Terry McAuliffe Embraces His ‘Great Friend’ Wes Bellamy, Notorious for Anti-gay Screeds

Warning: This opinion piece addresses hateful, often profane Twitter posts. It is impossible to discuss this rhetoric properly without presenting some posts in full. Reader discretion is advised.

I f a friend of yours used the words “faggot” and “faggots” more than a hundred times in his Twitter feed, would you embrace him in a joint Instagram video? Probably not. But then again, you are not Terry McAuliffe.

McAuliffe is running hard for governor of Virginia, a position he held from 2014 to 2018. McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin, his Republican opponent, are deadlocked. An October 22–23 Emerson College survey of 875 “very likely” voters found the Democrat and Republican tied at 48 percent each.

Youngkin, intriguingly, enjoys the support of 24 percent of black voters — a bonanza for a Republican. McAuliffe polls at 71 percent with blacks. The top contenders split Hispanics: McAuliffe with 48 percent, Youngkin with 47 percent. (Thursday brought Youngkin even better news: A Fox News poll of likely voters found him zooming past McAuliffe, 53 percent to 45 percent.)

Just ten days before this cliffhanger climaxes next Tuesday, McAuliffe appeared in an Instagram video with his former State Board of Education appointee Dr. Wes Bellamy. According to my Fox News colleague Cameron Cawthorne, this video was recorded last Saturday at Virginia State University, whose political science department Bellamy chairs.

“Vote for the man, the myth, the legend himself, Governor McAuliffe, the greatest governor Virginia has ever seen. My man,” said Bellamy, former vice mayor of Charlottesville, Va., and a vocal police de-funder who has smeared cops as “pigs.” Bellamy added that, “When you want to know who your real friends are, when everybody else turn their back on me, this man was right here with me, so he’s not going to turn his back on Virginia. Let’s make sure we vote for him.”

A smiling McAuliffe threw his arm over Bellamy’s shoulder. “Go vote,” McAuliffe said. “Get your boyfriends, girlfriends, whatever you got. Get them out there.”

This cheerful video, of course, does not mention Bellamy’s bizarre, unhinged, homophobic comments on Twitter. If McAuliffe were a Republican, his warm embrace of Bellamy would be massive news from Norfolk to Leesburg and beyond. Demands that McAuliffe withdraw from this race would be shrill enough to make hounds howl in agony.

Instead, the control-hungry Left has clammed up about Bellamy’s disturbing diatribes.

To give an idea of what they entail, I have collected a small sample of Bellamy’s homophobic, sexist, racist comments. They are presented here verbatim, uncensored, and uncorrected, to promote maximum understanding of this vulgarian’s grammatically challenged and appalling language:

This is a mere handful of the posts in Bellamy’s Twitter feed, as captured between September 4, 2009, and November 30, 2012. In these messages, Bellamy wields the words “faggot” and “faggots” 101 times. A more complete list of his offensive posts can be found here and here. As noted above, please be advised these comments contain derogatory terms for gay and black people, among other vulgarities.

When Bellamy’s anti-gay bigotry first emerged in 2016, he apologized and called his torrent of nasty verbiage “disrespectful, and quite frankly, ignorant.” He then resigned from the State Board of Education. A McAuliffe flack described the then-governor as “horrified.”

But McAuliffe is desperate to worm his way back into the governor’s mansion. So, he ignored this hideous history, which he encountered just five years ago, stopped being “horrified,” and rekindled his bromance with Bellamy.

McAuliffe, a lifelong Democratic operative, probably calculated that appearing in an Instagram video with a prominent black Virginian would secure some of the 12 percent of black voters who were undecided in an October 20 Monmouth University poll. Those black voters likely would outweigh any gay Virginians who would be appalled by McAuliffe’s behavior. If nothing else, McAuliffe can count. His hard political math zeroed out any lingering concerns about Bellamy’s anti-gay history.

Thus, McAuliffe said this in a September 11 video: “You could not have a better leader, a better mentor than Dr. Wes Bellamy. He has been a great friend for so many years.” And just last Saturday, McAuliffe smiled broadly and clutched Bellamy in his left arm, on camera.

And the dirty deed was done.

Bellamy’s hate speech might be forgivable if this were a passing wisecrack, a rare slip-up, or an eavesdropped snarl muttered to himself. But no. Bellamy wove an online pattern of jaw-droppingly anti-gay rhetoric for all to see.

You might expect Terry McAuliffe to distance himself from someone with this record. Alas, Terry McAuliffe is not you.