Kamala Harris’ Running Mate Tim Walz is ‘Bernie Sanders in Hunting Gear’ Warns Former Minnesota Governor
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the last Republican to serve as governor of the North Star State, has criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’ selection of Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, asserting that it reflects a deep commitment to the Democratic Party’s “democrat-socialist agenda.”
Harris named Minnesota’s incumbent governor as her running mate on Tuesday, Aug. 6, following weeks of whirlwind speculation regarding who she would tap to be her vice president.
“As a governor, a coach, a teacher and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his,” said Harris in a statement announcing her selection.
Harris praised Walz for his supposed bipartisanship and willingness to collaborate with Republicans to secure infrastructure investments, mandating universal background checks for gun purchases, cutting taxes for working-class families, passing paid family and medical leave bills and making Minnesota the first state to enshrine into the state constitution protections to the right to abortion following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Walz, 60, has used his term as governor to massively overhaul Minnesota and turn it into a progressive state – an overhaul that went on overdrive following his winning a second term in 2022 and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party – the Minnesota branch of the Democrats – took full control of both houses of the state legislature. With Walz on the ticket, the Democrats may now use Minnesota as a template for their national plans.
Pawlenty describes Walz as a Midwest Bernie Sanders
Pawlenty, who served as governor from 2003 to 2011 and previously campaigned to be the Republican Party’s candidate for the 2012 election, shared his views regarding Walz with Fox 9.
Pawlenty described Walz as “philosophically and politically” aligned with Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, though he noted that Walz brings a distinct “style and geography” to the 2024 Democratic ticket.
(Related: INTEGRITY ISSUE: Kamala Harris distances herself from past far-left stances to win voter support.)
“She has sort of the San Francisco, California, vibe. He’s going to have sort of the ‘Bernie Sanders in hunting gear’ vibe,” Pawlenty commented. “So, it’s the same product, just in different wrappers.”
While Walz’s record is celebrated by progressives, it has also provided ammunition for Republicans who view Harris and her running mate as too liberal.
Pawlenty suggested that the campaign of former President Donald Trump will easily be able to criticize Walz for his handling of the 2020 George Floyd riots, which massively rocked Minneapolis and led to a police station being burned to the ground.
He also pointed to Walz’s record of significant state spending increases and a scandal involving Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic relief fraud as potential Republican talking points.
“Rising crime and high-profile fraud within state government under his watch, with a nonpartisan legislative auditor saying, ‘You’re not taking it seriously,’” Pawlenty said. “The target audience for a lot of this is going to be persuadable voters in swing states.”
Meanwhile, Pawlenty also acknowledged Walz’s possible strengths as a campaigner.
“On a personal level, he’s energetic, he’s friendly, he’s folksy. He’s interested in issues. He likes to campaign,” Pawlenty said. “Their problem isn’t going to be campaign style or skills or energy. It’s going to be whether America is ready for a doubling down on this democrat-socialist agenda.”
He expressed doubts about the Harris-Walz ticket’s appeal, noting that Trump has his own challenges.
“I think this ticket, the Harris-Walz ticket, would be pretty beatable if the Republicans had a better candidate,” Pawlenty said. “There’s a bunch of Republicans and independents who don’t like Trump that the Republicans could leverage.”
Pawlenty clarified his personal stance, stating he does not support the Harris-Walz ticket and has voted for Trump in the past, with the possibility of doing so again.
“I think the Trump campaign is going to make it very clear that this isn’t some moderate or centrist choice,” he said of Walz. “They’re going to characterize it as a radical ticket. And I don’t know how well that will play in places like Pennsylvania.”
Watch this clip from Newsmax with Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) describing the Harris-Walz ticket as “far-left.”
The Case for why Christian Parents Should Not Send Their Children to Public Schools
(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon addresses the potential dangers of sending your children to public schools.
Jonathon begins the show by briefly discussing how the public school system has become anti-Christian as our society has become more modern.
“State schools exist to promulgate state ideology and, of course, we now live in a society no longer rooted in the values of scriptural revelation, we no longer live in societies rooted in Christian values. We instead live in societies that are formed by the sexual revolution that has unfolded since the 1960s,” Jonathan said. He added that while this has been true for some time, what we’re seeing in schools now, such as sexually explicit drag shows, is so bad that we’re practically nostalgic for the public schools of 20 years ago.
He notes that author Katy Faust, in her recent book Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City: Teaching Historical, Economic, and Biological Truth in a World of Lies, suggests parents can send their kids to public schools as long as parents are rooting them in Christian and conservative values at home. But Jonathon disagrees with this thesis: “I increasingly don’t think that the public school in any way, shape, or form can be retaken, despite the fact that I am cheering on those parental rights movements, the parental rights protesters.”
