In a video posted to Twitter early this month, Stewart, who served as the Trump campaign’s Virginia chairman last year before being fired for defiantly protesting outside the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington and who was tapped by the state party to co-chair its 2016 turnout and communications efforts, sipped coffee from a Confederate-flag mug after declaring: “The only way that we can kill political correctness is to be politically incorrect.”

“I think things have changed,” Stewart, who also has shaped his campaign around hard-line stances against illegal immigrants but hasn’t drawn strong support in early polls, said in an interview this week. “I think the 2016 presidential race was a watershed moment where you saw voters — including white voters and black voters and Asian voters and Hispanic voters — just fed up with political correctness and these gotcha techniques that the left has used to shut down speech.”

Saying she did not want her head to “explode outright,” Linda Thomas, president of the Virginia chapter of the NAACP, took a moment to gather her thoughts in a phone interview before commenting on Stewart’s embrace of the battle flag as a campaign strategy. It may represent heritage to some, she said, but the flag “isn’t a representative symbol for all Virginians.”