Ok, boomer:
Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker said individuals born after 1990 haven't "earned the right" to change America and should have their citizenship revoked if they think better countries exist.
Walker, who is facing off against Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock in a December 6 runoff election, originally made the comments in an April 10 interview with journalist Christine Dolan of CD (Creative Destruction) Media.
The clip resurfaced Sunday after being posted by the Twitter account Patriot Takes.
Dolan asked Walker how he felt about "people who want to change America from when you and I were kids," saying that up to 90 million Americans were born after 1990.
Millennials and Generation Z compose 21.75 percent and 20.67 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, according to 2021 data from Statista. Millennials are designated as those born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z are those born between 1997 and 2012.
Millennials now outnumber baby boomers, who represent 21.16 percent of Americans.
"They don't know that the grass is not greener on the other side," Walker responded. "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."
He then said "that most of the people today hadn't earned the right to change America," invoking those who have devoted their lives to military service to protect American liberties.
"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," Walker continued. "And then when you come back, you gotta come back legally, like we should be defending the border."
Again, voters need to send his ass back to Texas:
When he launched his campaign for U.S. Senate in Georgia, Herschel Walker claimed his deep roots in the state didn’t end with his days as a football legend at the University of Georgia.
It was widely known at the time that the Republican hopeful had been living in Texas for decades, though he has claimed to maintain a residence in Atlanta for “17 years.” Less widely known, however, was that Walker’s wife collected tens of thousands of dollars in rental income for that residence, according to his 2021 financial disclosure forms.
The house doubled as the Walker campaign’s first official address when he launched his bid in August 2021. Fulton County tax and property records show the home is solely owned by Walker’s wife, Julie Blanchard, who also collected rental income from 2020 and 2021 ranging from $15,000 to $50,000, according to the disclosure—defining the asset as “Georgia residence.”
Blanchard’s company also received a previously unreported $49,997 in COVID relief loans over that same period, at Walker’s Texas address, according to federal data. On one since-revised financial disclosure, Walker claimed the company had generated rental income for Blanchard, suggesting the company had an operational stake in the Atlanta property.
A Walker spokesperson did not reply to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
The rental income, which was earned between 2020 and 2021, suggests the Walkers had not only not been living in Georgia before his campaign, but hadn’t used the home for anything but a passive cash stream. That further complicates the variegated story that Walker—a Georgia native and former Dallas Cowboy who has lived in Texas since stepping away from the NFL in the 1990s—has told about his relationship to the state he is now vying to represent in Washington.
And Walker and the GOP really don’t want him to be seen with his buddy:
A week before the Georgia Senate runoff, former President Donald Trump has no plans to appear on stage with his handpicked candidate, Herschel Walker. In fact, it’s not even under discussion.
The retired football star is traveling the state this week with a rotating cast of national GOP surrogates. But unlike Georgia’s January 2021 Senate runoff, when the former president held two rallies including an election-eve event, this time Trump has been conspicuously out of the picture.
Both national and state Republicans say it would be best for Trump to, quite literally, just phone it in for the runoff.
“I think he’d be more effective if he did it by phone,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, suggesting Trump participate in an election-eve automated call to GOP voters.
Gingrich compared the hypothetical get-out-the-vote call to what Trump did for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin in 2021, when Youngkin kept a healthy distance from Trump throughout the campaign, but benefitted from his 11th-hour appeal to GOP base voters.
Trump, who launched his own presidential campaign on Nov. 15, did not hold a rally for Walker during the general election, doing so only ahead of the state’s May primary. But people close to Trump say he has found other ways to be helpful to Walker, by continuing online fundraising and possibly holding a tele-rally in the coming week. And Trump also reiterated support for the candidate during his own presidential announcement at Mar-a-Lago.
But even that has been turned on its head; Walker’s opponent, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is running an ad featuring a video clip of Trump praising Walker and the words “Stop Donald Trump” and “Stop Herschel Walker.”
A person close to the Walker campaign, speaking on the condition of anonymity about Georgia’s “complicated dynamic” with Trump, said the campaign has not asked Trump to visit the state — and Trump hasn’t asked to come, either.
And Walker thinks he can win by not stating his positions on the issues:
With a runoff extending Georgia’s U.S. Senate campaign by four weeks, it can be easy to forget that the eventual winner of the contest will have a job to do after this: a six-year term with all the weighty policy decisions that come with it.
U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock has served for two years, giving a window into how he approaches the job. His campaign also responded to a series of questions posed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on how the Democrat plans to respond to issues that the Senate is expected to tackle in the coming months, ranging from the debt limit to agriculture policy.
But it is much tougher to pin down where Republican challenger Herschel Walker stands. On the campaign trail, he engages in the culture wars that fire up conservative voters but don’t generally reflect the highest-profile issues standing before the Senate.
Walker has attacked Warnock’s record, often by tying him to President Joe Biden and his lagging approval numbers, but without creating a contrast with how he would govern.
“All I’ve been hearing him talk is how he was going to go to Washington and represent us,” Walker said of Warnock at a recent rally. “But he went to Washington and represented Joe Biden. He likes to raise our taxes and spend our money. Can you believe that?”
Amy Steigerwalt, a political science professor at Georgia State University, said it may not matter to Walker’s conservative base whether they know where he stands on issues. He will be a reliable vote in the Senate for the Republican Party, and that’s the priority.
But the lack of details on where Walker stands on prevailing issues could be troublesome for more moderate voters who backed Warnock in the general election but also supported Gov. Brian Kemp, splitting their ticket.
“Is it enough for them that Kemp went and campaigned with him finally, or do they need more?” Steigerwalt said. “And so this is a place where it might harm him because he’s not willing to give them that ‘more’ that they need to be convinced that he can do the job.”
Here’s the current state of the early vote:
Georgia has broken its record for the most ballots cast in a single day during early voting, with just one week until a pivotal runoff in the state's U.S. Senate race between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.
On Monday, over 239,160 Georgians cast their ballot, according to Interim Deputy Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling. This surpasses the previous record for early voting in one day of over 233,252 votes in 2018. Sterling tweeted Monday afternoon that they'll "break a quarter million voters today."
"We're excited," Sterling told CBS News. "It's a testament to voters and poll workers and poll managers across the state to pull this off. It's not easy to move a quarter of a million people."
Over the holiday weekend, where some counties were able to conduct early voting after Georgia Democrats sued, over 180,000 votes were cast. That was about 2.6% of the total active voter base in Georgia.
According to data from Georgia's Secretary of State office, 46% of that weekend's voters were Black and 57% were female.
Early voter turnout for the runoff has been highest in several Democratic leaning counties around Atlanta such as Fulton, Gwinnett and DeKalb County.