Walker said young people who don't like US policies should leave the country

Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker has spent the past several months blasting U.S. policies and President Joe Biden’s administration. But in a newly unearthed campaign interview from April, Walker suggests that critics of the United States should leave and give up their citizenship — especially if they are young and have not died for their country.

Walker is facing Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock in a Dec. 6 runoff election. Though Warnock received the most votes in the November general election, he fell just short of an outright majority, triggering a runoff under Georgia law.

In an April 10 interview with Christine Dolan and L. Todd Wood on the right-wing company CDMedia’s “Georgia 2022 Show,” Dolan asked Walker about a push by what she called “kids” who were born after 1990 and raised in the digital age who “want to change America from when you and I were kids.” Progressive Twitter account “PatriotTakes” shared the video on Sunday.

Walker responded by suggesting that young people who think other countries have better policies should leave and renounce their citizenship.

Well, first of all, they don’t know that the grass is not greener on the other side. They think there’s somewhere better, and if they know another place that’s better than the United States of America, my thing is, why don’t you go there or tell me, let me know who that is, because I can tell them right now, there’s not.

 

I think our biggest problem is, we’ve not shown our kids that most of the people today hadn’t earned the right to change America. And what I mean by that, there are people that have died or that have given their life up. There are people that have given their life up to this flag, they’ve given this life up for the national anthem, they’ve given their life up for our freedom and those liberties that we have in this country today and we’re taking it for granted. Well, I don’t want that to happen. And I’m saying, and I’m not being tough, I’m saying if you know a place better, you go there but you lose your citizenship here in the United States of America. And then when you come back, you gotta come back legally, like we should be defending the border.

Walker does not specify how one can earn the right to change the nation.

Though he praises those who have “given this life up to the national anthem,” his own false claims of having had a “career in the military” have been debunked by outside fact-checkers. Walker never served in the military. He has, however, repeatedly come under fire for lying about his work for for-profit companies that preyed on veterans and armed service members, pretending it was charity work.

A Walker campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry for this story.

Over the course of his campaign, Walker has frequently criticized the United States and called for significant changes to address “out of control” crime; to create more restrictive immigration policies; to end the use of a person’s chosen pronouns in the military and protections for LGBTQ people; to import more fossil fuel from Canada via the canceled Keystone XL pipeline; and to ban “divisive Critical Race Theory, gender identity, and cancel culture curricula” from public schools.

Walker claims such changes would “unite and restore Georgia.” An AARP poll released Nov. 22 found that Warnock enjoys a 24% lead among likely runoff voters under the age of 50, while older voters favor Walker by a 9% margin.

In the November election, voters aged 18-29 favored Warnock over Walker by a 59%-38% margin, according to an analysis of AP VoteCast data by the Center for Information & Research on Civil Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.