Nic White, Daily Mail, July 30, 2018

Spokesman for controversial senate candidate Corey Stewart calls Baltimore, New Orleans and Memphis ‘s***holes’ and says business would be ‘fools’ to open in black neighborhoods

Nic White, Daily Mail, July 30, 2018

A spokesman for controversial senate candidate Corey Stewart called three majority-black U.S. cities ‘s**tholes’.

Rick Shaftan derided Baltimore, New Orleans, and Memphis in a series of tweets this year while working to get the Virginia candidate elected.

He reserved particular ire for Louisiana’s biggest city: ‘You can run your gang-infested s**thole without our tourist dollars and soon, our tax dollars.’

Mr Shaftan was using the word President Donald Trump used to describe countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries in an anti-immigration tweet.

The racist posts were yet another gaffe in Mr Stewart’s scandal-plagued campaign that has seen him pilloried as a white supremacist by Democrats.

Mr Shaftan is no stranger to openly denigrating black people and the neighborhoods they live in on his social media accounts.

Following the riots in Ferguson in response to police shooting an unarmed black man, he repeatedly warned businesses not to open in black neighborhoods.

‘After Ferguson, only a fool would start, finance or insure a business in a black neighborhood,’ one of them read.

In response to news of a 2011 robbery he wrote: ‘Another reason why white people (and Asians and Latinos) don’t want to live with black people. #TheTruthHurts #Reality’

He also branded the NCAAP as the ‘black KKK, only more violent’ in a 2010 tweet.

Shaftan has a history of support controversial candidates, including far-right congress hopeful Paul Nehlen and accused pedophile Roy Moore.

He worked on a political action committee that supported Mr Nehlen, who has long expressed anti-Muslim views.

From late 2017 Mr Nehlen also started sharing anti-Semitic posts including an image of Jews’ heads on pikes in the Oval Office.

‘I was with [America Speaks PAC] back in 2016 where we boosted Nehlen. There was no sign he was anything other than a Trump guy, pretty much,’ Mr Shaftan told the Daily Beast.

‘I made an ad for him, I think in November, before he went wacko.’

Numerous other staffers for Mr Stewart’s campaign have been exposed as having racist, anti-Semitic, or white supremacist views.

They include one who was a member of a chat group planning a sequel to the deadly Charlottesville rally, and another who praised the president of the American Nazi Party.

Mr Stewart’s campaign also awarded Volunteer of the Month to a man with links to neo-Nazi groups.