Corey Stewart wanted to be the Donald Trump of Virginia, but he's turned out to be nothing more than some random Donald Trump Reddit fanboi. Stewart is an elected official in Prince William County, and he’s running in June’s GOP primary for governor. Polls, however, show him badly lagging, so in a desperate bid for attention on Tuesday, he tweeted out a charming defense of white supremacy.
Yes, literally, white supremacy: That same day, the city of New Orleans began removing monuments to the Confederacy, one of which included an engraving explaining that the election of 1876 ejected the “usurpers” and “recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” Stewart’s response was priceless:
That led to a pretty epic pile-on, which even featured singer/songwriter John Legend blasting Stewart in front of Legend’s 9 million followers (“Like, literally, nothing? Nothing is worse?”). Many also relished pointing out that Stewart is from Minnesota, which was, you know, part of the Union. One respondent, crime novelist Laura Lippman, jumped in to explain that, as an actual Southerner, she held views quite contrary to Stewart’s:
And that’s where things got ugly.
Some Nazi frog jumped into the thread to showcase the beauty that is Trump’s America:
Lippman’s husband, it so happens, is David Simon, creator of The Wire, the greatest television show of all time. Simon told the Nazi frog exactly what you tell Nazi frogs:
Stewart then re-entered the fray … to, remarkably, speak up on behalf of said frog:
So, to recap: Stewart, a Republican from Minnesota, defended white supremacy in the name of the South; was told by an actual Southerner that he didn’t speak for all Southerners; and then defended an anti-Semitic troll who demanded to know if Stewart’s critic was Jewish. Exactly what “argument” did Stewart imagine Simon should be responding to?
That’s some straight-up garbage, but Stewart is a garbage person, so it fits. The only question is, what does the Virginia Republican Party think about all this?
