Welcome to Deadspin’s farewell-to-2020 IDIOT OF THE YEAR awards! If you have made it this far, then congratulations, brave traveler.
Don’t take our word for it. Kelly Loeffler’s own campaign would have you believe she’s an idiot.
Earlier this month, the unelected Georgia senator, in the midst of a hotly contested runoff for control of the U.S. Senate, posed for a selfie with well-known white supremacist Chester Doles. The campaign took steps to distance itself from the man who spent decades in the KKK and proclaimed himself a neo-Nazi.
“Kelly had no idea who that was, and if she had she would have kicked him out immediately because we condemn in the most vociferous terms everything that he stands for,” Stephen Lawson, Loeffler’s campaign spokesman, told the Journal-Constitution.
There are a lot of problems with this statement, chiefly the fact that she was at a rally for QAnon nutter and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene where Doles was escorted out. A spokesman for Loeffler’s opponent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pointed this out.
“While Kelly Loeffler runs a campaign based on dividing and misleading Georgians, she is once again trying to distance herself from someone who is a known white supremacist and former KKK leader who nearly beat a Black man to death,” campaign spokesman Michael Brewer said to the Washington Post. “There’s no acceptable explanation for it happening once, let alone a second time.”
Of course it’s bad enough that Loeffler endorsed Greene, as we wrote in October:
Greene has a remarkable resume of racism, calling George Soros (who is Jewish) a Nazi, describing Black people as being held in slavery by the Democratic Party, saying she would be proud to see Confederate monuments if she were Black (“I’d say, ‘Look how far I have come in this country.’”)
There’s also the fact that, while Loeffler may or may or may not know who Doles is, he certainly knows who she is. And if you’re a bonafide white supremacist like Doles, you’d certainly like the cut of her jib.
We’re at a point in American politics where we’ve gone beyond dog whistles and “very fine people on both sides.” Soon-to-be-former President Trump told the “Proud Boys — stand back and stand by.”
To recap Loeffler’s white supremacist credentials, as we’ve done time and time again:
As co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, she said she adamantly opposed the Black Lives Matter movement, which drew the ire of the WNBA, which led the players to supporting Raphael Warnock.
Loeffler is proudly a Second Amendment enthusiast, unless it’s about legally armed Black people, which she referred to as “mob rule.”
In August we wrote about how Loeffler appeared on OANN to talk about how the “woke mob” was trying to cancel her when she appeared with Jack Posobiec, an alt-right white supremacist and conspiracy theorist who is buddies with notorious racist dweeb Richard Spencer. As we wrote then, Posobiec is someone “you know from seeing his tweets get dunked on by all of Twitter,” and that’s still true.
We mentioned her ties to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Chester Doles is also a fan of, because she’s an unabashed racist who said Black people should be proud of Confederate statues.
Did we mention that Loeffler made millions selling stocks after being briefed on the threat of coronavirus?
Here’s the most delicious part: Loeffler, once considered a moderate Republican, swung so hard to the right to appeal to racists and conspiracy theorists in the Trump base… but the Trumpers still call her a “traitor.” There are even calls by the right to boycott the runoff elections for the two Georgia seats held by Loeffler and David Perdue that will determine the fate of the Senate, and, by proxy, the country’s future.
That’s what you get when you associate with conspiracy theorist nutjobs and lunatics. That’s why you’re our No. 1 IDIOT OF THE YEAR, Kelly Loeffler.