Corey Stewart, Virginia Senate Nominee, Evokes Trump on Racial Issues
HAYMARKET, Va. — Speaking to a racially mixed audience in August 2016, Corey Stewart, the far-right provocateur who won the Republican Senate nomination in Virginia last week, hailed the renaming of a middle school to honor a local black philanthropist instead of a former governor with segregationist roots.
“As we’ve become safer, as we have become more educated, as we have become more prosperous, Prince William County has also become more diverse,” Mr. Stewart said enthusiastically about this booming Northern Virginia jurisdiction he leads.
But six months later, he was singing a notably different and harsher tune.
Mr. Stewart stood beside the controversial statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, and raised his voice to denounce protesters calling for the monument’s removal. “They have no respect for our heritage,” he said, calling the Confederate general “a great American.”
Mr. Stewart himself was a Minnesota transplant, who grew up in Duluth and went to law school in St. Paul. But his defense of the Confederacy, which was a central theme in his 2017 run for governor, and his invocation of diversity, which drew applause on his home turf, illustrate a blunt approach to racial issues that mimics President Trump’s. Both men have praised white nationalists in the past while talking about race to suit their purposes — Mr. Trump often takes credit for low black unemployment — and have especially used attacks on immigrants to get attention and stand out among more conventional politicians.
Interviews with more than two dozen Virginians present a portrait of Mr. Stewart as a conservative politician-on-the-make turned Trumpian agitator thirsty for cable television bookings. His evolution is a revealing case study about the incentives for Republicans in the Trump era, but also the risks they run: Longtime colleagues described Mr. Stewart as a brazenly cynical politician who could drag down the party as he tests whether a campaign of attacks on immigrants, schoolyard taunts and made-for-media bombast can prove effective in a state race.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/corey-stewart-virginia-senate-nominee-evokes-trump-on-racial-issues/ar-AAyKQ2R?li=BBnb7Kz
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