Former football star Herschel Walker has attracted a large following as a commentator over the last decade, carefully crafting an image as an upstanding Black American with a focus on conservative “family values.” So when news broke last week of Walker having a 10-year-old child whom he did not raise, the Georgia Republican Senate candidate's detractors began hammering on the contradictions between his moralizing speeches and his own life.

Walker has made his stance against fatherless households a key component of his personal political brand. In a 2020 interview, he said the Black community has a “major, major problem” with fatherless homes.

Media reports later confirmed that he has two additional previously unknown children, a teenage boy and a woman in her forties. Before the news broke, the public only knew of the son he has raised with his ex-wife and current wife, Christian Walker, also a conservative influencer.

With Walker in a neck-and-neck race with Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, the heat has been on the Republican. Recent polls show them in a virtual tie.

Will Conservatives Care?

There’s no question about the hypocrisy of Herschel Walker. He said on a podcast that if you have “a child with a woman, even if you have to leave that woman… you don’t leave the child.” But Walker did not acknowledge his 10-year-old child until the mother took him to court over the matter. The bigger question is whether voters in Georgia will care about the GOP candidate’s indiscretions.

Shortly after the news broke, Walker appeared at an annual meeting of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative evangelical group. When discussing the recent allegations, Walker brushed them off as political mud-slinging from the left before changing the topic back to his talking points. While it’s a small sample size, his reception by the evangelical right suggests that hypocrisy may not turn conservatives against Walker.

Walker has long been a fan of Donald Trump, and the former president has returned the favor by enthusiastically endorsing the former Heisman Trophy winner. He shares Trump’s penchant for political gaffes and will have to hope to have some of Trump’s imperviousness to scandal.

An old interview has been uncovered in which Walker compared his own multiple personality disorder to Jesus Christ: “Do our Lord Jesus Christ have a mental illness because he said he’s the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? To me, those are three different personalities.” He also slipped up by referring to the other 51 states besides Georgia, and offered a truly bizarre response to the Uvalde school shooting.

Georgia’s Demographics

What might hurt Walker more than anything else is the changing nature of the Georgia electorate. It’s risky business for a political party to rest on the demographics of a state that is changing. The Peach State is among those growing fastest across the nation and becoming rapidly more diverse. From 2010 to 2020 Georgia’s population increased by 10 percent with the Black, Asian, and Hispanic population seeing large increases while the white population declined.

On paper, conventional wisdom says that this plays into the Democrats’ favor, and it has been a contributing factor to Georgia Republicans’ push in the state to suppress the vote. An East Carolina University poll puts Walker’s support from Black voters at a lowly seven percent, lower than even Governor Brian Kemp’s nine percent in his 2018 reelection victory against Democrat Stacey Abrams. In that poll’s overall tally, however, Walker and Warnock were tied at about 46 percent.

Hammering Walker for his hypocrisy may have impact on the margins, but Warnock’s candidacy depends on turning out his base in an election that may be challenging for Democrats this year.

With his approval rating stuck around 40 percent, many in his own party have pressured President Joe Biden to offer student debt forgiveness ahead of the 2022 midterms. The Washington Post first reported that the White House is planning to cancel $10,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower earning less than $150,000 a year.

Some Democrats have been pushing for $50,000 per borrower in student debt cancellation to help the 45 million Americans with student debt. But Biden has remained adamant that he has not considered such an amount.

The White House has thus far denied reports of their $10,000 student debt cancellation plans, but rumors continue to fuel debate on the issue. A substantial dip in Biden’s approval rating has been in two key demographics for the Democratic Party, young people and minorities.

The average student debt for a graduating college student is $31,000, according to the Education Data Initiative. Since 1990, the average debt for a graduating student has doubled, adjusting for inflation.

Student debt also disproportionately impacts Black Americans, who are more likely to hold student debt than their white college graduate counterparts. Up to 86 percent of Black American college graduates owe student debt, at an average of $40,000. That’s $10,000 more on average than white Americans, who hold student debt at a rate of 67.7 percent.

Student loan forgiveness is thus potentially a key component in closing the astronomical racial wealth gap in America. According to the Federal Reserve, Black families have less than 15 percent of the wealth of white families.

Why Now?

Although the longstanding racial wealth gap cannot be solved with a single policy, the Biden Administration is keen to show the party base that it can get things done.

According to Data for Progress polling, 64 percent of Americans under the age of 45 and 77 percent of Democrats of all ages support the idea of canceling $50,000 of student debt per borrower.

