Corey Stewart, the favorite in the June 12 Virginia GOP Senate primary, rallied outside the Fairfax County Detention Center on Saturday to protest the MS-13 gang.
MS-13 gangsters are “murderous animals,” said Alice Butler-Short, founder of Virginia Women for Trump, in her introduction of Stewart. “Yes, the word is animals. They are sub-human in their activities. They have no right to be here, and they have no rights under our Constitution.” On March 23, the county ended an arrangement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold inmates potentially facing deportation for 48 hours past their release dates. Stewart vowed to “end the scourge of illegal aliens who are preying on law-abiding United States citizens here in Fairfax County.” Fairfax County is home to about 1.1 million residents, but only about 60 people showed up to Stewart’s jailhouse rally.
In the fight for control of the U.S. Senate in 2018, Virginia is mostly an afterthought. Donald Trump lost the state by 5 points in 2016, and Republican Ed Gillespie lost the gubernatorial race by 9 points in 2017. Democratic senator Tim Kaine is expected to win in 2018. What makes the race worth watching is what it says about the state of the Republican party.
Stewart is a populist and a nationalist who said during his campaign announcement: “I’ve always said that I was Trump before Trump was Trump.” Steve Bannon, before he was excommunicated by Donald Trump, called Stewart the “titular head of the Trump movement” in Virginia, even if Stewart was fired by the Trump campaign for his overzealous support of Trump (Stewart protested outside the the Republican National Committee in October 2016). Stewart hasn’t received much formal support from Team Trump; Jerry Falwell Jr. is the most prominent Trump surrogate to endorse Stewart.
Stewart, chairman at-large of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, came within 1.2 points of defeating Gillespie in the 2017 GOP gubernatorial primary, after making the defense of Confederate monuments the centerpiece of his campaign. “Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don’t matter,” tweeted Stewart, a native of Duluth, Minnesota, in April 2017. Wanting to keep Confederate monuments up isn’t by itself an extreme position—it’s the view of 60 percent of Virginians who voted in the 2017 general election.
But Stewart has a history of extreme rhetoric and ties to others known for their extreme views. And he finds himself backtracking after those views come to light. For example, Stewart had appeared at an event in Charlottesville in February 2017 with Jason Kessler, an organizer of the August 2017 Charlottesville rally where white nationalists and neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” at a torch-lit rally. The next day, a white nationalist killed counterprotester Heather Heyer in a vehicular terrorist attack. Kessler later tweeted: “Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist. Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.”
Stewart, who did not attend the August 2017 rally, repudiated Kessler on Saturday. “I don’t want his support,” Stewart told me. “I didn’t know who he was when I met with him. And I only met with him twice. At that point I realized, this guy is bad news.”
When I asked Stewart about his views of the “alt-right” and whether he rejects their support, he replied: “Well, I don’t even know what it is. I mean, I don’t know. Somebody’s going to have to come up with a definition of what the alt-right is.”
But Stewart did reject the view, common among the ethno-nationalist alt-right, that it matters whether immigrants come from Europe or Mexico. “It makes absolutely no difference. Wherever people come from, that’s irrelevant as far as I’m concerned,” Stewart told me. “What is important is that they bring a skill or a talent or something that’s going to benefit America.” Stewart didn’t even go so far as to say overall immigration numbers need to be reduced. “When I think of immigration I don’t really think of a quota or anything like that in terms of a number,” Stewart said. “I support immigration provided the people come through legally and that is based upon merit.”
Stewart also rejected birtherism, the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born outside the United States, even though he promoted the conspiracy theory as recently as December 2017. “@TheDemocrats got cocky forging @BarackObama birth certificate. Thought they could slip phony #AllredYearbookFraud by on @MooreSenate. Sad!!” Stewart tweeted in reference to Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. But Stewart told TWS: “I’ve never bought into that birther stuff,” and he claimed his December 2017 tweet “was trying to demonstrate the point of how ridiculous the left is.” Even though I questioned him about his views on the alt-right and his past comments on birtherism, our exchange ended amicably. “Nice to meet you, man,” the Virginia Senate candidate told me. “Good to meet another Midwesterner.”
That was Saturday. Stewart seemed to want to generally distance himself from extremism. Then on Monday, the Daily Wire drew attention to a January 2017 YouTube video in which Stewart appears alongside Paul Nehlen, a vicious bigot. Stewart calls Nehlen “one of my personal heroes… I can’t tell you how much I was inspired by you.” (The video was taken down from Stewart’s YouTube page sometime Monday but may still be viewed here.) Nehlen did not publicly reveal his virulent anti-Semitism until later in 2017, after that YouTube video was recorded, but during his 2016 primary campaign against Paul Ryan, Nehlen did say we should consider deporting all Muslims in the United States. (The Washington Post reported in December 2015 that “Stewart says he disagrees with Trump’s idea for a ban against [foreign] Muslims.”)
When asked for comment on Nehlen, Stewart’s campaign issued a statement Monday evening to THE WEEKLY STANDARD that reads in full: “Sadly it’s unsurprising to see the establishment Republicans continue to play the race card against President Trump’s most vocal supporters.” There was no repudiation of Nehlen in that statement. Asked again Monday night if Stewart still thinks of Nehlen as a “hero” in light of Nehlen’s rank bigotry, the campaign has provided no further comment. Stewart’s rejection of Jason Kessler but silence on Paul Nehlen is bizarre, to say the least, as a matter of politics.
Having nearly defeated Gillespie in the 2017 gubernatorial primary, Stewart is widely viewed as the frontrunner in the June 12 Senate primary. But there haven’t been any independent polls conducted for months. In the primary, Stewart faces Delegate Nick Freitas, a veteran who served two tours in Iraq as a Green Beret. Freitas supports President Trump, but he is more of a movement conservative with a libertarian bent. Senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul have endorsed him. E.W. Jackson, a firebrand and evangelical pastor who badly lost a 2013 race for lieutenant governor, is also in the running. The last independent public poll, conducted in February by Christopher Newport University, found 66 percent of Virginia GOP primary voters undecided, with 17 percent for Stewart, 7 percent for Jackson, and 6 percent for Freitas.
None of the GOP campaigns has enough money to run TV ads. By the end of May, Stewart had raised $840,000, and Jackson had raised $270,000. According to Freitas’s most recent report from March, he’d raised $343,000. Tim Kaine has raised $17 million. “This is the least visible primary I’ve seen in a long time,” the Cook Political Report’s Jennifer Duffy tells me in an email. “As a result, I think it’s possible that Stewart could lose. The establishment (party leadership, etc.) don’t want him as the nominee for fear he could damage GOP chances down the ticket in the fall. It’s possible there is activity taking place to boost Freitas (phones, mail), but I haven’t seen it. It would be an upset if Stewart does lose.”
But lose he could—especially if he lets himself be linked to Paul Nehlen, who got all of 16 percent of the vote when he was defeated by Paul Ryan by 68 points in 2016.
Update: Late Wednesday night, Corey Stewart issued the following statement: “The Freitas campaign claims that you’re a bigot if you said nice things about Paul Ryan’s former opponent, Paul Nehlen. President Trump, Steve Bannon, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Phyllis Schlafly, Michelle Malkin, and I all said nice things about Nehlen. Once Nehlen started saying very disturbing things, President Trump and I distanced ourselves from him. And now the Freitas campaign is trying to label us as bigots. People are tired of this.”
As noted above, Nehlen said the United States should consider deporting all Muslims in 2016, prior to Stewart’s remarks that Nehlen is his “personal hero.” Nehlen’s hatred of Jews wasn’t revealed until after Stewart called Nehlen his hero.