Jonathon pointed to the counter-example of grassroots groups like Moms for Liberty taking over school boards, firing principals and diversity coordinators, and ensuring that a woke, pro-LGBT curriculum was not introduced to their kids. “I still do, however, think that it’s incredibly dangerous because I do believe that these are state schools, and I do believe that the ideology of the state is now fundamentally antithetical to Christianity.”
To support his thesis, Jonathon dove into the impact that a public school education has had on our culture, citing state ideology as having filled the vacuum left by the decline of religion. However, he emphasizes that it’s also important to note how effective the indoctrination of children in the public education system has been:
A 2022 report highlighted new data from the Seattle public schools that shows an 853 percent spike in students identifying as ‘non-binary’ over only three years. So, in 2019, 53 out of 55,417 students identified as ‘non-binary.’ ‘Non-binary’ means you’re not identifying as male or female; you’re just sort of some random other. By the 2022-2023 school year, that number was up to 505, including, get this, three children in preschool, 16 in kindergarten, 89 in grades 1-5, 125 in middle school, and 272 in high school. I think it’s obvious to any reasonable person that a child of four or five years old identifying as ‘non-binary’ has almost nothing to do with that child’s identity, which he or she can not even conceptualize at that age.
The reality is that children have been recruited into an industrial-scale social experiment, especially with regards to the new gender ideology that has permeated almost all our society in a short amount of time.
Jonathon added that gender ideology has ramped up the potential costs of sending children to a public school. “Your kid isn’t just going to maybe learn a very liberal view of sex and sexuality, but now they’re actually going to have identity questions that form the basis of how they see themselves introduced to them at a very young age, which could lead them on the road to transition. And, as we know, in many jurisdictions across the Western world, it is actually illegal and against policy for teachers to inform parents that their children [began] identifying as a different gender at school.”
Jonathon underscored the impact of peer pressure and kids’ desire to be popular. “The fastest route to achieving that [popularity] is to identify somewhere on the LBGT spectrum.” He quoted from a 2019 column by Suzanne Glover in the Daily Mail about her then-13-year-old daughter’s experience at a U.K. public school.
Over the past year, Bella has totted it up, and she and her friends estimate that around 12 percent, one in eight, of her year group have already come out as gay, bisexual, or transgender. Other parents I talk to at similar girls’ selective schools near us in the Home Counties cite similar percentages.
And it’s not just single-sex schools. In council figures released last November, Dorothy Stringer, a High School in Brighton, was revealed to have 40 children who didn’t identify with the sex they were at birth, with another 36 out of 1,600 children saying they were gender fluid.
…
According to the Government’s latest Sexual Identity Census figures, which are gathered anonymously,1.6 percent of adult women in the UK identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Although it is not tracked, it is estimated that the number of transgender people lies somewhere between 0.2 percent and 1 percent.
Jonathon pondered why this was so different in schools before continuing to read from the column: “One word whose meaning Bella did not yet know the meaning of was ‘cisgender.’ The word, which is being heard more and more, is defined as ‘people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth.’ In other words, Bella has been told she now has a label for being born a girl and wanting to stay one. Baffled, she told me after school: ‘I am a girl. I like being a girl. Until now, it didn’t occur to me that I needed to justify it.’”
Rhetorically asking who introduced these ideas into this young girl’s head, Jonathon said “it’s the school. The school is introducing and encouraging and facilitating the identification with other genders and other sexualities and even encouraging sexual experimentation. And students are just trying to figure out, ‘Well, who am I, actually?’ but they’re being told that there’s an essentially infinite list of options that they can choose from, and there’s only one option that’s really, really boring.”
For more analysis on the rot in our public school system, tune in to this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show.
UK Riots are Used to Call for End to Online Anonymity
In the wake of recent riots in the UK, Tobias Ellwood, former lawmaker, British Army reservist and a senior officer in the 77th Brigade, has voiced strong opinions on the role of social media in fueling public disorder. Ellwood, known for his previous support of vaccine passports and online vaccine certificate databases, emphasized the alleged negative impacts of online anonymity in a recent interview.
The UK’s 77th Brigade, officially known as the 77th Brigade of the British Army, is a unit that focuses on non-traditional warfare, including what is known as “information warfare” or “psychological operations.” Formed in 2015, it includes personnel from various sections of the military as well as reservists with expertise in a range of disciplines such as media, marketing, and public relations.
Related: The 2024 Digital ID and Online Age Verification Agenda
According to Ellwood, the swift spread of misinformation and the organization of disruptive activities are significantly enhanced by social media platforms. He proposed that no one should be able to maintain a social media account without full accountability, suggesting a nominal annual fee to remove anonymity for the use of such platforms as a measure to enforce responsibility among users.
The lawmaker drew a stark contrast between the positive representation of Britain at the Paris Olympics and the destructive behavior of rioters back home, stating that the ease of rallying and mobilizing through social media platforms exacerbates such issues.
