HELENA, Mont. — An aide to Montana Gov. Steve Bullock’s senate campaign was fired Thursday after a history of racist, sexist and homophobic tweets surfaced.
Evan McCullers, who joined the Bullock campaign in June as deputy press secretary, sent a series of offensive tweets between 2012 and 2014, when he was in high school and college.
“The tweets are inappropriate and do not reflect Montana values. When we learned about them, he was let go,” said Olivia Bercow, the campaign’s communications director, in a statement.
The tweets included derogatory language about Black people, women, homosexuality.
In one tweet, he called women “manure,” and he used flippant language about rape in a different one. In another tweet, he said he was scared by the statue of a Black boy in a neighbor’s yard.
According to his LinkedIn account, McCullers completed high school in 2013, making him a teenager at the time the tweets were written.
In a statement released by the campaign, McCullers apologized for his tweets, calling them “vile, inappropriate and unacceptable.”
“I especially owe an apology to the women and members of the LGBTQ+ community that these posts have rightly offended, and to my family and others who will receive undeserved negative attention because of my actions,” McCullers said in a statement. “More importantly, I will continue to listen to those with different life experiences than mine and learn from my mistakes that cause others pain I could never understand, just as I have in the years since those hurtful words.”
The tweets were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
McCullers’ Twitter account, which recently included references to Bullock’s campaign, was changed to a private setting on Thursday.
Prior to working on Bullock’s campaign, McCullers served as an executive assistant for U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, according to McCullers’ LinkedIn profile.
The campaign of Republican Sen. Steve Daines, Bullock’s opponent in the senate race, declined to comment on the tweets. The Montana Republican Party also declined to comment.
Iris Samuels is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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