The woke zealotry of Tim Walz

Now that US vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has picked her running mate, the true nature of the 2024 election has come into sharp focus. When Americans walk into their voting booths this November, they will see the names Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Donald Trump and JD Vance. But woke ideology and its resultant policies are really what are on the ballot.

Any hopes that the Democrats would tone down on woke, or cater to independents even a little bit, disappeared on Tuesday with the announcement that Governor Walz of Minnesota would be Harris’s running mate. Walz has for the past five years presided over a once-moderate state, which has now become a byword for ideological capture.

A more obvious bait-and-switch has perhaps never been played in American politics. Walz may have humble, centrist roots. But since ascending the ranks of power in the Minnesota Democratic establishment, he has fully embraced the kind of woke policies that have alienated working-class voters across America.

Walz is a zealot of gender ideology. He made Minnesota a ‘safe haven’ for the medical transitioning of children. He signed a bill into law last year that allows the state to take custody of children whose parents refuse permission for their child to receive ‘gender-affirming care’ – that is, harmful experimental drugs and surgeries. As of this year, menstrual products must now be put in the boys’ bathrooms in all public schools, as per a law he championed. Tampons and sanitary towels must be available to all ‘menstruating students’, regardless of their gender, above the age of nine, the bill states.

Walz has also gone hard on racial identity politics. During the Covid-19 crisis in 2021, as concerns over medicine scarcity raged, he backed a ‘weighted lottery’ approach to giving out monoclonal antibodies that prioritised not just health concerns, but also a patient’s race.

Of course, after his selection, the mainstream media’s narrative machine immediately jumped into overdrive to paint Walz as ‘kind’ and ‘folksy’ – just your average Joe with the common touch, as befits a football-coaching dad from the American heartland. John King of CNN described him as ‘a small-town Midwesterner’ who ‘won a Republican House seat and held it, in very difficult years for Democrats’. ‘He has that small town, rural appeal’, King insisted.

Having Walz on the Democratic ticket was a show of ‘love versus hate’, according to Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe, who described him as a man ‘with an authentic touch that could really break through’. ‘Very, very, positive’, intoned her husband, Joe Scarborough. Elsewhere on MSNBC, Pete Buttigieg claimed that Harris ‘has found an extraordinary partner, who has brought that joy immediately to the campaign trail’.

At Harris and Walz’s first rally together in Philadelphia last night, Kamala projected total faith in being on the right side of history. ‘We are the underdogs in this race’, she said. ‘We will govern on behalf of all Americans.’ That seems unlikely.

For an American populace still reeling four years after the politically motivated riots that started in Walz’s home state, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, Harris’s VP pick feels like a smack in the face. In the aftermath of Floyd’s death in May 2020, Minneapolis became a flash point for the radical ‘defund the police’ movement. Three years later, even the New York Times admitted the experiment was a ‘failure’. ‘Violent crime soared’, wrote Ernesto Londoño in the Times in 2023. ‘Many residents have given up on the local public-transportation system, where some stations increasingly have become gathering points for people who openly smoke fentanyl and other drugs.’ Walz, while not directly responsible for Minneapolis’s policing, hired defund-the-police activists to the state’s sentencing commission.

Pay no attention to the Democrats’ paeans to fighting for the poor and oppressed. Just like every other woke policy, the ones overseen by Walz in Minnesota have harmed the very people he claims to fight for.

Take education. According to figures from 2022, Minnesota has ‘one of the largest education-achievement gaps between black and white students in the country’, notes one African-American journalist based in St Paul, the state’s capital. ‘Just 31 per cent of black students are proficient in reading compared to 59 per cent of white students. In addition, just 20 per cent of black students are proficient in math in comparison to 54 per cent of their white counterparts’, he adds. This is despite – or more likely, because of – the state’s enthusiasm for embedding the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ agenda into schools.

Much has been made about Walz’s star turn a few weeks ago, when he called the Trump-Vance ticket ‘weird’. The banal jibe went viral. Many commentators say that this quip was what made Harris ultimately decide in Walz’s favour, instead of the popular and centrist Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. Given that the Harris campaign has thus far operated mostly on vibes, I find it quite plausible that the Democrats would go with a man who brings no electoral advantage, but who simply said something that caught the attention of people online. However, picking Walz over Shapiro betrays a more sinister impulse as well – it also speaks to the Democrats’ abandonment of American Jews.

Shapiro has high approval ratings, at just over 60 per cent overall and over 40 per cent among registered Republicans, in his own battleground state. He would have given the campaign a crucial edge in that all-important Electoral College vote. But he is an observant Jew who in the past has spoken out in defence of Israel and against anti-Semitism. This means he was the focus of ire from some pro-Palestine activists who campaigned to keep him off the ticket. As the New York Times wrote at the beginning of the month, this meant Harris was faced with a significant choice: ‘Should she take the opportunity to stand up to her far-left flank in an appeal to the centre of the party and to independents, or should she shy away from inflaming an issue that has divided and bedevilled the party – Israel’s war in Gaza?’

Well, Harris has made her choice: she has sided with the Hamas-loving, kid-transing wing of the Democratic Party. The battle lines have now been firmly and clearly drawn. Americans will face a stark choice this November.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.