Herschel Walker already faced an uphill battle to become a U.S. senator after The Daily Beast reported he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion. But now it appears Walker is embroiled in another fight: one with his own son.
Christian Walker, a conservative with a substantial social media following—particularly on TikTok—has taken aim at his father, whom he accused of violence and said abandoned his children from multiple women.
“Herschel’s problem is that his son has such a way with words,” Will Sommer tells co-host Kelly Weill in this episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, referring to Christian’s impassioned online reaction to his father’s denials of the abortion allegations.
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“This is not what you want as early voting begins,” Sommer says. “Really this is a family spat that’s playing out in public now.”
After posting two two-minute video monologues on social media on Tuesday morning, Christian Walker stepped up the attacks on his father, despite his dad’s plea that he “loves” his son, “no matter what.”
“Even just from a campaign perspective, you look at that and you say, ‘Yeah, Herschel’s pretty screwed,” Weill says. “This one is a lot harder to sweep under the rug because it really flies in the face of his stated family values.”
While his father could lose the public vote, Christian Walker may have just gained a few more followers.
“Christian Walker is coming off as a sympathetic character,” Sommer says. “This is interesting for a guy whose entire bit has been being like an internet heel, just sort of yelling at everyone. He’s coming off pretty well, and I think this image of hurt that he’s expressing is pretty effective.
“People may be underplaying the fact that Christian Walker saw the writing on the wall and decided to divorce the Christian Walker brand from the Herschel Walker brand. I think this has become such a thorny story for him that Christian decided, ‘Yeah, OK, time to take the break from my dad.’”
The candidate’s son has railed against progressive gay values, saying that while he is “attracted to men” he refuses “to identify with the rainbow cult.”
“Don’t call me gay,” he tweeted in June.
Also on the podcast, Travis Waldron, senior national reporter at the Huffington Post, talks Brazil and its politics, which have been popping off thanks to the Brazilian general election.
“The stakes of this one feel pretty high given the concerns about democracy and [President Jair] Bolsonaro’s efforts to follow Donald Trump down the path of election skepticism and potentially an all out challenge to the result of the elections,” Waldron says.
Bolsonaro is “a perfect analog to Trump and in a lot of ways he’s kind of his own creature. In 2018 he sort of, I mean not sort of, he blatantly followed the Trumpian playbook to the presidency and he did it. There were a lot of similarities in the circumstances.”
Bolsonaro survived the first round of Brazil’s presidential election Sunday and now faces a runoff against former President Lula da Silva on Oct. 30.
In this week’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss an 11-page “guide” on far-right site The Gateway Pundit for detecting voter fraud in November.
“I wanted to highlight this guide because I think it gets at the root of what an insane nightmare is ahead for electoral workers next month,” Sommer says. “Because basically this plan is like, “We need people monitoring the balance at every step of the way.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
