Donald Trump will be campaigning for Herschel Walker in the days before the latter’s Dec. 6 runoff election with incumbent Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock.

Walker and Trump have a great deal in common as both men are arrogant, hypocritical, dishonest and profoundly ignorant.

When asked about government spending to slow climate change and produce clean energy, with $1 billion earmarked for the Urban and Community Forestry Assistance Program, Walker stated: “They continue to try to fool you like they’re helping you out, but they’re not. They’re not helping you out, because a lot of the money is going to trees. You know that, don’t you? It’s going into trees. We’ve got enough trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?”

Walker gave us another sampling of his environmental expertise. “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then — now we got to clean that back up, while they’re messing ours up.” Who knew air has volition and decides when and where it wants to go. This gives new meaning to a Bob Dylan classic lyric: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”  

Turning to crime and justice, Walker was asked about street crime and violence. “Cain killed Abel and that’s a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation — what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way.” Shortly after the gun massacre of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, Walker was asked about the killings. His response: “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”

Walker’s knowledge of U.S. history is on par with that of Donald Trump. Recall that on July 4, 2019 the former president gave the nation a lesson on the Revolutionary War. “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do …” an acceptable “alternative fact” in MAGA world. Walker recently informed us that “we’re the greatest country in the United States …” 

Demonstrating his knowledge of evolutionary biology, Walker said he didn’t understand how humans could have evolved from apes. “At one time science said, man came from apes. Did it not? … If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”

In August 2020, Walker told right-wing pundit Glenn Beck he had a cure for COVID. “Do you know, right now, I have something that can bring you into a building that would clean you from COVID as you walk through this dry mist.” Apparently Walker decided to let millions of people around the world die from COVID as he did not share his miracle cure. 

Walker claimed to have founded a nonprofit charity for veterans, Patriot Support, an organization he described as a “military program” that treats thousands “of soldiers a year.” In truth, the for-profit program is run by Universal Health Services, one of the largest hospital companies in the U.S. and has been investigated by the FBI and Department of Defense over whether the psychiatric facility was increasing profits by keeping patients in treatment longer than needed. 

Since 2017, Walker has been stating he graduated from the University of Georgia — with a degree in Criminal Justice — and was in the top one percent of his class. When confronted with this lie (he did not graduate from any college or university), Walker stated “I never said that,” a response from Trump’s play book. When confronted about one of your lies, tell another lie by denying you uttered the first lie. In March of this year Walker claimed he worked in law enforcement (the FBI). A lie. Walker also said he owned “the largest minority-owned chicken business in the United States.” Another lie. 

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson notes that “Walker challenges Trump’s dubious achievement on the lies-and-hypocrisy score.” Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. states that Walker is intellectually in line with Republican Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) and Lauren Boebert (Colorado) who couldn’t “pour water from a bucket if the instructions were printed on the bottom.” 

Regarding hypocrisy, family man Herschel Walker is the father of four children, three he rarely speaks of nor has regular contact with. The Daily Beast reports the mother of one of those children had to sue Walker for child support. Speaking of his father, 23-year-old Christian Walker (a conservative social media personality) said: “You know my favorite issue to talk about is father absence. Surprise! Because it affected me … He has four kids, four different women. Wasn’t in the house raising one of them.” Writing on Twitter, Christian Walker said: “[H]ow DARE YOU LIE and act as though you’re some ‘moral, Christian, upright man.’ You’ve lived a life of DESTROYING other peoples lives. How dare you.”

While it’s hardly a surprise the Trump faction of the Republican Party selected a candidate as despicable as Walker, the most troublesome aspect of this choice is that almost 2 million people in Georgia voted for him. Walker courted the evangelical vote from the beginning of his campaign and it paid off. Newsweek reports that an NBC News exit poll conducted among people who voted in the Georgia Senate race asked respondents if they were “white born-again or evangelical Christians” and who they had voted for. One-third responded affirmatively and 88% of this group stated they had voted for Herschel Walker (and, no doubt, will vote for him again in December).

Walker has preached that he’s a new man “redeemed by the grace of God.” But underneath this self bestowed redemption it’s business as usual — ongoing lies and blatant hypocrisy.

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George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale and is retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego.

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Sources

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Bort, R. (2022) “Herschel Walker’s Response to the Uvalde Shooting Was Incoherent. So Is His Senate Bid,” May 26, Rolling Stone, www.rollingstone.com 

Cilizza, C. (2022) “Herschel Walker’s answer on gun violence is literally nonsensical,” May 26, CNN, www.cnn.com 

Cilizza, C. (2022) “Herschel Walker just proved (again) what a massive risk he is for Republicans,” July 12, CNN, www.cnn.com 

“GA-Sen: Watch Herschel Walker (R) Say “We’re the greatest country in the U.S.” (2022) November 12, Daily Kos, www.dailykos.com 

“McDonald , J. (2022) “Georgia Senate Candidate Herschel Walker Spouts Inaccurate ‘Bad Air’ Theory of Climate Change,” July 13, FactCheck.org, www.factcheck.org 

Pitts, Jr. L. (2022) “We believe Herschel Walker,” September 28, Miami Herald, www.miamiherald.com 

“President Trump said Revolutionary War troops ‘took over the airports’ in his Fourth of July speech.” (2019) Time, www.time.com 

Robinson, E. (2922) “Herschel Walker’s truth problem, July 23, Cleburne Times Review, 

www.cleburnetimesreview.com 

Shephard, B. (2022) “What to know about Herschel Walker’s son Christian, who went viral for denouncing his dad,” October 5, www.abcnews.com 

Sonmez, F. (2022) “Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker promoted a ‘mist’ that he claimed would ‘kill any covid on your body,'” January 12, The Washington Post,

www.washingtonpost.com  

Stauss, A. (2022) “Clip and save: Herschel Walker’s nine most stupendous, ridiculous, and offensive lies,” October 14, The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com

Tucker, C. (2020) “White evangelicals choose liar over pastor.” Nov 16, 2022, Reflector,

www.reflector.com 

Vaillancourt, W. (2022) “Turns out Herschel Walker, who questioned how evolution is possible, repeatedly lied about his academic record,” April 1, Rolling Stone, www.rollingstone.com