“Have we advanced the rules to keep up with how social media is now dominating our society? ” Ellwood remarked, in an interview with GB News. However, the proposal has met with criticism. Benjamin Jones, Director of Case Operations at the Free Speech Union, who also appeared on GB News, argued that such measures could inadvertently harm vulnerable individuals who rely on anonymity for safety and expression. Citing the example of a young ex-Muslim lesbian woman, Jones pointed out that stripping anonymity could sever critical lifelines for those in oppressive situations.
Russia Should no Longer Hold Back in Ukraine – Medvedev
Russia should respond to Kiev’s attempted incursion in Kursk Region by taking over land that Moscow currently recognizes as Ukraine, former President Dmitry Medvedev has suggested.
The Ukrainian military initiated a cross-border raid involving some 1,000 troops this week, which has so far claimed five civilian lives and left over 30 others wounded in Russia. The operation has largely been thwarted by the Russian army and border guards, Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov reported on Wednesday. He estimated Ukrainian casualties at 315, including 100 killed in action.
“From this moment, the special military operation should become openly exterritorial in nature,” Medvedev, who serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, argued in a post on Thursday.
“We can and should go further into what still exists as Ukraine. To Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev. To Kiev and further. There should be no restrictions in terms of recognized borders,” he explained.
Read more EU endorses Ukraine’s incursion into Russia
Kiev and its Western backers claim that Russia started the hostilities in February 2022 out of a desire for imperial conquest. Moscow has denied that, saying it sought to stop continued Ukrainian attacks on the ethnic Russian breakaway republics in the east and preempt a Ukrainian military offensive in Donbass.
Four Ukrainian regions have since voted in referendums to join Russia, though some parts of them remain under Kiev’s control. Moscow says it will only agree to peace talks if Ukraine pulls its troops out of these new federal subjects.
Medvedev, a Ukraine conflict hardliner, said the “terrorist operation” in Kursk Region should “remove any taboo” on declaring publicly that the Russian forces “will only stop when we consider it acceptable and beneficial for us.”
The EU has endorsed the Ukrainian operation in Kursk Region. European Commission spokesman Peter Stano has said that the country has the right to defend itself, “including by striking the aggressor on its territory.”
READ MORE: Veteran Russian war correspondent wounded in Ukrainian drone attack
The US has implied that it had not been made aware of Kiev’s plans, with White House national security spokesman John Kirby telling the press: “We intend to reach out to our Ukrainian partners to get a fuller picture of what happened.”
Beijing Tests ‘Strike Capabilities’ in South China Sea
China has conducted a combat patrol near disputed territory in the South China Sea, following military maneuvers there by the Philippines along with the US and other Western allies.
According to media reports, the Chinese military’s Southern Theater Command announced on Wednesday that it had carried out air and sea combat patrols near Scarborough Shoal to test “strike capabilities.”
Scarborough Shoal, known as Huangyan Island in China and Panatag Shoal in the Philippines, is claimed by both Beijing and Manila. It is about 220 kilometers (120 nautical miles) west of the Philippine Island of Luzon.
The Chinese maneuvers tested the reconnaissance and early warning capabilities of its troops, according to Beijing.
“All military activities that disrupt the South China Sea, create hotspots, and undermine regional peace and stability are all being controlled to the best extent,” it stressed.
The combat patrol has reportedly been carried out in response to same-day military drills conducted by the US, Australia, Canada and the Philippines.
In a joint statement, military chiefs of the four countries vowed to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight,” and other uses of the sea and international airspace allowed under international law.
They said the two-day exercises were being held to uphold unhindered passage in the Asia Pacific region.
The South China Sea is the subject of numerous overlapping claims by countries in the region. Apart from China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei claim parts of it. The waterway sees significant volumes of commercial traffic and serves as the key conduit for the foreign trade of South Asian nations.
Tensions in the region have been further aggravated by the activities of the US and its allies, which routinely send in so-called “freedom of navigation” missions through the area claimed by Beijing as its exclusive economic zone.
READ MORE: US, allies plan show of force in South China Sea
Last week, the Philippines and Japan conducted their first joint maritime drill in the South China Sea.
China has repeatedly cautioned the Philippines against strengthening military cooperation with the US, saying it will be used to serve Washington’s geopolitical agenda to the detriment of Manila’s own security.
Relations between the two Asian countries have worsened since Philippines’ President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who took office in 2022, allowed American forces and weapons access to four additional Philippine military bases. Some of those bases are located near the disputed waters.
Washington had been “stirring up trouble” in the South China Sea, undermining efforts by China and its neighbors to maintain peace and stability in the disputed waters, the Chinese embassy in Manila has argued.
The Manchester Attack – AM Wake Up
Great to be invited to TLAV (The Last American Vagabond) Tuesday for AM Wake Up from the Slow News Day team. In this longer conversation I go into more detail about the evidence exposing the Manchester Arena hoaxed bombing. Please listen and share.
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