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Black conservatives want Herschel Walker in the Senate despite his depravities [1]
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Date: 2022-10-17
NBC News spoke with a number of right-leaning Black voters in Georgia who made it clear that regardless of Walker’s issues, all that matters to them is helping him defeat Warnock. Among them is Shelley Wynter, host of “Word on the Street” on Atlanta’s longtime AM powerhouse, WSB. The article erroneously refers to that station as WSB-FM; however, as most Atlantans know, the main signal is still on its longtime home on AM 750, with an FM station as a simulcast. Wynter didn’t mince words—all that mattered to him was putting a Republican in the seat.
Wynter, a native of New York City who lives in Atlanta, said he “couldn’t care less about the things that have plagued” Walker’s campaign. “We want a Republican-controlled Senate,” he said, adding that the 2022 midterms for him are not “a nuanced argument about candidates and policies and qualifications. This is party politics.” He joked that he would cast his vote while “holding my nose … and will probably close my eyes, too. But he’s getting my vote.”
Republican political consultant Kaaryn Burton Walker (no relation to Herschel) was of a similar mind. For her, it was all about priorities.
“At this point, we just have to roll with it,” said Burton Walker, an Atlanta-area resident who works as a GOP political consultant. “You have to prioritize at this point. I’m not saying Herschel did this or that. … It’s just messy. And it doesn’t matter. It’s not about me, as a Black conservative, and who I support. And because I stick by Herschel does not mean I absolve him of anything he is alleged to have done. It’s not about Herschel. It’s a bigger picture.”
If Burton Walker is concerned about priorities, then how is she not concerned about the abuse Christian and his mother suffered at Herschel’s hands? Unless I missed something, Herschel hasn’t even begun to come to a mature understanding of his abusive behavior. That, to my mind, is more disqualifying. Is a Senate seat so important that we must put an unrepentant abuser in the Senate for the sake of giving the Republicans the majority? If so, then Burton Walker’s priorities are severely misplaced, to put it mildly.
Barbershop owner and medical supply supervisor Chaka Cox’s priorities seem equally misplaced.
“I’m not concerned about that at all,” he said, adding that the controversies around Walker “haven’t been proven. It’s about mudslinging, and some of them are pretty vicious attacks.” He said he believes the choice for Georgia Senate comes down to “which candidate is going to be in the best interest of Georgian people and, in a bigger sense, the nation.” For Cox, who was born and raised in Atlanta, that choice was easy. “I know Herschel Walker votes more conservative. And that’s the main thing I’m looking at.”
Apparently, how Walker would vote is more important to Cox than Walker’s willingness to shirk his responsibilities as a husband and a father.
A few other Black conservatives told NBC News that one factor trumped everything else—social issues, particularly abortion. For instance, former Republican National Committee staffer Amanda McGee said she’s supporting Walker because she thought it was “a weird dichotomy” for Warnock, an ordained Baptist minister, to be pro-choice.
And yet, in the same breath, she claimed that Warnock should be “encouraging Black young men and women to get married before having children they can’t afford.” So apparently McGee doesn’t mind that it took a report in The Daily Beast for Walker to admit that he had four kids, three of whom were by women to whom he wasn’t married. Oh, that’s right—since he’s for the sanctity of life, that’s all that matters.
Commercial banker Mykel Barthelemy, who ran in the Republican primary for GA-06 in 2020, said that social issues pushed her to the right after she became born-again. She claimed that she is “anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality—anything that is immoral and goes against God.” Apparently in Barthelemy’s eyes, Walker’s abuse doesn’t seem to qualify as behavior that is “immoral and goes against God.”
I’ve been wanting to speak up about this since Sunday, but something about this had be stewing so much it’s only been now that I’ve been able to calm down enough to write about it. This article shows why Christian and other domestic violence survivors don’t come forward for years, if at all. People who should be lifting them up are effectively kicking them in the teeth and a bunch of other places. In the cases of the people profiled by NBC News, they’re also effectively giving Christian the finger by saying that getting his so-called father in the Senate trumps all else.
Listening to this made me shudder, because I almost sounded like them. Many of you know that I got sucked into an abusive, hypercharismatic campus ministry in my freshman year at the University of North Carolina. This bunch was one of the few even remotely integrated groups at Carolina in those days. However, the other Blacks in that bunch were basically Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson clones. They were willing to overlook the fact that the pastor of their church lied about his past ties to a notorious campus cult from the 1970s and 1980s, Maranatha Campus Ministries. Indeed, they were willing to be complicit in hiding this outfit’s true nature—all because people were being saved under this so-called pastor’s ministry.
And yet, some of them lectured me about being pro-choice and pro-LGBT. That they did so while being complicit in something far worse still makes me retch a quarter-century later. Seeing these Black conservatives brush off Walker’s depravities makes me want to retch just as much. I know that I’ve reserved my ire for the so-called leaders of the GOP who foisted such thugs and boors like Walker and Donald Trump on us. But if abortion is so important to these people that they are willing to effectively give the finger to a domestic violence survivor is almost too obscene for words.
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