The Fight over Virginia's monuments

[struggle4progress]

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

... There are seven hundred monuments to the Confederacy, most of them in the South, from Tampa to Charlottesville. Some, like the ninety-foot pyramid of granite blocks at Hollywood Cemetery, in Richmond, were built just after the Civil War, to honor the dead. But the vast majority were commissioned later, from the end of Reconstruction to the present ...

... Stewart made the defense of Confederate monuments one of the central issues of his gubernatorial candidacy. "Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don’t matter," he tweeted. In the Republican primary, in April, Stewart came within five thousand votes, just over a percentage point, of beating the more establishment candidate Ed Gillespie ...

Stewart, who lives in a restored plantation house in northern Virginia, recognized the power of picking up a symbol that liberals had righteously rejected ... "I can go up and down Virginia, I can talk pro-life, and every conservative Republican is going to say, 'Yeah, I've heard that, been there, done that. I agree with you, but it doesn't make you different.' When I went around Virginia and talked about preserving the historical monuments, and the lunacy of taking them down, that generated the same amount of guttural reaction and concern that the pro-life movement generated forty years ago" ...

By this spring, Kessler and Stewart had helped deliver the defense of Charlottesville's monuments to the widespread white-nationalist movement, which stripped away the euphemisms and the nostalgia in favor of an unalloyed racist rhetoric. Brad Griffin, the thirty-seven-year-old spokesman for the League of the South, a white-separatist group that participated in the Unite the Right rally, told me, "When I was growing up, they were always saying that the Confederacy was about heritage, not hate. They had this whole narrative where the Confederacy was this multiracial paradise where hundreds of thousands of black Confederates fought for the Confederacy. Knowing history, I thought this was just ridiculous" ...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/the-fight-over-virginias-confederate-monuments

[atreides1]

1. Stewart isn't a Southerner!!

The little shit was born and raised in Minnesota, I'm more of a Southerner then he'll ever be and I was born in Hawaii. And yes Hawaii is the most Southern state in the Union!

Stewart is nothing more then a Carpet Bagger, pretending to be something he isn't and fooling the rubes into believing that he gives two shits about them!