Killer Mike Stirs Controversy With Herschel Walker Interview
Former NFL player-turned-United States Senate candidate Herschel Walker sat down for an interview on the Love & Respect with Killer Mike show.
Rapper and activist Killer Mike née Michael Render, is facing criticism for sitting down with the GOP candidate.
“Instead of wondering why @KillerMike would sit down with @HerschelWalker, ask yourself: Why was the GOP’s Great Black Hope so eager to talk to the rapper who cozied up to Gov Vote Suppressor, carried the NRA’s water & told Black protesters to go home?,” writer Michael Harriot wrote on Twitter. “There’s your answer.”
The tweet garnered many replies including one that was consistent from other critics that the rapper/journalist “spoon-fed” Walker answers.
Other writers wondered, rightfully, if Killer Mike will sit down with the sitting Democratic incumbent, Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock, who Walker will face in November.
Keith Reed of The Root noted that the interview was one of Walker’s most “lucid” as he’s been prone to incoherent responses to any number of questions throughout his campaign.
For example, the rapper asked Walker about his 2016 comments from his Svengali Donald Trump who asked Black voters “what do you have to lose” as it related to voting for Republican candidates. Walker told Killer Mike, “When he said that statement, I said, ‘I don’t really like how you said that statement.’ There’s no doubt, give him an opportunity and see what he can do...We use Black and brown people as people just to get votes but we don’t do anything for them.”
He also addressed Trump’s recent claims that he pushed him to run for office saying, “I’m mad at him, because he never asked, but he’s taking credit that he asked,” Walker said.
Love & Respect with Killer Mike is a weekly interview program broadcast on Atlanta’s public television station WABE. The station notes that guests “all take part in the type of intriguing conversation only Killer Mike can conduct.”
The interview with Walker is the second time that Killer Mike has garnered backlash for cozying up with Republicans. In September 2020, he met with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. He said of the governor, who is a Trump loyalist and has been accused of voter suppression, that “More than anything, I’m a Southerner. I’m a Black man. I’ve been raised in a traditionally Democratic city. But my state is pretty conservative, always has been. So as a Southern man, I connected pretty much instantly with him. Politics and policy don’t matter to me as much as human decency and principles, and he seemed to be a principled human being when I talked to him.”
At that time the rapper compared himself to both Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. adding, “I know the road I follow is a hard one.”
