Tim Walz: The Wrong Kind of Lutheran?

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

Niche Walz Critiques Abound

After VP Kamala Harris selected Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, we expected the GOP and their auxiliary online creeps to probe for his weaknesses with the electorate. A two-term governor leaves a paper trail, and there was plenty of high profile stuff that might rile up their base: when Minneapolis supposedly “burned to the ground” in 2020, Walz’s “dictatorial” response to COVID, or the Feeding Our Future scandal. 

But the criticisms that have been arising from the online muck seem a little, well, niche. Because Walz signed a law requiring schools to make menstrual products available to students for free, we got riffs on “Tampon Tim”— sure to be a hit with the kind of joke guys who think their nuts are gonna shrink back into their gut if they buy their wife a pack of Tampax. Today I ran across a white nationalist Twitter account that is somehow racist against Germans? And now there’s this, from the editor-in-chief of the nutball The Federalist: 

Ah yes, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, that fringe group of far-left wackos. I don’t know much about Lutherans myself (my people are all Catholics, which is one reason I find a reactionary adult convert a little suss) but I do know the ELCA is not only the largest Lutheran denomination, but also the seventh largest Protestant denomination in America. And it’s got a whole lot of members in Pennsylvania, making this critique somewhat electorally inopportune. But by all means, please keep writing stories with headlines like "Tim Walz's Church Is a Trainwreck of Heresy and Blasphemy." (On the more devious end of things, Republicans are now trying to “Swift Boat” Walz as well.) 

Meanwhile, broader coverage of the new VP candidate is shifting its focus to the Walz family. In People, Walz and his wife Gwen talk about their son Gus and his non-verbal learning disorder. Over at the Daily Beast, we learn that Hope Walz is making her dad “a Gen Z hit.” And MPR talks to the folks who bought the Walz home in Mankato when he became governor. Their verdict? “That dude really is quite normal.”

As for the GOP candidate, he doesn’t seem to be able to recall Walz’s name. Talking Points Memo’s Emine Yücel says Trump has referred to Walz as “guy,” “the Minnesota gentleman,” and “Kamala’s new friend.” I remember when such lapses in memory from a presidential candidate raised serious questions about his fitness for the job. 

Can Royce White Save the Minnesota Farmer?

We try not to go to the “Royce White mades a crackpot comment” well too often because it’s bottomless, and we’d be covering the GOP-endorsed challenger to Sen. Amy Klobuchar nearly everyday. But what the Steve Bannon pal had to say at a Farmfest debate in Morgan, Minnesota, made a high enough percentage of the Racket staff laugh out loud that I figured it was time.

Here’s an excerpt from the Strib’s coverage:

During one telling exchange, [moderator Blois] Olson asked a question about policies around easing the workforce shortage in the U.S.

White, first to respond, said, “Second law of thermonuclear dynamics. The inexorable rise of China. The decline in your communities, the decline in this country, is not by accident.”

Here’s what the Minnesota Reformer had to say:

“Renewable energy is okay. The question is, is it going to work? How’s it going to work? Who’s going to run it?” GOP-endorsed Senate candidate Royce White said. He continued by railing against China, garnering cheers from his supporters in the audience: “[Democrats] are selling you out to China every chance they get. And they’re proud of it. They brag about it. They admit it. They’re not hiding it.”

(It’s unclear what he was talking about.)

It's also unclear why Minnesota farmers would support another Trump-led trade war with China, considering how disastrous the last one was for them.

MVA Takes Another L

Anyone looking at the legal challenges that the Minnesota Voters Alliance launches might suspect that the org’s primary concern is that too many Minnesotans might vote. Or maybe they just don't want too many of the "wrong" Minnesotans to vote. The MVA has (unsuccessfully) challenged same-day voter registration and today the Minnesota Supreme Court tossed out their attempt to halt a new law that re-enfranchises non-incarcerated felons. The court tossed it out, saying they the organization didn't have standing—in U.S. courts, alas, you can't try to stop a law just because it bugs you. MVA founder Doug Seaton said the decision "sidesteps the necessary constitutional scrutiny" of the law, but considering the MVA’s spurious legal argument (they claimed the legislature could not restore one civil right to felons without restoring all of them, or some nonsense like that), I’d say the court was being kind by not subjecting it to analysis.

Uptown Faces New Peril: ‘He’s Actually Surprisingly Menacing for a Random Trumpeter’

As though navigating a torn up Lake St. wasn’t enough, Uptown can now count among its woes a man who follows people around and blows a trumpet at them. That’s what we gathered from yesterday’s Reddit thread “Guy in uptown blowing his trumpet at dog walkers.” Said the original poster: “Was walking my dog and this guy kept following me and he was blowing into his trumpet at us and would laugh. Wasn't playing a song but just blaring noise at us. He followed us for 2 blocks. Anyone else encounter this douche nozzle?” Turns out, plenty of people had. He’d been spotted harassing women at Bde Mka Ska. One person said the hornman was a former neighbor till he was evicted. And as one poster summed it up: ”He plays his trumpet outside my apartment all the time, he’s actually surprisingly menacing for a random trumpeter.” Be careful out there, Uptown!