The Utter Incompetence of the US Courtier Class Exhibit 6: Tim Walz.

Walz was born in 1964 in West Point, Nebraska to a school teacher and superintendent father and a homemaker mother. He grew up in small towns in Nebraska, and in 1982 graduated high school in Butte in a class of 25. He then went to college in Chadron Nebraska before drifting for a while after his father’s death from lung cancer; with service in the Texan and Arkansas National Guard (he served in the National Guard from 1981 to 2005, but never saw front line service), studies at University of Houston and building tanning beds. In 1987 he returned to Chadron State College in Nebraska and graduated with a BSc in social science education in 1989 at the age of 25. He had the help of the GI Bill to do this, something he much more openly states than J. D. Vance.

He then spent a year teaching in China, before returning to the US and teaching in the small town of Alliance, Nebraska. He married another teacher in 1994, and moved to Mankato, Minnesota in 1996 where he taught geography and was the football coach. He and his wife also ran a travel agency for nine years that organized summer educational trips to China for high school students, with Walz leading his last trip in 2003. Given that 21 years have passed since then, and the huge changes in China in the interim, these trips will have provided him with little insight into the political-economy of today’s China. Walz earned n MSc. in experiential education from Minnesota State University, Mankato in 2002.

In 2006, Walz ran for the US House of Representatives and won; serving until 2018. He was against the Iraq War and repeatedly voted against corporate bailouts. He showed his anti-China stance by meeting with the CIA-financed Dalai Lama and serving on a commission monitoring “human rights violations in China”, and also showed staunch support for the Zionist regime (which he has repeated during the current presidential election campaign). His voting record was highly bi-partisan, tending to cooperate with his Republican opponents while serving on a number of House Committees (Agriculture, Veteran’s Affairs, Transportation & Infrastructure and Armed Services). He has also been a staunch supporter of LGBTQ causes.

In 2018 he won the Governorship of Minnesota, and was re-elected in 2022. He responded to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by both using the National Guard to put down riots and getting a police reform act passed. He has enacted legislation that is pro-abortion, pro-labour, pro-indigenous, clean energy supportive as well as acts that provide extra educational spending (including universal free school meals), legalized recreational use of cannabis, and universal gun background checks. During COVID he kept the schools closed for longer than the national average. Basically, a relatively progressive Democrat on domestic policies and a hawk on foreign policies (matching the Democratic Party’s embrace of the warmongers). On August 21, 2024 he accepted the nomination as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate.

The problem for Tim Walz is that he has spent his whole life in small town Nebraska (1.9 million) and Minnesota (population 5.8 million), before then becoming a house representative for the small state of Minnesota and then the governor of that small state. He lived in small town Mankato (population 46,000) for two decades before moving to small city St. Paul (population 312,000) on becoming governor in 2018. He was not groomed by any oligarchs, the security state or the political royalty (as with Obama, Harris and Vance) or in any other way readied for the brutalities of US national politics. He has never held an administrative or cabinet position within the US federal state. He was thrown into the “big leagues” with very little relevant training. He is one of the least wealthy people to ever run for vice president.

With little or no national standing before his nomination, and less than three months standing between the nomination and the presidential election, Walz simply did not have the time to build a coherent public identity nor develop the talents of dealing with the national media and oppositional attacks. He has also been caught a number of times “embellishing” his life story; an issue that even MSNBC has pointed out. For a candidate that rests on his small town Midwest background, the pictures with multi-billionaire Alex Soros at the latter’s New York apartment were also a gaffe; especially with the optics of a courtier meeting his new boss. And of course, there were the debate gaffes that even SNL made fun of:

The reality is that Harris’ running mate was picked in haste due to the last-minute removal of Biden from the ticket after the latter’s disastrous debate performance with Trump. A move that should have been done much earlier, given Biden’s so obvious mental decline. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Kamala Harris has shown little ability as a presidential candidate after an at best mediocre stint as vice president. The lateness of the transition away from Biden limited the quality of the candidates ready to risk running, and then the weakness of Harris limited the quality of the vice presidential candidates. The pool of possible candidates was also so full of oligarch tools (e.g. the Getty product Gavin Newsom), uber-Zionists like Josh Shapiro (who even worked in the public affairs department of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C.) , and those with little real administrative experience.

Tim Walz seems to be a relatively decent man who would have been much better suited to a cabinet role that would have helped him burnish his national image and to develop his federal level state management and political skills. Instead, he got thrown in at the deep end with little time left on the clock and a quite brutal opposition.

Compare Walz’s (or Harris’) record to that of Xi Jinping, or any other of the senior members of the Chinese Party-state, who spent decades learning how to manage the state apparatus and political relationships at the national and international level. A history of achievement that even the Australian ABC News has to accept.