As the Kamala Harris campaign unveiled their vice-presidential pick last week, conservatives could hardly contain their glee. The man of the hour, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, was a radical, they reasoned. The 2020 George Floyd riots began in his backyard. He championed every toxic left-wing cultural position available, from sex changes for minors to late-term abortion.
And — as the ensuing opposition-research feeding frenzy would soon come to reveal — he routinely misrepresented his military service overseas (or in this case, his lack thereof), up to the point of plausibly having committed stolen valor. “Republicans Are ‘Thrilled’ Tim Walz Is the VP Pick,” blared a New York Magazine headline. Among Republican insiders, the piece reported, “the response to Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as vice-president was one of overwhelming joy.”
The Right might be underestimating Walz — or at least, overestimating the average voter’s discernment. Political ideologues and addicts of all stripes tend to find it difficult to conceive of the fact that the median member of the electorate might not think like they do. Walz is a radical, and of a particularly repugnant strain.
But he seems, to the untutored eye, like an affable middle-aged white dad. His public awkwardness has been highlighted and mocked at length by right-wing pundits, but it may well strike less attentive observers as endearing.
His policy record would surely alienate many voters, if they were fully aware of it. But with three months to go until the election — and a massive, extraordinarily powerful media apparatus doing full-time bottle service on Harris’ and Walz’s behalf — that remains a big “if.”
Walz, in other words, is more dangerous than many conservatives would like to believe. While he may not represent the modern Left in formal demographic terms (no ostensibly straight white man ever could), his state has served as a kind of test run for the war on Middle America — its values, interests, people, and way of life. Nowhere is this more evident than on the issue of immigration.
Minnesota remains a heavily white state — 76.3 percent, as of 2020 — and has not attracted as many immigrants as some of its larger, more urban, and densely populated competitors. But it is precisely because Minnesota is a “Middle American” state rather than a coastal economic powerhouse, that the dogged determination to flood it with foreigners is so striking.
Under Walz, who took office in January 2019, native Minnesotans have fled in droves: From April 2020 to July 2023, the Land of 10,000 Lakes lost a net 46,000 residents to other states. From 2022 to 2023 alone, Minnesota’s net out-migration was worse than in 34 out of the 50 states.
But it has offset those losses via international immigration, steadily replacing its natives with the foreign-born. “But for international immigration into Minnesota, the state would be losing population,” American Experiment, a conservative Minnesota think tank, noted in December. The state now boasts the largest foreign-born population in the region.
“Minnesota may not rank as one of the most popular destinations for current immigrants,” who “favor New York, Chicago, and Denver among other big cities,” the American Experiment report added. “But Minnesota appears to be a significant secondary destination.”
As deep-blue cities become overwhelmed by the sheer number of immigrants pouring into their jurisdictions, both local and federal authorities have increasingly taken to diverting large numbers of immigrants to more conservative, less population-dense regions of the heartland.
But Walz has displayed a remarkable determination to replace his state’s native population.
Here, too, Minnesota is leading the way. The state is now a top destination for “asylum-seeking migrants” — and tens of thousands of illegals — arriving from New York City, buoyed by the Big Apple’s decision to dole out free plane tickets to immigrants to cart them off to other parts of the country.
That has imposed an unprecedented strain on the state’s once-modest immigration system, pushing Minnesota’s only immigration court to a record-breaking 32,105 backlogged cases at the end of fiscal year 2023 — a 126 percent increase from 2020 — and overwhelming local family homeless shelters.
In this sense, Minnesota serves as the leading edge of mass migration’s shift from the nation’s urban population centers to the heartland. Once mostly a “city problem,” the incoming flood is now trickling out to the exurban and even rural corners of the country.
The result is the crisis facing communities like Springfield, Ohio: The town of roughly 58,000 — which was featured as the subject of Newsweek’s 50th-anniversary “The American Dream” issue in 1983 — has been flooded with 20,000 Haitian immigrants over the past decade, drastically transforming its way of life forever. Nobody in Springfield voted to become Little Port-Au-Prince. But then again, nobody involved in the Haitian colonization of the town bothered to ask them in the first place.
In Minnesota, the most ludicrous example of this phenomenon derives from the state’s new Somali population. The state boasts the largest number of Somalis in the nation — now more than 86,000 — and Somalis have jumped to the second largest foreign-born population in Minnesota over the past decade. (Mexicans remain the first).
If their elected representatives are any indication, these newcomers appear to have no particular interest in actually assimilating. U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the most notorious representative of Minnesota’s new Somali constituency, recently boasted to a predominantly Somali crowd — and in the Somali language — that “the U.S. government will do what we tell the U.S. government to do,” according to an English subtitle translation of the speech.
“For as long as I am in Congress, no one will take over the seas belonging to the nation of Somalia and the United States will not support others who seek to steal from us.” As I wrote back in March:
Omar was not the only Somali-American politician to openly boast of a dual (at best) loyalty. Earlier this month, Ohio state Rep. Ismail Mohamed touted the emergent bloc of Somalia Firsters in U.S. politics: “We have 20 or more different political representatives. And of course, Ilhan Omar is our representative at the federal level…. Our main objective is to discuss things that concern Somalia. It’s our country. It’s our people. Our aim as [a] united front is to lobby for Somalia.”
More recently, at a rally to support Omar — with the congresswoman herself beaming next to the podium — former Somali Prime Minister Hassan Khaire declared: “The interests of Ilhan are not … the interest of Minnesota. Nor is it the interest of the American people. The interests of Ilhan is that of the Somalian people and Somalia!” The Somali crowd erupted into cheers.
What mass immigration has wrought, in effect, is nations within a nation — foreign peoples, cultures, and languages imported from abroad, clustered together as an undiluted and unassimilated whole, in once-American towns and cities.
They feel no sense of obligation to their host nation, and often view its laws, customs, and social expectations with something that borders on contempt. And why shouldn’t they? Our leaders have given them no reason to feel otherwise.
“In many ways, Omar and [her counterparts] are rational actors,” I wrote in March. “They came to this country as Somalians, and this country gave them no reason to rethink or abandon that identity. Their comments are the inevitable result of a nation that no longer has the political will to both inspire and demand loyalty to this country, and only this country, from all who wish to reap the considerable benefits of U.S. citizenship.”
Walz’s tenure as governor of Minnesota is a particularly striking example. “The Minnesota I remember from my childhood is no more,” Nick Solheim, a native of the state, wrote earlier this month.
“The state was home to 25 percent of all ISIS recruits in the United States,” largely due to the deluge of immigrants from Somalia — it is now the largest Somali community outside Somalia itself. Despite the subsequent increase in terrorist recruitment, carjackings, and the informal renaming of an entire neighborhood in Minneapolis as “Little Mogadishu,” Walz says the flood must continue. “Refugees strengthen our communities,” he said in 2019. ‘The inn is not full in Minnesota.’”
In reality, the inn should have never been open in the first place. But Walz has displayed a remarkable determination to replace his state’s native population.
In the 2023 legislative session alone, Walz signed bills to provide driver’s licenses, state-run health care, and tuition-free (i.e., covered by the taxpayers) college education to illegal immigrants, solidifying Minnesota as one of the chief magnets for illegal aliens in the heartland.
This may be par for the course for contemporary Democrats, but it is notable to see it pursued so aggressively outside of the Left’s urban and coastal enclaves.
Harris, at least, does not hide her contempt for Middle America. Walz’s betrayal is far deeper; he pretends to be one of them. It may be true, as Lincoln allegedly said, that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. But the Right should worry that Walz may be able to fool some people for long enough that they vote for the undoing of us all.
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