly relevant in 2017, as Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans continue to question…

As part of a “sister city agreement,” Doral officials frequently visit foreign cities including the City of Armenia, Guatemala City, New Taipei City, Oranjestad, and Barranquilla, allegedly to foster trade. But recently, Doral residents have begun to protest their city council members’ seemingly frivolous spending, particularly after a recent trip in which Mayor Bermudez and Vice Mayor Cabrera, along with other officials, visited Guatemala City in late July.

Last week, Miami’s futbol faithful were left disappointed again when Major League Soccer owners declined to give David Beckham’s group final approval for a new franchise. Although they did give Becks the nod to keep negotiating, there are plenty of looming hurdles: a land deal with the county that isn’t…

Just last year, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called Breitbart News — the cartoonishly racist conservative news site that birthed Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ben Shapiro — “not a credible source.” In February 2016, Rubio told Fox News that Breitbart is a website that peddles “conspiracies.” (For once, he wasn’t lying.) Breitbart responded by bashing Rubio throughout the 2016 election cycle.