The situation in Minnesota continues to roil the waters.
We are looking at the very real possibility of a standoff between the state government led by Governor Tim Walz — the failed vice presidential candidate who just had to step away from a third-term run in Minnesota because of the allegations of fraud — and the federal government.
On Thursday, Walz — who is in a world of hurt politically right now because of the Somali fraud scandal — compared this moment to the Civil War. Apparently, it is now the Civil War if you send ICE to enforce arrest warrants against criminals in this country.
Walz stated:
When things looked really bleak it was Minnesota’s first that held that line for the nation on that July 3rd, 1863. And I think now we may be in that moment; that the nation is looking to us to hold the line on democracy, to hold the line on decency, to hold the line on accountability, and more than that, to rise up as neighbors and simply say, we can look out for one another. We can have differences. But we proved to the world going on 250 years that our democracy could hold. It feels to me like we’re at one of those inflection points.
I’ve said many, many times that when you have high-level politicians talking this way, it is truly bad for the country. When you say we are at the point where we are going to go to war with one another and a civil war is about to break out, and it’s the end of the country, these statements turn into self-perpetuating prophecies.
That’s because the more people believe they can’t get along with their neighbors, that there is no basis for a common Americanism, the more they are likely to see each other as enemies and not political opponents.
Walz also said:
I’d ask everyone to pause for a moment of silence to remember Renee Good, also to remember all that’s good and right about this nation. And, I’m going to ask folks if they can, I’d ask employers to give their people some space. I’d ask each and everyone to find a way to contribute in your community. Might be shoveling your neighbor’s walk. It might be being at a food bank.
It might be pausing to talk to someone you haven’t talked to before, but to show the goodness, to rise up to make sure that we’re being very, very clear about this, that we expect our constitutional rights to be respected, that law enforcement is local, that we expect accountability of our elected leaders and that we are not going to go quietly and we’re not going to give up on those things that matter so much to us. And chief amongst those is human dignity, respect, rule of law. All of the things that we know make this country great.
That’s bizarre, Orwellian language. Walz moves very quickly from “we should take this moment of silence, to go work at a food bank or talk to someone you’ve never talked to before,” to “we need to respect rule of law” while holding a moment of silence for a person who, at the very least, was involved in obstruction of the performance of law. When he says that law enforcement must be local, what he means is that federal law enforcement shouldn’t do its job.
And when he says that we should “rise up,” when he says that we have an obligation to stand up for our constitutional rights — you do not have a constitutional right to be in this country illegally, nor do you have a constitutional right to thwart federal law enforcement’s pursuit of criminal illegal immigrants and their deportation. You do not have the right to do any of those things.
All of this is part and parcel, of course, of Tim Walz’s broader agenda, which is to label ICE as the Gestapo, which is what he did last year.
You wonder why people are out there confronting ICE? When you put people in a moral position where they feel they must confront federal law enforcement and do it over and over and over again, the basic rule is: the more people are confronting law enforcement, the more there will be bad situations that emerge from those confrontations.
This is just the way the world works.
Listening to Tim Walz talk about morality is astonishing, considering that just last year he said that China — a true authoritarian state — might be the global moral authority.
He said:
Who holds the moral authority? Who holds the ability to do that, because we are not seen as a neutral actor and we maybe never were. I don’t want to tell anybody that; I think there’s a lot of people say you always lean one way in this, but I think there was at least an attempt to be somewhat of the arbitrator in this. We saw President Carter do it with Begin and Sadat. We’ve had certain wins along the way that were actually mutually beneficial both ways. Now I ask who that is. And I mean consistently over and over again, we’re going to have to face the reality. It might be the Chinese.
Unbelievable. That person is the person who’s now the moral authority talking about authoritarianism? Remember, he presided over the riots in 2020 that shut down a city in his state because he was unable to handle basic law enforcement functions in his state.
The reason that Tim Walz is going so hard here is because he recently had to step away from running for a third-term because of the fraud in his state — a fraud scandal largely emanating from the Somali community, which, of course, is the community at issue in these immigration raids from ICE.
For Walz to preach about morality and the rule of law, he has to ignore his own history.
And he’s doing just that.