Corey Stewart is one of those politicians that you either love or love to hate. He’s a conservative populist who built a state-wide reputation on his pugnacious, in-your-face opposition to illegal immigration. And as the prominent Virginia politician to align himself mostly closely with Donald Trump, he is surely loathed by many.
Whatever you might think about Stewart, though, he’s entitled to speak his views like anyone else.
It’s one thing to denounce him as a bigot and a white supremacist — his enemies are entitled to free speech, too — but quite another to disrupt his campaign appearances. Lefties may think they’re accomplishing something by shutting him down, but it’s probably not what they think — they’re engendering sympathy for a not-very-sympathetic guy.
Stewart visited the Peoples Republic of Charlottesville a couple of days ago to defend the statue of Robert E. Lee, which City Council had previously voted to remove. On social media, he had urged people to “defend Virginia’s heritage,” and likened those who wanted to remove the statue to tyrants and Nazis, according to the Washington Post.
His appearance was met by protesters who drowned out his interviews and conversations with shouts of, “White supremacy has got to go!” Hoisting signs saying, “Ban Bigots,” and “No tolerance for white supremacy,” protesters yelled at him to go back to Prince William County. As he left, they shouted, “Whose town? Our town!”
If anyone has that kind of treatment coming, it’s Stewart: His rhetoric toward illegal immigrants has been harsh and uncompromising. And if Charlottesville lefties want to vent online or hold their own demonstrations, I’m fine with that. But I have to say, Stewart handled the disruption with class.
“Stewart took it in stride, frequently grinning and trying to chat up his detractors,” the Post writes.
Stewart welcomed the protests and the attention they would bring, believing they would buttress his pitch as a conservative standing up to an intolerant left and “political correctness.”
I’m calling them out for who they are,” Stewart said. “It’s really a symptom of the left and their unwillingness to listen to alternative points of view.”
Score one for Stewart.
Lefties in Charlottesville and elsewhere make much of their desire for “inclusiveness.” But their version of “inclusiveness” and “tolerance” includes only those groups friendly to their point of view. A truly inclusive viewpoint would say, “Sure, we’ll keep the Robert E. Lee statue because many people still revere him as a hero. We’ll build statues for our own heroes and heroines. Our community can tolerate them all because we embrace the diversity of cultures, sub-cultures and viewpoints.”
But that’s not the Left’s approach. They want to expunge the heroes of their ideological enemies. They want to exclude other points of view from the public realm. Their viewpoint is relentlessly negative. Erecting a statue of a politically correct hero would be a positive action. But if anyone has proposed doing so, the effort hasn’t gained enough steam to be noticed. The Left’s advocacy of diversity applies to race and ethnicity only. It is a pinched and intolerant view that excludes anyone who thinks differently, including dissenting views of blacks, gays and other minorities.
I part ways with Stewart because I think there are ways to justify restrictions on illegal immigration without demonizing millions of people who came to this country not to create mayhem but to better their lives. It is possible to both sympathize with the aspirations of those who want to live here even while saying firmly, sorry, this is a nation of laws, and if you want to live here, you cannot enter and stay in this country illegally. We can deal with the issue in a humane way.
Corey Stewart is not the guy I want to be making the stand against political correctness in Virginia. But he’s the one doing it, and the Left is making him look good by comparison.
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