White Supremacists Rally For Trump in Dahlonega

by Gloria Tatum

Dahlonega, home of the 1829 gold rush, is a beautiful city nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains, with warm friendly people who welcome visitors with Southern hospitality. 

But underneath this idealistic surface, there lurks a toxic virus, dormant for years, that recently has been brought back to life by President Trump’s racist rhetoric.   

The latest outbreak of this virus was promoted as a patriotic pro-Trump rally organized by Chester Doles and Michael Carothers a/k/a Michale Weaver, both neo-Nazis, who have been imprisoned for brutal assaults on Black people.  

The September 14 rally was supported by an alliance of racists and fascists and promoted on a variety of neo-Nazi and white nationalists websites.     

Doles, a well-known Lumpkin County resident, who is a self-described fourth-generation Klansman, was once a leader of the Georgia chapter of the white supremacist group National Alliance.  

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists the National Alliance as a hate group.  It is genocidal in its ideology and calls for the eradication of Jews and people of color and the creation of an all-white homeland, according to SPLC.  

Republicans and city officials shunned the event, and locals hung yellow ribbons on the town square and on businesses to show silent solidarity against the rally. 

The Day of the Rally 

Over six hundred state and local law enforcement officers outnumbered the two or three hundred counter-demonstrators who outnumbered the thirty to fifty white supremacists, Nazis and Klan members.  

About 1:30 pm on Saturday, September 14, about thirty white supremacists led by Doles marched down the street to speak to people gathered on the sidewalk and to reporters whom he considers Antifa. 

Doles is obsessed with Antifa and labels almost everyone who does not share his white supremacist world view and support of Trump as Antifa, which he considers a domestic terrorist group. 

 Antifa is actually an acronym for anti-fascist.  Doles hates and fears them because they conduct research on Nazis and expose their identify to the public.   

 “Because of this college [University of North Georgia] and the Antifa professors in it that for thirty years  have been teaching Antifa propaganda to students. Now that army over there (several hundred counter-demonstrators) is Antifa,” Doles said.

Doles said he tweeted President Trump about Antifa, and that Trump is about to declare them [Antifa] an organization of terror.

Doles warned that Antifa might drop battery acid from a drone on his group when they sang the national anthem and pledged allegiance to the flag.   But his ridiculous paranoid delusion did not happen. 

Doles also raged against immigrants calling them criminals, murderers, and drug dealers and supported Trump in his building of the wall, ending chain migration, and ending the Dreamers program.  

The next speaker was Jovanni Valle, a/k/a Jovi Val, a Hitler fan and Holocaust denier, who wears a MAGA hat and a swastika necklace in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York. 

In Dahlonega Valle raged against the police and government for taking their guns away for the rally.  “I believe in the Second Amendment, I believe in the right to bear arms, and our rights to bear arms was infringed today.”

“Today I wanted to see every American here to have their guns fully loaded because I did not travel all the way from New York City to see gun control.” 

Valle was upset at seeing approximately one hundred State Department of Correction Officers in full riot gear carrying guns, and most were Black men who stood guard around the town square.   

He continued to whine that he was not allowed to carry a gun or a Confederate flag in the rally area.  

Then he turned on the immigrants and said,  “Open all the borders…. give Americans back their guns, [and] no one will try to cross that border.   I want every gun the government has and more……our founding fathers were white and they wanted a white America.”  

Another speaker was, Charles Edward Lincoln, treasurer of the American Freedom Party, a political party that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule, according to SPLC.   

Two brave young people marched through the white supremacist rally shouting, “No Nazi, No KKK, No Fascist USA.”   Both were arrested and charged with inciting a riot, but there was no riot. Their bond was set at $4,700.

Calling this rally out in public as a racist and fascist event is what real American patriots look like.

What Do Locals Say About Doles

 “People outside of Dahlonega don’t realize he [Doles] has been threatening and terrorizing the community for years.  There is a long history of this,” a member of Socialist Coalition of North Georgia (SCNG) tells the Streets of Atlanta.  This individual wishes to remain anonymous, as do most people in town because they know Doles will come after them in some way.  

Doles’ has a violent history of assault and gun charges.  In 1993, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for a brutal attack on an interracial couple in Maryland.   Years later, he pleaded guilty to burglary and was given probation. In 2004, his home was raided that produced six charges of illegal weapons possession.   As a convicted felon Doles was prohibited from owning firearms, according to news reports. 

 He was suspected of being behind running a Jewish woman out of town that held an Interfaith Seder.  She received anti-Semitic notes telling her to “go back where you came from” and “Jews are not wanted here.”  She left the area shortly after that happened.  

Doles was thrilled over a large banner “Historic Ku Klux Klan Meeting Hall” that hung over a business in the town square but other citizens were embarrassed and enraged.  

This so-called pro-Trump rally was in response to Indivisible Lumpkin, a progressive group, that has held several anti-Trump rallies on the town square.   Doles is fixated on Indivisible and has harassed them and put National Alliance leaflets on their cars.   

“In general, he [Doles] is that guy you stay away from because he is rough and has a history of violence.  Everyone knows his white supremacist views so most decent townspeople know to stay away from him,” a resident who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from Doles or his friends, told the Streets of Atlanta.

“We don’t talk about unpleasant things like racism, income inequality or homelessness, and we don’t call it out when we see it, and we don’t talk about the root cause.  A prevailing philosophy up here is to ignore it, and it will go away or die out with the old South,” the anonymous resident said.