Before watching the unhinged tirade by neo-Confederate Corey Stewart to the “Sons of Confederate Veterans,” I urge everyone to read The First White President: The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy. by the brilliant Ta-Nehisi Coates. A few quotes from Coates’ article that jumped out at me include: “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”; “In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own.”; “Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed.”; “Part of Trump’s dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters.”; “By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.”; “It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests.”; “White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.”; “The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one man.”; “The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.”
With that context – and I urge everyone to read the entire piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates – here’s white supremacist Corey Stewart speaking to a group whose mission statement is about “preserving the history and legacy of these heroes so that future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” Seriously.
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
