'Make Parkway Great Again' Candidate Insists She's Not Racist

BALLWIN, MO — Jeanie Ames, a self-identified "Confederate" who called former first lady Michelle Obama a "giant rat," said the Congressional Black Caucus was one of the things wrong with America, and retweeted a message calling on the United States to ban Islam, insisted she's not a racist at a candidate forum Sunday night. Ames is running for Parkway School Board with the campaign slogan "Make Parkway Great Again."

"I am not a xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic racist," she told an audience at the forum hosted by the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis, explaining that her retweet about Islam was taken out of context.

The tweet, which depicted a kneeling Templar knight, read in full: "To be opposed to evil is to be opposed to Islam! Let the crusade begin. Ban Islam in America."

"I think that it has been overwhelmingly misconstrued and overwhelmingly taken out of context that there is a picture from my Twitter page with a knight of Templar on it, and I want to explain why that is the case," Ames said, before not explaining much of anything.

"My love of anything political or international studies — I am drawn to that and I love engaging in that dialogue — and it gets me into trouble sometimes, as it does now. But it in now way was a reflection of any Islamophobia at all. In fact it was just the opposite, and it was taken out of context," she continued.

After the forum, Council on American-Islamic Relations of Missouri director Faizan Syed approached Ames to ask if she would apologize for the tweet, the Post-Dispatch reports. She refused.

A group called Muslims for a Better America posted a Facebook Live video from the candidate forum. Watch it here:

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