None of the evidence seems to be going the other way.
For example, we have yet to see any report of a class discussion in which as a teacher of young minds Tim Walz championed free minds and free markets, rational self-interest, individual rights, and capitalism and warned his students about the censorship, surveillance, propaganda, robbery, imprisonments, tortures, and murders characteristic of Chinese totalitarianism. It would be a scoop for sure.
But we do keep getting indications that Walz, avowed champion of socialism (it’s on tape), is a fan of the CCP and the political system it has wrought.
Sharing
We don’t know how much of a communist Walz is. So far, the needle of the commie-o-meter has been fluctuating between 68% and 87%. Now a report from the Washington Free Beacon has pushed the upper limit past 90% (“Walz Praised Chinese Communism as a System Where ‘Everyone Shares,’ ” August 19, 2024).
The Beacon unearthed a 1991 story in Nebraska’s Alliance Times-Herald of what Walz was at the time telling his students about the wonderful Chinese communist system.
Walz: “It means that everyone is the same [a good thing?] and everyone shares [a good thing?]. The doctor and the construction worker make the same [a good thing?]. The Chinese government and the place they work for provide housing and 14 kilograms or about 30 pounds of rice per month. They get food and housing.”
Housing units and bags of rice? Wow.
I doubt that in 1991, after some years of highly regulated concessions to market processes, all wages in China were the same, and who knows whether the specified rice quota is accurate either; or, if it is, who exactly got it in city or countryside. Nor is everything in the Times-Herald’s account of Walz’s teaching consistent with his vision of China’s pervasive equality; for example, he referred to “wealthy families” in China who can “buy their way into a school.”
Like a good neighbor?
However accurate Walz’s description of the Chinese system of 1991 may be, it is conspicuous for its lack of any criticism, whether of the ravaging communism of Mao’s time or of the more moderately and selectively murderous form the system had taken by the 1990s.
Can we hope that Walz learned and matured over the years? That he is no longer the naïve, morally ignorant, economically ignorant, historically ignorant misleader of youth that he was in 1991?
But this hope is undercut by his track record as governor of Minnesota, his continued dubious associations with Chinese Communist Party officials (some of whom attended his inauguration as governor—were they invited?), and his recent statement that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” A proposition that ignores the difference between a neighbor’s voluntary expression of good will and the “neighborliness” of socialist policies imposed at the point of a gun.
