This is the leadership the GOP thinks we need.
Someone please help me understand what Herschel Walker is saying
Time to Log Off is a weekly series documenting the many ways our political figures show their whole asses online.
In the wake of this country’s most recent mass school shooting, Republicans have desperately scrambled to find purchase in their pathetic attempts to deflect from the congruent realities that a) America has a grotesque and unquenchable need to deify guns and gun ownership at the expense of children’s lives, and b) the cliched soundbite of “a good guy with a gun” being the only antidote to the subsequent proliferation of gun violence has been thoroughly debunked to the point of absurdity.
With even the conservative movement’s most skilled operators floundering to make a lick of sense given those two truths, you have to wonder then what political neophyte Herschel Walker was hoping to accomplish in his most recent Fox News appearance. Because, while Ted Cruz, for instance, might sputter and flail like a sanctimonious wacky inflatable tube man, at least he can spit out a coherent (albeit incorrect) sentence on the subject of America’s addiction to guns. Walker, meanwhile, proposed, uh ... this:
Assuming I’ve parsed the rhetorical matryoshka that is “a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at social media” correctly, it sure sounds like Walker is proposing a massive breach of online privacy, wherein some sort of federal agency would simply monitor ... everything, I guess? And then they’d just yadda yadda yadda, some Minority Report bullshit, and voila! Problem solved!
The irony of a Senate nominee from the party of limited government endorsing an enormous surveillance agency reading everyone’s DMs notwithstanding, Walker’s Fox News appearance is noteworthy for somehow being a marked improvement on his previous attempt to address the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. Speaking with CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday, Walker insisted that before he could offer even a scintilla of an opinion about gun reform, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”
Folks, this is the kind of leadership the GOP thinks we need.
Meanwhile, while Walker was conceptualizing his social media panopticon, his Democratic Senate opponent Raphael Warnock was busy committing to three head-on debates ahead of the November midterm elections. If Walker does manage to harness the same sort of hubris that led him to appear on Fox News to propose an enormous domestic spy program, and accepts Warnock’s offer, I recommend he log off (and sign out, and clear his cache) and start studying, now.
