The statement:
“There is not a racist bone in my body.” -Sen. Kelly Loeffler, The Atlanta Press Club U.S. Senate debate, Dec. 6
What we found:
The Rev. Raphael Warnock and others are challenging Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s associations with controversial figures, as well as her criticism of the Black Lives Matters movement, as an indication she might not take racism of others seriously enough.
In their Dec. 6 debate at the Atlanta Press Club, the Democrat directly questioned her stance on racism.
“She says she is against racism and that racism has no place, but she welcomed the support of a QAnon conspiracy theorist, and she sat down with a white supremacist for an interview,” Warnock said. “I don’t think she can explain that.”
Credit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Loeffler, who is running against Warnock in the January U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia, responded: “There’s not a racist bone in my body. I have worked to bring communities together my entire life.”
Earlier in the debate, she said there was no place for racism in the country and that “every African American life” was important.
Warnock was pointing to Loeffler’s early support of Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Congresswoman-elect of Georgia’s 14th District. Prior to the November election, Loeffler campaigned with Greene and welcomed her endorsement.
“Greene has a history of peddling the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory that falsely claims President Donald Trump is secretly fighting a ‘deep state’ that protects sex traffickers and pedophiles — a bizarre belief the FBI has labeled a potential domestic terrorism threat,” the AJC reported.
Greene also has been criticized for offensive statements about Jews, Blacks and Muslims. Over the summer, Republican members of the U.S. House denounced her comments about Black Americans as “disgusting,” “offensive,” and “bigoted,” the New York Times reported.
At a news conference after a November campaign stop in Cobb County, Loeffler tried to distance herself from QAnon when asked her opinion of the online group.
“I don’t know anything about it,” the Marietta Daily Journal reported. “I’m not a supporter or believer in it, but my focus is, look, no Georgians are asking about this. Georgians are asking about how do we create economic opportunity, how do we stand up for our rights, our freedoms in this country. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what Marjorie is doing.”
The interview Warnock mentioned was one Loeffler gave in July with Jack Posobiec, whom PolitiFact described as an activist and a correspondent for One America News Network, a conservative cable news channel. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described him as a “TV pundit associated with white supremacy and Nazism.”
During the interview Loeffler spoke about her opposition to Black Lives Matters. At the time, the WNBA, a majority-Black league, had unveiled plans to honor women who were victims of police and racial violence, with warm-up jerseys that read, “Black Lives Matter.”
Loeffler, who owns a stake in the Atlanta Dream, sent a letter to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert, calling for those plans be scrapped, the AJC reported. She said her opposition stemmed from what she perceived as Marxist ideology and calls to defund the police.
“This is an organization that seeks to destroy American principles, and I had to draw the line,” Loeffler told Fox News in July. “I had to speak out for those who disagree with this movement because our country is too important.”
My message is simple: we should unite around the American flag. We should keep politics out of sports. We shouldn’t promote movements that encourage violence.
— Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) July 9, 2020
And I will not be silent about it. Watch my full interview with @IngrahamAngle here. #gapol #gasen pic.twitter.com/yVNz7IqFuU
Players across the league called for Loeffler’s ouster. Ahead of an Atlanta Dream game in August, players wore “Vote Warnock” T-shirts.
“She used her enormous privilege and power as a United States Senator to pick a fight with the black women on her team who know what it’s like to grow up in a community where you have to have two talks with your children, one about the birds and the bees … and the other about what happens if you’re pulled over by police officers,” Warnock said during the debate.
More recently, Loeffler’s campaign disavowed a photo of her posing with Chester Doles, whom The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described as “a longtime white supremacist who spent decades in the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance.” Doles also was sentenced to prison for the 1993 beating of a Black man in Maryland, the paper said.
Loeffler’s campaign pushed back on any association with Doles.
“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,” Loeffler’s campaign said in a statement.
Loeffler has countered Warnock’s accusations by pointing to a sermon in which he called on Americans to repent of their “worship of whiteness,” a statement he signed with other church leaders calling Israel an apartheid state, as AJC Senate Watch reported.
Warnock’s campaign says the “whiteness” sermon, delivered in 2016, was about spiritual priorities in the wake of the release of the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which President Donald Trump is heard boasting about the ease of sexually harassing women.
Warnock spokesman Terrence Clark said that the sermon noted that “many people had tolerated then-candidate Trump’s hateful comments toward people with disabilities and marginalized communities, and only expressed outrage after that tape came out,” the AJC reported.
In mid-December, a coalition of more than 100 religious leaders — mostly Black church leaders in Georgia — signed a statement saying that Loeffler’s ads critical of Warnock’s sermons were a “broader attack against the Black Church,” the New York Times reported.
“We call on you to cease and desist your false characterizations of Reverend Warnock as ‘radical’ or ‘socialist,’ when there is nothing in his background, writings or sermons that suggests those characterizations to be true, especially when taken in full context,” the statement said.
In response, Loeffler tweeted to Warnock: “No one attacked the Black church. We simply exposed your record in your own words.”
