Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Corey Stewart is a 48-year-old lawyer who was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota. Naturally, he has now become the nation’s most prominent defender of the white supremacist monument that was taken down in New Orleans on Monday. (The monument commemorated an 1874 attack against the city’s integrated police force by a white paramilitary group and literally included an inscription praising the restoration of “white supremacy” to the South.) That’s because Stewart is running for governor as a Trump-style Republican in Virginia, which is a state that’s involved in its own Confederate-monument controversies, and boy is he really, really trying to make some hay out of this defending-the-Confederacy thing. I don’t have room to print all his tweets about the subject—counting retweets, he’s sent 17 of them in the last 15 hours—but here are some of the highlights:
(New Orleans’ move was proposed by its mayor and approved 6-1 by its city council.)
(New Orelans also plans to take down statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard.)
Washington and Jefferson, of course, were Virginians, and the question of how to address their support for the slave trade is a pressing one at their estate museums in Monticello and Mount Vernon.
Here’s another ISIS thing with a helpful graphic for social media sharing:
I liked this one especially:
Yeah, this defense of Robert E. Lee could really cost you among the Trump supporters you are trying to court in a Southern-state Republican primary. Truly a profile in courage!
I’m Corey Stewart, and I approved this message about wishing I could build a time machine so I could hug and kiss Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.
