Speaking as a Midwesterner, let me give you my opinion of Tim Walz.
Walz needs to be seen in the context of the rapid fall of Minnesota, and particularly what happened to the Twin Cities.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis & St. Paul used to be one of the nicest, safest cities
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in the United States. The Mary Tyler Moore show was set there for good reason, it was friendly, safe place.
Minnesota used to be purple and quite centrist.
The local Democratic party is called the DFL - the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.
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That was how Minnesota politics worked - the cities in the metro area allied with the unions (primarily in the mining Northeast) who allied with the farmers. They went against the Twin Cities suburbs and businessmen, it was always polite, and the state was even.
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The big shift happened with the mass influx of Somalis, along with the Dems trying to bring in blacks from other metro areas. The "nice" Repubs being controlled opposition, they of course did nothing to stop this process.
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The demographics changed sharply, crime rates soared, and the political situation rearranged itself.
Along with much of the rest of the country, enough of the suburbs switched to the Dems, that along with the newly black metro areas, the Dems began to get a decisive margin.
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Polite and nice stopped right there, the new DFL played strictly hardball politics
They also turned on their traditional constituencies of the farmers and the Iron Range union workers. As soon as they didn't need the votes, it was slap across the face, and knife in the back,
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they had no need for those traditional white Americans, or there traditional values.
Minnesota rapidly became the most radical of the Midwestern states, even more so than Chicago-dominated Illinois.
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Walz is a snake & a chameleon. Yes, he hunts, does the fishing opener & sometimes wears flannel shirts - all of which are used by the entirely Democratic Minnesota media to portray him as something he is not, a folksy politician with a common touch.
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Walz is despised in the outstate regions where the hunting & fishing are primarily done. Those areas have flipped from Blue to solid Red, as they try to protect themselves from the radical in the Twin Cities - to no avail.
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The real Walz? He's the face of the Great Replacement, that is followed by the Marxists crushing the opposition.
That's exactly why they want him as VP. He brings no election advantages. They're not worried about the election, but what comes after.
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The post below is worth reading (the OP is followed by Hegseth), but what's really interesting is the numerous comments, both with this post, and particularly his other post that he links.
This is the third component where the US military may be in deep trouble: personnel 1/
& command. The degree of rot & dysfunction that is described, in the comments in particular, is extraordinary & not at all compatible with fighting a real war with a peer power.
The Democratic party, government & military are all obsessed with DEI.
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The rot has been going on for a long time, but Obama made it much worse when he purged much of the leadership ten years ago - and it sounds like it has gotten much worse since then.
The 3-way dilemma is that first the US does not have nearly enough weapons
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There is an elementary error here, that will change all of our lives. To be fair, this error is shared by almost all economists, major corporations & the government.
We do not live in a post-industrial society. We live in an industrial society, perhaps the most industrial 1/
There are an extraordinary number of factories around the world, with huge numbers of workers including skilled labor, who work nonstop to keep an endless flow of ships, planes & trucks going to America, that are daily delivered to our population.
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Our leadership has moved beyond understanding this, it has been the state of things for their entire careers.
The point - and China in particular understands this very well - is that the US cannot deliver the goods & service in exchange to pay for what we consume.
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To be a Traveler is the antithesis of living in a Community. It's delusional to think that you can have both at the same time. I think that there are some very important implications when it comes to what has gone wrong with our culture, and how we can save it. 1/
Community is based on continuity, for both people & places. What it used to be was living in a place for your whole life, perhaps being buried in the same graveyard as your grandparents and their grandparents. The people you knew in school might be your pallbearers.
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The very center of Community is not friends, but family. To live near to your parents & grandparents. To know your aunts, uncles, first cousins - and other cousins as well. Children were raised within a family network, knowing who their relatives were, as people & not names.
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I wholeheartedly condemn the murder of the UHC CEO. He was a human being, this was awful - as murder is.
That said, as a populist, I don't think his murder falls into some special category. It was no worse - or better - than the murder of any other 50 something married father
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In other words, I do not see the murder of an "elite" as being anything special, compared to the murder of a middle class or upper class person. And from the perspective of the "elites", that is some pretty radical stuff.
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The "elites" have been killing the non-elites on a major basis. Unlimited illegal immigration, elimination bail, refusing to put violent criminals in jail on racial grounds - these are all forms of systemic murder that the elites back in practice.
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The Finns are liberals, feminists & atheists. Their pro-child policies do work to the extent that their TFR of 1.3 is significantly higher than the TFR of equivalent liberals, feminists & atheists in the US.
Raising TFR isn't hard, people just don't like where it goes. 1/
The primary driver of fertility is culture. If the culture is such that women believe that their primary purpose in life is to have & raise children, then they will do so.
If women believe their primary purpose in life is to serve themselves, to enjoy a career, to travel
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to date around, and to later at some point when it isn't too inconvenient, to have 1 or 2 children - we already know where that goes. Far below replacement TFR.
People try to work the margins, but it doesn't work. Fundamentally, how do women spend their 20s?
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With the likely but not certain announcement of Brooke Rollins @BrookeLRollins as Ag Secretary, I decided to do a little digging. Preliminary conclusion is that while she won't make people in regenerative agriculture happy, she could be a lot worse as well.
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@BrookeLRollins Quick background: rural girl from TX, FFA, 4H, earned an Ag degree from Texas A&M, four children. However, she went straight from the College of Agriculture to Law School, and hasn't looked back, though she maintains contacts with some women's ag groups, and insists FFA
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@BrookeLRollins was a life transforming experience for her.