As the Zika virus has swept through Miami, residents have raged almost as much at Gov. Rick Scott as at the hated Aedes aegypti mosquito. And with good reason. Scott slashed mosquito control budgets statewide and then tried to blame Obama for the outbreak. And to top it off, Scott's wife owned undisclosed stock in a mosquito control company.
So when the governor recently visited ground zero of the outbreak in Wynwood, he wasn't exactly stepping into friendly territory. And one passerby loudly let Scott know his feelings about the situation while TV reporters circled him outside Zak the Baker.
"Motherfucker!" the man in a red car screamed while waving a middle finger out the window. "You scumbag! Fuck you!"
The drive-by rant happened last month, but new video of the incident was recently uploaded to Vimeo by Nathan R. Restrepo, who attended the August 19 presser, and posted on Reddit.
Restrepo, a documentary filmmaker and artist, happened to be eating at Zak the Baker when the governor's entourage entered. He grabbed his camera and followed the press horde outside.
"I was shooting him and I was like, 'What am I getting here? It's all going to be on TV on seven, six and ten tonight anyway," he says. "Then this guy drives up and just starts yelling and I'm like, 'Yes!'"
Restrepo says the driver never gave any hint at why exactly he was angry at the governor.
"He might have fucked him over back in high school. Who knows?" Restrepo says. "But everyone loved it."
Restrepo's video joins the growing canon of "Scott Yelled at by Angry Residents" videos, which started in April when a woman in a Gainesville Starbucks told the governor "You're an asshole" for denying Medicaid to low-income Floridians.
In this case, the governor's harasser was far less eloquent. In fact, it's anyone's guess whether the red-car screamer was upset about Scott's handling of the Zika outbreak or any of his other governing strategies.
But as Scott spends this morning embroiled in yet another political fistfight — this time with the mayor of Tallahassee over whether the state has done enough to help residents restore power after Hurricane Hermine — you can count on this incident not being the last video of Scott faced with an angry constituent.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the date the video was shot.