As the GOP unleashes race-baiting attacks on U.S. Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock, U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler is doing damage control after a photo surfaced of her posing with former Ku Klux Klan “Grand Klaliff” Chester Doles, a longtime fixture in the north Georgia white supremacist movement.
Doles posted the selfie with Loeffler on VK, a Russian social media site (the pre-Parler stomping grounds of the white supremacist right) over the weekend. Doles — who spent years in jail after beating a Black man nearly to death as part of his white nationalist activism — has been trying to legitimize his “America Patriots USA” group for the last few years, with little success. And here he is.
With one hand, Loeffler is claiming that her well-staffed campaign didn’t know who he was when they approached her. Georgians might find that hard to believe; Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-supporting incoming congresswoman from North Georgia, threw Doles out of a joint rally with Loeffler a month ago.
And with the other, her campaign has been trying to smear her opponent in January’s Senate runoff, Rev. Raphael Warnock, any way they can, focusing on dog whistle attacks that paint him as a radical Black preacher.
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