As Georgia’s attention turns from it’s Senate primary to the general election, Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Herschel Walker continues to self-immolate.
This week alone, Walker has been outed for lying about his law enforcement “experience,” lying about training “to join” the FBI, and lying about being a good Dad. It’s almost as if his primary opponent Gary Black had ESP when he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, months ago, that “Democrats are poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to amplify Walker’s vulnerabilities, and it would be “foolish” for Republicans to postpone a thorough accounting of his background until after he’s nominated.”
Absentee Dad Walker Rails Against Absentee Black Fathers
It’s actually sort of hard to watch Walker gaffe this hard. He’s a little like Joe Pesci’s character, Harry, from Home Alone: he ought to know better, but he keeps walking face-first into flying paint cans.
This week’s reporting from The Daily Beast, confirmed by both The New York Times and The Washington Post, is just another example of Walker slamming headlong into an obstruction of his own making. Walker, who told Charlie Kirk in 2019 “I want to apologize to the African-American community, because the fatherless home is a major, major problem,” has been hiding his own parental absenteeism for years. The same Walker who told internet personalities Diamond and Silk that if you have “a child with a woman, even if you have to leave that woman… you don’t leave the child,” has a 10 year old son he doesn’t see, as well as an adult daughter and 13 year old son he sees only occasionally.
And Walker, who does pay child support for both children, apparently required a court order to do even that. According to the Daily Beast, “the mother, whose name we are also withholding for privacy reasons, had to take Walker to court a year after giving birth in order to secure [that] declaration of paternity and child support.”
Not a Cop, either
Another Walker lie exposed this week regards his involvement with law enforcement. Walker — who once threatened to “have a shootout with police” during a manic episode — has more recently claimed (repeatedly) to have been both a cop and an FBI agent. ““I worked for law enforcement, y’all didn’t know that either?” he said in 2019. “I spent time at Quantico at the FBI training school. Y’all didn’t know I was an agent?”
Both were false.
According to The Post, “A spokesman for the Cobb County Police Department told the Journal-Constitution, and later confirmed to The Washington Post, that it has no record of working with Walker,” and “The title of “honorary deputy” holds no power at all and is seen as a “political token” for people supportive of the sheriff who might want to get out of a traffic ticket, former DeKalb County district attorney J. Tom Morgan told The Post.”
The paint cans just keep flying, and Walker keeps walking right into them. As described in this recent critique by The New Republic, Walker just seems to love to lie. “At this point the “False Statements” section of his Wikipedia page is longer than the one recounting his ongoing campaign to be Georgia’s next senator.”
Yet, if habitual lying disqualified candidates from holding public office, we wouldn’t have had our 45th President. So it remains to be seen if Georgia voters will be put off by Walker’s utter lack of qualification to be a Senator, come November. In the meantime, though, we can expect Walker’s unending lies to be a central narrative to Georgia’s ongoing Senate campaign.