Another Bad Week as “Walker’s Words Come Back to Haunt Him”

Herschel Walker continues to show Georgians in his own words just how unprepared he is to serve in the U.S. Senate. From hawking a phony COVID cure and denying having ever heard former President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Georgians are hearing Walker for themselves — and their concerns are piling up.

Recent videos of Walker have Georgians scratching their heads. The AJC’s Greg Bluestein and Patricia Murphy discussed how Walker’s questionable comments are coming back to bite him on this week’s Politically Georgia.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Herschel Walker’s words come back to haunt him

• Patricia Murphy: The COVID mist is the tip of the iceberg of the items that Democrats are going to drag out and replay for voters about what Herschel Walker has said. This is not a video that was unearthed from 30 years ago. This was very recently, during the COVID pandemic. The strangest part of the video, other than the discussion of the COVID mist that can kill every germ on your body, is he keeps saying, “They don’t want to hear about that. They don’t want to talk about that.” Who is they? What are we talking about? It just sounds very conspiratorial, a little paranoid. I don’t know what he is talking about. And it’s just very unusual. 

• Patricia Murphy: Walker does have this habit of giving these answers that are very head scratching, and this is one of many, many, many that we are going to hear about.

Walker has a pattern of lies, exaggerations, and outright bizarre claims. The latest of Walker’s woes led The Covington News editor Tom Spigolon to ask, “Shouldn’t a candidate this close to being a U.S. senator — whether Republican or Democrat — be expected to think before he speaks?”

The Covington News: OPINION: State’s possible next U.S. senator should think before he speaks

• Shouldn’t a candidate this close to being a U.S. senator, whether Republican or Democrat, be expected to think before he speaks?

• I’m talking, of course, about Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee for one of Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats.

• So, what will Walker say if he’s asked about the college degree from UGA he’s touted for years, or his status as valedictorian of his senior class at Johnson County High School?

• Or his stand on gun violence, or NATO’s relation to the Ukraine War, or claims that former president Donald Trump never said the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”?

• Walker has made some seriously inaccurate statements recently on such issues as the Ukraine War and evolution. 

• Walker reportedly told a Carrollton Rotary Club in Carrollton that NATO has not been supporting Ukraine or working against Russia’s invasion — both false.

• Then, at a Gwinnett County church, a man who has a good chance of being a member of the body that confirms Supreme Court justices publicly questioned the validity of evolution by saying if man had evolved from apes then “apes would no longer exist.”

• If all of this wasn’t bizarre enough, Walker also has been saying for years — including in a book he wrote — that he returned to UGA to earn a degree after leaving early to join the USFL.
  
• But numerous news outlets have found he never received a college degree despite claims to the Dallas Morning News that he earned one in criminal justice. His promotional materials for his book also featured the false claim he graduated. 

• He also went so far as to tell SiriusXM Radio and others he was in the top 1% of his college graduating class — an impossible claim if he never received a degree.

• Then, his claim he was high school valedictorian could not be proven. News outlets found the school did not designate a valedictorian in the year Walker graduated, despite one Heisman Trophy biographical website stating he was the school’s top student that year.

• And when Fox 5 news anchor Russ Spencer recently asked Walker about the college graduation and valedictorian claims, Walker said he had never said he graduated from UGA. But he has made the claim repeatedly — CNN reporting he made both the graduation and valedictorian claims in a 2017 motivational speech, a radio interview and on his website promoting his 2009 book.

• Then, in the same interview with Fox 5, Walker denied Trump has ever said the 2020 election was “stolen” — despite Trump making the claim repeatedly. He later clarified the statement to say he had never heard Trump tell Walker that it was stolen.

• And, just in the past few days, Walker gave a jumbled explanation to Fox News about gun violence that showed he had little or no understanding of the subject. 

• Apparently, the Republican nominee for one of Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats has thought little about how to prevent the deaths of 19 innocent children, or 10 shoppers at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket  — and the potential for it happening again — that it has barely been on his radar.

• In fact, one of his possible solutions to gun violence in the Fox interview was creation of a government agency to watch young men’s social media activity. What do his fellow Republicans who believe the government has gone too far in breeching individual liberties think of that?

• If Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock made the same repeated gaffes — someone with that much power and influence — I would criticize him, too.

• Again, I ask: Shouldn’t a candidate this close to being a U.S. senator — whether Republican or Democrat — be expected to think before he speaks?

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