But mainstream outlets are filled with opinion bashing student loan forgiveness as elitist and benefitting the rich. On the contrary, however, research from the Roosevelt Institute shows that $50,000 of student debt cancellation per borrower would mostly help poor Black families.

The latest reported plans from the White House of $10,000 are more modest and would cost the government an estimated $230 billion.

A large dip in Biden’s approval rating has been in two key demographics for the Democratic Party, young people and minorities.

Can Biden Cancel Debt?

While the Democrats have a slim majority in the Senate, they have not passed headline-grabbing legislation such as the infrastructure bill. Biden has also appealed to “rational Republicans” on issues like gun control and abortion rights, key issues for young Americans. Such appeals show Biden’s inability to act on his campaign promises unilaterally or through the marginally Democratic-controlled Congress.

Debt cancellation falls under the purview of the executive branch, however, giving Biden a range of executive actions that he could take to cancel any amount of federal student loan debt.

Senate Republicans confirmed the President’s power to cancel student debt when in April they filed legislation that attempted to curtail that power. As David Dayen wrote in The American Prospect, “there would be no need for such a bill if there was not already authority granted by Congress to the executive branch to suspend, defer, or cancel student loan payments.”

Having campaigned on a promise to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower, Biden could pitch debt cancellation as a landmark political win.

With his approval rating cratering and Democrats fearful of key midterm elections this fall, Biden may well see student debt cancellation as a shrewd move to win over apathetic voters.

With primary season in full swing and the 2022 midterm elections on the horizon, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has stamped his mark on the slate of Republicans that will be on offer to voters in November.

Thiel was an early backer of Trump in 2016, but since then he has noticeably taken a step back from full-throated support of the former President. While the two endorse similar politicians, most notably J.D. Vance in Ohio’s Senate primary, Vance has sought to differentiate himself from the MAGA world to some degree.

The tech billionaire refrained from public support of Trump during the 2020 election, Thiel is unafraid to be seen socializing with notorious alt-right figures.

Insiders have noted Thiel’s treatment of Trump as a figurehead for the budding political far right. Functionally, Trump and Thiel share similar views on important issues, but Thiel has perhaps more skin in the game than even the Trump family.

Buying Democracy

Large political donations from billionaires are nothing new in modern American politics, but Thiel’s donations have been particularly noteworthy.

Once an early backer of Senator Ted Cruz, Thiel has invested heavily in several outsider candidates that follow his political agenda to a tee. He donated $10 million each to two PACs that supported J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona in the primary races for Senate seats.

Vance and Masters are both outspokenly anti-Big Tech, a seeming contradiction considering their biggest benefactor. Thiel was the first investor in Facebook and a long-time adviser to Mark Zuckerberg, and he is the co-founder of several major tech companies, including PayPal and Palantir.

Furthermore, Vance and Masters both worked for Thiel. Masters was the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital. Vance worked at a venture capital firm founded by Thiel and his own VC firm received huge investments from Thiel.

But their anti-tech rhetoric makes more sense when you consider Thiel’s role and views on big tech firms. Thiel uses candidates like Vance and Masters to criticize big tech companies like Zuckerberg’s Meta and advocate for far-right ideologies.

Senator Ted Cruz, another Thiel acolyte, has forcefully attacked big tech companies like Meta for allegedly censoring conservative and right-wing accounts. Much of this pressure from the right comes in tandem with pressure from Democrats on tech companies like Meta and Twitter to better regulate hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.

And of course, Thiel still has business interests in tech and government policy. Thiel’s Palantir has received massive government contracts to help police departments, federal departments, and other government organizations to surveil American citizens and refugees.

Cozying Up With The Racist Right

In addition to influencing American tech policy, Thiel has been a friend to many on the far, far right. In 2016, he was seen having dinner with Kevin DeAnna a prolific white nationalist author who is influential in alt-right and openly racist circles.

Thiel also has friends and connections who espouse far right views, including writer Ann Coulter and former Trump aide Steve Bannon.

While he keeps extremely outspoken people in his circle, Thiel rarely articulates his personal political views in public. It is fairly easy to discern his political ideology from his political spending and endorsements.

As an extension of Thiel, candidates like Vance and Masters bash immigrants but attempt to do so in a slightly different way than Trump. Rather than swimming in pure racist vitriol, they attack immigration by turning attention to “woke” corporations.

The website of Protect Ohio Values, a Vance-supporting Super PAC, says “Vance has called on Americans to “take a page from President Trump’s playbook” on putting an end to illegal immigration, which benefits woke corporate elites and the Democrat Party.”

But the biggest beneficiaries of anti-immigrant actions on the border have been firms like Palantir and billionaires like Peter Thiel.