Loeffler campaign repudiates white supremacist after she poses for a photo with him
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By David Ian Klein December 14, 2020
Sen. Kelly Loeffler has condemned a white supremacist with whom she posed for a photo, her campaign told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sunday.
Loeffler is the Republican incumbent who is running against Rev. Raphael Warnock, in a runoff race for her Georgia senate seat, set for January 5.
The pictured man was Chester Doles, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, who was convicted in the 1993 beating of a Black man, according to the Baltimore Sun.
ALERT: Kelly Loeffler just posed for a photo with Chester Doles, a former KKK leader who runs the white supremacist American Patriots USA.
In 1993, Doles nearly beat a Black man to death.
In 2017, he marched in Charlottesville.
This is who @KLoeffler is proudly appealing to. pic.twitter.com/4YZcvL05rf
— Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) December 13, 2020
“Kelly had no idea who that was,” Stephen Lawson, Loeffler’s campaign spokesman, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “if she had, she would have kicked him out immediately because we condemn in the most vociferous terms everything that he stands for.”
Earlier this year, Doles also posed for photos with Marjorie Taylor Green, an incoming congresswoman from Georgia, known for her support of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory. However, at a later rally for both Green and Loeffler, Doles was ejected.
Doles is affiliated with the Hammerskins, a white supremacist group who are “one of the oldest hardcore racist skinhead groups in the United States and have a history of violence,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
