Herschel Walker won't appear with Marjorie Taylor Greene following white nationalist event

Georgia Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker has canceled a planned appearance with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) after she spoke at a white nationalist conference. But the former football player was happy to appear with her previously, despite her long record of racist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic words and deeds.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on Tuesday that Walker had pulled out of Greene’s pro-gun rights event scheduled for this weekend in Rome, Georgia. The decision came after Greene’s appearance last weekend at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Walker has not given any public statement indicating his reasoning. His campaign spokesperson referred the American Independent Foundation to a tweet noting only that Walker “has declined to speak” at Greene’s event.

Some GOP leaders have criticized Greene and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) for speaking at the conference, though the party has so far refused to hold either accountable for their actions.

Greene had a lengthy record of hate speech even before she was elected to Congress. She spread conspiracy theories that blamed secret space lasers controlled by the prominent Jewish Rothschild family for wildfires in California and shared an anti-Muslim video that suggested Jews want to destroy Europe via “immigration and miscegenation.”

Greene has also said that Muslim Americans do not “belong in our government”; argued that systemic racism can’t exist in the United States because “slavery is over” while simultaneously claiming that Black people are “lazy” and make “bad choices”; and repeatedly likened COVID-19 safety requirements to Nazi rule during the Holocaust.

Like most other Republican leaders and colleagues, Walker has been happy to stand with her, and he has actively courted her support. Last year, he accepted in-kind contributions from Greene’s campaign that may have been illegal.

This is only the latest bigotry-related issue for Walker. In October, Walker’s campaign first defended and then canceled plans for a fundraising event with Bettina Sofia Viviano-Langlais, a conservative filmmaker who used an image of a swastika made of syringes as her Twitter avatar.

“Despite the fact that the apparent intent behind the graphic was to condemn government vaccine mandates, the symbol used is very offensive and does not reflect the values of Herschel Walker or his campaign,” Walker’s campaign said at the time.

In December, Walker’s campaign held a fundraiser at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where Walker said Trump was the “greatest president ever, ever to hold office.” Former Missouri state Sen. John Loudon (R), who once spread racist and Islamophobic conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama, was also a member of the event’s host committee.

And in 2015, Walker defended Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. “We do have to get this country safe. We have to quit being politically correct,” Walker said at the time.

Walker is also reportedly friends with Jerry Mungadze, a homophobic conversion therapy advocate who has boasted of being able to determine if someone is gay or possessed by demons just by watching them use crayons to color.

Walker is one of several GOP candidates seeking their party’s nomination to challenge Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) this November.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.