When you have to say something isn’t a swastika, you have already given up the game

The Herschel Walker campaign’s NOT A SWASTIKA statement has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the statement.

Walker, who is running for Senate in Georgia (with a Twitter profile picture of himself, shirtless, from many years ago, for some reason), had to respond to a report by Patricia Murphy, Greg Bluestein, and Tia Mitchell in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the Twitter profile picture of one of his major fundraisers, Bettina Sofia Viviano-Langlais — that being an image that is obviously a swastika made out of syringes.

Walker’s campaign spokeswoman explaining that it’s “clearly an anti-mandatory vaccination graphic” is notable for its honesty. It is clearly an anti-mandatory vaccination graphic because it is equating vaccines to the Nazi Party.

“Herschel unequivocally opposes anti-semitism and bigotry of all kinds,” the spokeswoman also said, which… okay? Nobody was suggesting that Walker is for anti-Semitism and bigotry? Or maybe it does need to be explicitly said that a Republican candidate does not share the values of the Nazis.

It’s not that Viviano-Langlais has a swastika because she’s a Nazi sympathizer, but to paint vaccines as Nazism, which is just incomprehensibly stupid. On the one hand, saving millions of lives with a breakthrough medicine whose development helped pave the way to new hope in the fight against malaria, with a vaccine that is widely seen as nearly miraculous… on the other hand, literally the Holocaust.

The problem that Walker’s campaign should have been addressing is the source of his campaign funding being someone so phenomenally out of line with reality. Instead, the response of being taken aback that anyone would suggest Walker has an affiliation with Nazi values — well, that does raise a lot more questions not answered by the statement. And anyway he later cancelled the upcoming Texas fundraiser with Viviano-Langlais soooo… he must’ve realized he was abysmally losing this case in the court of non-mouthbreathing public opinion. (PS: The image is now scrubbed from her profile.)

Would we think that because Walker, last November, suggested having select states vote again for President? And that doing so would “maintain our democracy” despite explicitly being a plan to subvert our democracy? And how, exactly, is Walker going to handle it when he loses his own election? A lot of questions, indeed.