Pete Snyder, a Republican candidate in Virginias 2021 gubernatorial race, defended the states Confederate monuments this week, telling a local reporter that removing the statues would wipe out Virginias history.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled on April 1 that the city of Charlottesville could remove two Confederate statues that stand on public property, which activists and local leaders have long sought to remove.

In response, Snyder told Daniel Grimes, a reporter for Charlottesvilles NBC 29, that he opposes the removal efforts that have swept the commonwealth in recent years.

Our history is our history and we cant have a Stalinist type of regime that every time you have a new leader you wipe out the history from the leader before, Snyder told Grimes .

We have a complicated history in America and in Virginia, he continued, according to tweets that Grimes posted Monday afternoon. I have a six year old daughter. She needs to learn all of it. She needs to learn that sometimes good people do bad things and sometimes bad people are capable of doing remarkable things. Thats our history, we need to learn it all. Virginia has had a front seat to all of it.

The comments are similar to remarks that Snyder, one of 10 candidates pursuing the Republican nomination for governor in Virginia, made in late March during a Zoom meeting with the Spotsylvania County Republican Party , according to a video snippet from the meeting provided to HuffPost. The video shows Snyder responding to a question from someone on the call, but does not include the question itself. However, his response is nearly identical to the one he gave Grimes about the Charlottesville decision this week.

She needs to be able to know that good people sometimes do bad things, and bad people sometimes can accomplish remarkable things, Snyder says in the Zoom call, again referring to his daughter. Thats life, thats business, thats history, and she needs to be able to know that. So I think erasing our history is dead wrong. I want to preserve Virginias history. (You can watch the video from the Zoom call above.)

Snyders campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.