Robert Costa of CBS News reports that former vice president and Chalk American Mike Pence on Tuesday visited the memorial in Charlottesville, Virginia for slain anti-racism activist Heather Heyer, who was killed by white nationalists during an August 2017 protest in the city.
While he was vice president, Pence and Donald Trump coddled the white supremacist attackers, who were supposedly protesting the removal of a statue of defeated secessionist Robert E. Lee from a city park. The white supremacists, which included members of neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan, were praised by Trump as “very fine people” as he sought to diminish the importance of racists among his followers. Heyer’s mother refused a phone call from Trump because he called in the middle of her daughter’s funeral.
Heyer was killed when a neo-Nazi, James Fields sped his car down a narrow street into a group of anti-racism protesters who had assembled to confront the white supremacists, who had marched through Charlottesville the night before carrying tiki torches and shouting slogans like “Jews with not replace us.” Far right activists have said that the group were not white nationalists, but were people celebrating antebellum Southern culture, most of which centered around slavery.
Pence is a prospective candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, something he’s as likely to gain as an NBA scoring title.