‘No one in Georgia cares about this QAnon business’: Kelly Loeffler accepts endorsement from controversial candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene
‘What impressed me with Kelly is I found out that she believes a lot of the same things that I believe’
Republican senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia has enthusiastically accepted an endorsement from Controversial QAnon candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene in a bid to swing right wing votes in her run for senate.
Ms Greene, an extreme Republican congressional candidate in Georgia, announced the endorsement on Thursday in an outdoor event on the outskirts of metro Atlanta, with Ms Greene saying she’s supporting Sen Loeffler because she’s “the most conservative Republican in the race.”
“What impressed me with Kelly is I found out that she believes a lot of the same things that I believe,” Ms Greene said.
Ms Greene has come under fire by Democrats and even members of her own party for previously expressing support for the QAnon conspiracy theory which promotes the belief that the president is secretly working to save the world from a satanic cult of paedophiles and cannibals.
NBC News reported in August that she wrote dozens of articles as a "correspondent" for a conspiracy news website, speaking favourably of the theory.
Sen Loeffler’s top Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, took to Twitter in response to the endorsement, branding Ms Greene’s rhetoric “dangerous”.
“Instead of trafficking in division and proudly standing alongside those that spout dangerous rhetoric like Marjorie Taylor Greene, we’re focused on being a voice for all Georgians,” he said. “It’s time to fire our unelected senator.”
A spokesperson for the senator’s Republican challenger Rep Doug Collins called the coalition “a good endorsement for Kelly.”
Sen Loeffler defended her acceptance of Ms Greene’s support by saying that “no one in Georgia cares about this QAnon business,” AJC.com reported.
“It’s something that fake news is going to continue to bring up and ignore antifa and the violence promoted across this country,”she added. “That’s not going to distract us. It never has distracted her.”
“What we agree on is that we are fighting socialism. We are promoting conservative values. And I’m not going to stand for attacks on her character because she has stood for American values," she said.
The far right movement has been linked to killings, attempted kidnappings and other crimes. In May 2019, an FBI bulletin mentioning QAnon warned that conspiracy theory-driven extremists have become a domestic terrorism threat.
In August, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy condemned the theory saying: “there is no place for QAnon in the Republican party.”
“I do not support it and the candidate you talked about has denounced it,” he said in direct reference to Ms Greene’s previous support of the theory.
The Georgia candidate also faced backlash after she posed with a rifle next to pictures of Democratic House Representatives: Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar in a post on Facebook.
“Hate America leftists want to take this country down,” she wrote in the post, later adding, “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offence against these socialists who want to rip our country apart.” The post was later removed by the platform.
Ms Greene is running essentially unopposed in northwest Georgia’s heavily conservative 14th Congressional District after Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal dropped out of the race.
Additional reporting by the Associated Press
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