Governor Glenn Youngkin accused of ‘toxic culture’ after aides attack teen on Twitter

The Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, was accused of creating "a culture of toxicity" in his first months in office, after campaign aides attacked a high-school student, naming and picturing the boy, for sharing a news story about the Republican official.

On Saturday, Ethan Lynne, 17 and according to his Twitter biography a Democrat, posted an article which suggested Youngkin could be trying to stop work to highlight the history of enslaved people at the Virginia executive mansion.

In response, Youngkin's campaign account posted a picture of Lynne with the former governor Ralph Northam, next to a picture from Northam's medical school yearbook of two men in racist costumes: one in Blackface and one in a Ku Klux Klan costume.

"Here's a picture of Ethan with a man that had a Blackface/KKK photo in his yearbook," Team Youngkin tweeted.

In 2019, Northam admitted being one of the men in the photograph, an admission he later recanted.

Virginia governors cannot serve consecutive terms. Youngkin beat the Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor, in a bitter 2021 election in which the Republican made teaching about race and racism in US history a key campaign issue.

Amid outrage at an attack on a minor, the Team Youngkin tweet was deleted.