By Jason Lewis
If former ACLU director Howard L. Simon really wants to compare VP nominees (“Is J.D. Vance qualified to be president-in-waiting?,” 11 Aug.) perhaps I can shed some light on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
It seems doubtful Walz was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate for the 10 electoral votes in a state that has remained frustratingly out of reach for GOP presidential hopefuls since 1972.
Perhaps it’s something far more simple.
Misery loves company and the bizarre record of the emasculated Minnesota Governor makes him the perfect fit for the San Francisco Democrat. Kamala’s inner circle may have dreamed about “defunding the police,” but under Walz, Minnesota did it. His decision “not to engage” the George Floyd rioters − who burned down the 3rd precinct in Minneapolis and destroyed over 1,500 businesses and buildings causing $500 million dollars in damages − still reverberates across urban America.
In 2024, violent crime in Minneapolis remains 29% above 2019. No wonder the media are ignoring Kamala’s complicity in backing a Minnesota Freedom Fund that was used to bail out rioters (and much worse).
But like Harris, Walz had more contempt for anyone who refused to conform to his draconian COVID rules which resulted in one of the highest percentages of nursing home deaths in the country. So who better to continue with ad hominem attacks on Trump so as to deflect a Harris-Walz agenda that is easily the most radical the country has ever seen?
Don’t believe me? Here’s what Walz did in Minnesota.
After Democrats engineered a trifecta in 2022, taking full control of state government, the first thing they did was to make sure it stayed that way — passing HF3, an automatic voter registration (AVR) bill with multilingual interpreters, no physical address requirement (a description will do) and absentee voting weeks before the election.
Then it was on to free health care and college tuition for undocumented immigrants and most important, driver’s licenses, ostensibly used for driving and identification purposes. But combined with AVR, well… gee, it’s a good thing Minnesota has such clean state voter rolls.
The Minnesota governor then gleefully signed the most extreme “PRO-choice” law in the land — eradicating even Roe’s limits on elective abortion after viability in the third trimester. Now he wants to enshrine it, along with a right to “gender-affirming” care for minors, in the state Constitution.
Parents who opposed either were lectured by Walz’s Lt. Governor, Peggy Flanagan, wearing a knife-wielding trans-tee shirt as a symbol of making Minnesota a “refugee state” for puberty blockers and surgical mutilation performed on youngsters not able to consent for themselves.
That is, when she and her boss weren’t targeting Capitol monuments, female sports and the Minnesota state flag — replacing its historic symbols with the ones of a new demographic they ushered in via a weaponized refugee asylum program that sustains Rep. Ilhan Omar’s political future.
A demographic at the center of a $250 million Feeding Our Future nonprofit pandemic scandal that Walz tried to lie his way out of until a Ramsey County Judge publicly refuted his version of the costly affair that soaked taxpayers.
And while state spending surged a jaw-dropping 38% in one biennium under Walz (consuming an $18 billion surplus), “the average Minnesota household has spent $30,427 more due to inflation since January 2021,” says a recent Joint Economic Committee report. In fact, the state saw its real domestic product shrink in the first quarter of this year.
In fact, a result, no doubt, of the governor’s war on energy. He not only adopted California’s Clean Car Rule phasing out gasoline powered cars, but then Walz teamed up with the Biden administration to block a copper nickel mine on Minnesota’s Iron Range.
He’s got to be absolutely giddy about Harris’s plan to ban fracking.
Minnesotans, however, aren’t and have been fleeing the North Star State in droves with $6 billion in income departing over the last couple of years. In urban Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the state’s largest, nearly 40,000 residents left between 2020 and 2023, according to the U.S. Census.
It all amounts to a very ominous warning because once Kamala Harris does to the country what Walz did to Minnesota, you won’t have anywhere to run.
Former Minnesota Congressman Jason Lewis, now a resident of Fort Myers, writes at jasonlewis.substack.com and is the author of “Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press”.