Kudos to Vice News for catching this:
In the final weeks before Virginia’s primary elections on June 12, a previously obscure Facebook page,“Virginians against Tim Kaine,” began running ads promoting Republican Corey Stewart, an unapologetic pro-Trump Republican who has made Confederate nostalgia a centerpiece of his campaign to replace Kaine in the Senate.
The 19 ads, which all ran in June, clocked between 28,000 and 95,000 impressions and cost up to $1,900, according to Facebook’s recently launched political ad archive.
But no one knows who paid for the ads. That includes the voters of Virginia who narrowly elected Stewart to be the Republican nominee by just over 5,000 votes. President Donald Trump quickly endorsed Stewart after his victory, despite the fact that the GOP’s own official Senate campaign arm shunned him.
“Virginians against Tim Kaine” is not registered with the Federal Election Commission, which is required when running ads advocating for the election or defeat of a federal candidate. The page’s owners did not respond to a Facebook message asking for more information. There is no other website for the group or contact information. The Stewart campaign declined to respond on the record.
The only people who know the page administrator’s identity are inside Facebook, but they declined to name the person, citing the user’s privacy. Facebook knows the origin of the political ads thanks to its new vetting system, which requires the owner of the page to have a physical address in the U.S. plus a Social Security number and a government-issued ID.
This attempt to block foreign interference in elections, however, still allows for domestic dark money to slosh around on the social network.
Since American politics is a big puke-hole into which more puke is always being dumped, though, Stewart then ran for Senate, and this time he won the primary and will face incumbent Tim Kaine in November. At Stewart’s Tuesday-night victory party, his supporters began a chant of “lock her up!”—her being the uppity she-demon Hillary Clinton—to which he responded by suggesting that Kaine should also go to prison.
“That might just happen, by the way. And Timmy too. Oh, we’re going to have a lot of fun between now and November, folks,” said Stewart. (“Fun” indeed! To be clear, Tim Kaine has not been implicated, as far as I am aware, in even the most ludicrous right-wing claims about Clinton’s criminality.)
Stewart, the Washington Post reports, played “Sweet Home Alabama” at his victory celebration; he has also had to spend a lot of time recently disavowing his past assertion that an extreme-right Wisconsin white supremacist named Paul Nehlen is a “personal hero” to him.
Let’s not let Russian trolls sway another election to a racist asshole. Click here to donate and get involved with Kaine’s re-election campaign.