Herschel Walker busted as a tax cheat

Although MAGA Republican Herschel Walker is running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia and is registered to vote in Atlanta, the former football star owns a house in the Dallas area. According to CNN, Walker is getting a “homestead tax exemption” on that house. But in Texas, such an exemption, CNN notes, is strictly for one’s primary residence.

Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck, reporting for CNN’s KFile on November 23, explain, “Publicly available tax records reviewed by CNN’s KFile show Walker is listed to get a homestead tax exemption in Texas in 2022, saving the Senate candidate approximately $1500 and potentially running afoul of both Texas tax rules and some Georgia rules on establishing residency for the purpose of voting or running for office. Walker registered to vote in Atlanta, Georgia in 2021 after living in Texas for two decades and voting infrequently. In Texas, homeowner regulations say you can only take the exemption on your ‘principal residence.’”

Someone who lives and works in Georgia has every right to own a home in Texas. But a homestead tax break on a property in Texas, Kaczynski and Steck note, is strictly for someone who primarily lives there — not someone who primarily lives in a different state, such as Georgia.

For white evangelical Protestants, power is religion and Herschel Walker is their vessel

According to the CNN reporters, “Walker took the tax break in 2021 and 2022 for his Texas home even after launching a bid for Senate in Georgia, an official in the Tarrant County tax assessor office told CNN’s KFile…. Politicians in the past in Texas have landed in hot water over improperly taking the exemption, including then-Gov. Rick Perry, and have typically agreed to pay back taxes. Questions have swirled around Walker’s residency since he actively began exploring the possibility of a Senate run in Georgia last year, and Democrats and Republicans alike hit Walker over the issue.”

Kaczynski and Steck also point out that in order to “run for office and vote in Georgia, 15 rules, not all of which need to be met, are considered for establishing residency.” One of them is “where the resident takes their homestead tax exemption and where they intend to live permanently.”

It’s not that Walker’s provable lies and bizarre behavior are less consequential than they’ve ever been as much as there’s just Walker fatigue. There just ain’t many more ways to say, “this guy’s ridiculously unqualified for public office,” than we’ve already written.

Herschel finds a way to make us care again. Today it’s over the issues of abortion and taxes. But, say, a substantive policy debate over tax policy or him explaining his opposition—as a man whose body it will never effect—to abortion with no exceptions. Instead, today we’re back to discussing one of the two women who have accused Walker of pressuring them into actually aborting pregnancies that they conceived together. The second woman appeared at a press conference yesterday with lawyer Gloria Allred with receipts that she says refutes Walker’s denial that he even knows her, and a challenge: If I’m really lying, say it to my face.

Of course, we’ve been down this path before, when the first woman who Walker allegedly conceived a pregnancy that he then allegedly gave her money to abort actually produced the check that he wrote in his own handwriting for the whole thing. He doesn’t deny that the check, written to a woman with whom he has another child, was his but he still denies that it was written to pay for an abortion. In this latest instance, the receipts are a little bit more saucy, according to the Daily Beast’s account of yesterday’s presser:

[Jane] Doe also provided what she says is further evidence of her six-year extramarital affair with Walker, including a journal entry, letters, and two pieces of audio—a recorded phone call in which both said they loved each other, and an answering machine tape where a man Allred identified as Walker says, “Ah you, this is your stud farm calling, you big sex puppy, you.”

As gross as that was, it was even more awkward; rather than giving sexy, it sounds like what I imagine one of the brothers from Lambda Lambda Lambda fraternity in the ‘80s jocks vs. geeks comedy Revenge of the Nerds would say practicing pickup lines in the mirror. With g like that, it’s almost a miracle to consider Walker has kids at all. The comedy of it almost obscures the severity: in addition to having the worst flirtation skills in America, and to being a hypocrite for advocating abortions in his personal life while claiming he wants them banned for everyone else, consider that Walker also has a documented history of domestic violence accusations and mental health issues. That matters because among the other claims Jane Doe made yesterday was that Walker threatened to harm himself if she didn’t go through with terminating the pregnancy.

Doe, visibly overcome with emotion and fighting back tears, read aloud from one journal entry.

“Herschel has about gone off the deep end over this whole thing. He thinks that having the baby will keep him in so deep with [his wife’s] family that he’ll never get out. He talks about how it would be fine for the baby, and I, if he would just ‘disappear.’ But I know what that means,” she said. (Walker, who claims to have played Russian roulette more than half-a-dozen times, was hospitalized for carbon monoxide poisoning in 1991, after reportedly falling asleep in his car while it was running in his garage.)

Now all of that is foul-smelling hypocrisy, to be sure, but Walker’s supporters are searching for ways to rationalize why Republicans must vote for someone whom they would otherwise accuse of serial murder. These ways are various and sundry, to be sure, but they share a common bedrock assumption – that morality is fine and all but this is war.

What seems to be a scrambling response is actually a rational expression of three things. Cynicism: we’re not doing anything the enemy isn’t doing. Nihilism: nothing matters anyway except giving ourselves a tactical advantage over the enemy. Pragmatism: we will recognize that advantage by way of the enemy’s reaction to it.

They insist (again, well-intended) that politics should make sense according to ways of thinking in which things make sense. Instead of shoving the square peg of fascism into the round hole of liberalism, we should tell as many voters we can that they don’t care about “reasons,” just power, and is that trustworthy?

Another example, another apology.

Again, it’s about Herschel Walker. (Sorry!)

Or rather his white evangelical Protestant supporters.