Corey Stewart, the long shot Republican candidate running against incumbent Tim Kaine for Senate in Virginia, is already a well known racist. He’s a big fan of the Confederacy who believes the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery. Somehow, it seems that Stewart’s staff might be even worse. Stewart’s spokesperson, Rick Shaftan, has repeatedly tweeted racist sentiments, according to a report from The Daily Beast.
Shaftan, who runs communications for Stewart, has for years publicly disparaged black people on Twitter.
“Crazed black people looting a liquor store is the ultimate racist stereotype. #Ferguson,” he tweeted in 2014 after the unrest following a white police officer’s killing of a black teenager. “After #Ferguson, only a fool would start, finance or insure a business in a black neighborhood,” he tweeted again. After violence in Baltimore following the death of a black man at the hands of police, Shaftan tweeted “The message out of Ferguson and Baltimore is a simple one: DON’T OPEN A BUSINESS IN A BLACK NEIGHBORHOOD!”
Responding to the news of a robbery in 2011, Shaftan wrote in a now-deleted tweet: “Another reason why white people (and Asians and Latinos) don’t want to live with black people. #TheTruthHurts #Reality”
Shaftan later called the majority-black cities Memphis, Baltimore, and New Orleans “shitholes”. In 2010, he called the NAACP “the Black KKK, only more violent and dangerous.”
But Shaftan isn’t the only one on Stewart’s team jockeying for the Most Racist medal.
In addition, a Stewart volunteer was a member of a chat group that planned a sequel to the deadly right-wing rally in Charlottesville, The Daily Beast previously reported. Meanwhile, a former Stewart staffer appeared to praise the founder of the American Nazi Party, and recently left Stewart’s team for a role on the campaign of a New Jersey politician who has previously posted white supremacist content.
Sadly, this election cycle, Stewart isn’t the only blatant white supremacist running for Congress—he’s not even the only one in Virginia. Nathan Larson, an admitted pedophile and rapist, is running for the House of Representatives as an Independent there. He has previously called Hitler a “white supremacist hero.” There’s also Arthur Jones, an actual former Nazi running for Senate in Illinois, who recently told the Chicago Tribune, “I haven’t been a member of any Nazi group since 1980. There’s more to me than being a denier of the Holocaust. I’m an American patriot.” What a great, normal country we live in.