Tim Walz Is Still Not a Communist Dupe
Republicans should find a different angle
If you read the political media and social media semi-attentively, as I do, you’ll notice two things. First, right-wing X circles—not the major figures, but the ordinary commenters—are apoplectic about Tim Walz. To them, Walz is not just a liberal governor—he’s a secret Communist agent recruited during his time in Beijing who has a plan to emasculate American men, probably because he himself is gay. (You can, if you like, and I don’t recommend it, search around on the site for Walz’s name.)
I’ve read as much about Tim Walz’s early years as anyone ever should. If he’s a Communist agent, he’s a very bad one. As Zeeshan Aleem put it for MSNBC, Republican charges (now from folks like Senator Ron Johnson) that Walz’s now-famous wedding anniversary date coinciding with the Tiananmen incident somehow show that he’s loyal to the CCP are so deeply wrong that they call into question whether Walz’s accusers have thought about China for more than two seconds.
In an interview this week with Fox Business, Johnson warned that Walz is a “radical leftist” and made the case by pointing out what he called Walz’s “strange” relationship with China. “He got married on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. He’s gone to China. He’s taught in China. He’s got deep connections to China,” Johnson said in the interview.
The only way this makes sense is if you imagine that Johnson believes that the Communist regime recalls the incident as a victory and that Walz views it as a triumph. Nothing could be further from the truth. Memories of 1989 are infamously erased in China, and literally since Walz first returned to the United States after teaching in the country he has condemned the killings.
I cannot stress how deeply wrong the idea that anyone working for the CCP would want to celebrate their ties to the quashing of the movement is. I struggle to find an equivalent in U.S. history. I suppose the closest that I can come to would be if, say, someone were to claim that Spike Lee were a big fan of the FBI because he often wears Malcolm X caps. Or maybe that the Lincoln Memorial is a shrine to Confederate triumphs. It does not make sense. It does not even make sense as a gaffe. It is bafflingly wrong.
Somewhat less confusing is the charge that Walz is soft on Communism. You can find this documented in several places, such as the Washington Free Beacon’s coverage.
As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which "everyone shares" and gets free food and housing.
"It means that everyone is the same and everyone shares," Walz said during a lesson on China's communist system in November 1991. "The doctor and the construction worker make the same. The Chinese government and the place they work for provide housing and 14 kg or about 30 pounds of rice per month. They get food and housing."
Let’s stop for a second. This was November 1991. The Cold War was over. Eastern Europe was free. The USSR had about six weeks to live, and everyone pretty much knew the game was up there too. Communism was far from a live issue. And Chinese Communism was far from a looming threat, with a nominal annual GDP per capita of about $350.
Let’s imagine the scene. Walz was talking to sixth graders, not high schoolers! This is egregious sloppiness because it’s clearly important. Here’s the article:
Not only does the Free Beacon make it sound like Walz just decided to up and teach about China one day, they obscure the fact that Walz was talking to 12-year-olds. And, yes, Tim Walz was also a high school teacher: Alliance was and is a small town and he pulled double duty in the middle and high school.
The distinction matters because you teach subjects differently at different levels.
I want you to imagine how you would describe Communism to 12-year-olds.
It is really hard.
If you were describing democracy, you’d say, “it’s a system where everyone votes.” If you were describing liberalism, you’d say, “it’s a system where everyone has rights.” And if you were talking to anyone who knew anything about how those systems actually worked, you’d be laughed out of the room if you didn’t follow it up with qualifications.
Describing any political system requires you to start somewhere. And “under Communism, everyone is equal” is … a start! You’d want to qualify it and describe it and then point out that there’s a lot of equality in misery, but you have to start somewhere.
Here’s the thing. Walz did that. He went beyond that assertion. The reporter for the Times Herald described the lesson in such detail that we know that Walz mentioned, for instance, that wealthy families can buy their way into school. We know that he mentioned that the government was different to the people because he directly told them that the Chinese government wasn’t representative. And he did all of this in the context of a pen-pal exchange between middle school students.
That’s the critical context! This wasn’t some lesson about Communism: he was sharing the letters the students had received from their pen pals in China! The goal wasn’t to indoctrinate them but to teach them that there were people like them in China—and, along the way, to subtly push them to do better in their studies, since the Chinese students could write in English but the American students couldn’t write in Chinese.
Here’s the most puzzling thing to me about all of this. A good attack either has legs or it doesn’t need them. By that, I mean, if it’s a really strong attack you can just let it out there without further explanation—or, alternatively, you can rest assured that your opponent’s attempts to rebut your arguments will be so torturous or embarrassing that it will help the original attack.
The attacks on Walz with regard to China do not meet either criteria. Walz was preternaturally careful in how he described China, almost to the point that at times I have wondered if he was already thinking about later public steps. He’s measured, exuberant at times and critical at times. And he’s not saying, for instance, that Communism is good—should the doctor and the construction worker make the same amount? I actually doubt that even twelve-year-olds, to whom “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is a perfectly calibrated slogan, would find that so attractive as to make them wave their little red books. So the attack is neither shocking (“I love Chairman Mao!”) nor embarrassing.
If anything, the attack strengthens the image that Democrats are seeking to portray. There’s a great exchange in A Few Good Men that illustrates my point. Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise) objects to a doctor’s testimony as speculation and is overruled. Later, his co-counsel, Lt. Commander Galloway (Demi Moore), renews the objection. The judge angrily overrules her again: “The witness is an expert and the court will hear his opinion.” Afterward, Lieutenant Weinberg (Kevin Pollack) admonishes her: “You object once so they can hear you say he's not a criminologist. You keep after it and it looks like this great cross we did was just a bunch of fancy lawyer tricks. … Christ, you even had the Judge saying [the doctor] was an expert!”
At this point, conservative attacks on Walz’s China record have something of the same flavor. Every rebuttal makes the original attack look silly, while giving Walz’s defenders (and partisans of the truth) a chance to note that Walz was an engaged, caring, inventive teacher—the kind who changes lives and goes beyond what’s required. It also reminds people that Tim Walz is a small-town guy who managed to become a global traveler and informed observer of China while building a career and family. If the best you have is lazy, out-of-context reporting, it discredits anything else you say.
And here we come back to the semi-attentive observer’s perspective. Many contemporary conservative attacks bubble up from the social media fever swamps and land in major conservative outlets. That’s a change from how it used to work, in which the outlets would formulate or repeat storylines developed from the center and broadcast them. There is, it turns out, a benefit to top-down direction in messaging at times—because top-down messaging usually comes with editors who can ask follow-up questions. And you can see the frustration in (especially) the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, which is trying to redirect conservative attention away from this stuff to what they view as winning issues.
I’m not in the business of advising conservative operations, but I am getting pulled into these conversations about Walz and China way more than I thought I would. So, for my own sake, let me explain it to the right: you’re better off not talking about this stuff. It’s a losing issue. Instead of talking about Walz and China in the 1990s, talk, like former Rep. Mike Gallagher is doing in today’s paper, about the contrasts between Republicans’ China policy now and the Biden-Harris China policy.
That’s not to say I endorse the substance of those attacks, although I do find them much harder to rebut. And I doubt anyone will take my advice.
Rather, I mention all of this as evidence that the Harris-Walz ticket has deeply upset the conservative camp. All of their lines of attack have been scrambled, and more than a month later it’s not clear how they will regroup. It does, in fact, take time to launch successful messaging, and something like a quarter of the time from the Biden/Harris switch until the election has been spent foundering. There’s still a long time to go, but so far most attacks seem either copy-paste (wow, calling a Democrat a socialist, how long did that take to workshop) or, frankly, batsh*t crazy.