Herschel Walker Did Not Practice What He Preached

The following op-ed is by Steve Benen at MSNBC.com: 

Candidates for powerful elected offices face all kinds of questions, but as a rule, there’s no reason to ask, “Exactly many children do you actually have?”

With Herschel Walker, however, it’s become unexpectedly relevant.

As of a few days ago, the public knew that the Georgia Republican had an adult son, Christian Walker, who maintains a relatively notable public profile through social media, and who the U.S. Senate candidate frequently mentions. On Tuesday night, Walker’s family grew a little more: The Daily Beast reported on “secret son” whom Walker hadn’t publicly acknowledged, and who “has apparently been estranged from his biological father since his birth a decade ago.”

The Republican acknowledged the accuracy of the report. His campaign’s statement specifically said that Walker “had a child years ago when he wasn’t married.” The statement went on to dismiss the idea that “Herschel is ‘hiding’ the child.”

As it turns out, the use of the phrases “a child” and “the child” apparently understated the case. The Daily Beast published a follow-up report this morning.

A day after The Daily Beast broke the news that Herschel Walker had a secret 10-year-old son he fathered out of wedlock, the football star-turned-politician confirmed late Wednesday night that he has yet another son with a different woman that the public doesn’t know about — as well as a daughter that he had in college.

In a statement, the Republican acknowledged his children and said he disclosed their existence in 2018 paperwork when he was appointed to a White House fitness council. That's apparently true.

By all appearances, however, Walker did not share this information with the public. Indeed, it was literally two days ago when his campaign team suggested he only had one out-of-wedlock child, instead of three.

I’m not unsympathetic to the argument that Walker’s family life is a private matter. But as the Daily Beast’s original report noted, the problem is that Walker, who has no political record, has spent years making public condemnations “against fatherless households and deadbeat dads — specifically in the Black community.”

The New York Times highlighted several such examples, each of which will now be seen in an uncomfortable new light.

In a 2020 interview with the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, he called the absence of fathers “a major, major problem” in Black households and boasted of having been “like a father” to many young people in his hometown in Georgia. And in a 2021 interview with the Black conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk, Mr. Walker lamented that “the father leaves in the Black family. He leaves the boys alone so they’ll be raised by their mom,” comparing the dynamic to family separations during slavery.

“If you have a child with a woman,” Walker continued in that interview, “even if you have to leave that woman — even if you have to leave that woman — you don’t leave that child.”

This is has been a central message of Walker’s public persona for years, and it now appears he didn’t practice what he preached.