Op/Ed: Herschel Walker, MAGA candidates prove character irrelevant to some Republicans

When news broke of Herschel Walker allegedly advocating for and paying for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, conservative voices reacted exactly how they should have, denouncing abortion as murder and vowing that if the allegations were true, they would certainly not vote for a baby murderer … Kidding. I’m just kidding. The Republican Party’s legitimacy is hanging on by a thread. As a right-leaning voter, I don’t want to see the GOP fail, but I also don’t want to participate in a national disgrace.

When the Herschel Walker bombshell dropped, MAGA populist “conservatives” remained true to form, sniveling back to their corners to quietly wait out the uproar against their beloved candidate. Some even tried to defend Herschel. Lisa Boothe, a Fox News contributor and host of “The Truth With Lisa Boothe,” tweeted, “The Left doesn’t abandon flawed candidates. We shouldn’t either … They have embraced Warnock, who is more deeply flawed.” Unless Boothe has a significant pending story on Warnock, this tweet is, shall I say, “deeply flawed.”

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But this is by no means a normal political environment. The main players are an orange pretending to be a reality TV star and an escaped nursing home resident. Typically, allegations of a Senate candidate threatening to kill his family, abandoning all of his children and paying hush money for an abortion would be immediately disqualifying. But no. This is America. This is 2022.

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Conservatives are “all about the policies,” it seems, not the character. Gone are the days of canceling Sen. Al Franken for taking pictures mock-groping a female soldier (he was welcomed back into society recently as a guest host on Jimmy Kimmel). Now, we live in a new reality, one where a Senate candidate, let alone sitting senator, can surf allegations merely with a tweet, and a terrible one at that. Shortly after the scandals started cascading down on Walker on Oct. 4, he used his last two brain cells to tweet, “I LOVE my son no matter what,” seemingly forgetting that he now had the obligation to explain to voters which of his newly discovered sons he was referring to.

This laughably embarrassing conduct from MAGA candidates isn’t new, and it definitely isn’t unique to Walker. Just a few short weeks ago, Don Bolduc, the MAGA-loving Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate in New Hampshire, pulled what might possibly be the most embarrassing political stunt of all time. Bolduc showed up for what should have been a softball interview on Fox News. After being shown a clip from a primary debate just weeksearlier in which he proclaimed confidently that “Trump won the election, and damn it, I stand by my oath,” Bolduc stuttered through an awkward minute of desperately trying to explain his “research” that magically led him to now believe without a doubt that “the election was not stolen.”

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“MAGA” candidates are spineless husks following the whims of one man … until they face the general election. They have no true stance on abortion rights, tell bald-faced lies about election integrity and participate in a personality cult which threatens to destroy America from within. To save the Republican Party and the country, the GOP must overwhelmingly reject these candidates. If we don’t, MAGA Republicans will soon be all that remain, and they’ll banish the conservative movement to the fringe of the world stage, along with democracy itself.

Sam Underhill is a senior at New Castle High School in New Castle and a student fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Conservatives must reject MAGA candidates before party pushed to fringe