Stealing Valor & Criminalizing Speech
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz owes Brian Mast, who lost his legs to an IED bomb, an apology. Also Tom Cotton, Anna Paulina Luna, Ronny Jackson, J.D. Vance and especially the 2-3 million US soldiers who served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. After his selection as Kamala Harris’s vice presidential nominee, we learned Walz retired just before his Army Reserve Unit shipped out.
The Harris campaign has since scrubbed their website bio of Walz, demoting him from “retired command sergeant major.” He retired as master sergeant.
Several things are of interest here, apart from the abject dishonesty of Walz’s characterization of his own military record of 24 years of service in the reserves.
The first is that the disclosure clearly caught the campaign by surprise.
Asked about it, Vice President Harris looked annoyed at the tarmac question, bristling, “I praise anyone who has presented themselves to service our country, and I think we all should.” The media is covering for them — smearing Vance, who served in the Marines for four years, six months of it in the combat zone in Iraq.
But the fact that the Harris team was surprised by the uproar suggests either that ex Attorney General Eric Holder, who was tasked with vetting Kamala’s VP picks, didn’t notice the glaring disparity between Walz’s claims and his record — a clear omission — or he didn’t care. And if Holder, and Harris, chose to overlook this, it is likely because they are more worried about their Hamas wing — which could not cotton the selection of Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro, a Jew — than about military votes.
The second thing of note is that this deception is occurring at the same time that the US government is targeting stellar patriots for the crime of speaking their minds.
Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who served in the military after 9/11 and then in Congress and still serves in the reserves — is now under the security apparatus that George W. Bush put in place after the twin towers went down. Tuesday, as Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion and the rule of law,” Gabbard was placed on a terror watch, tailed by Air Marshals and bomb dogs.
She and her husband were designated for Secondary Security Screen Selection — in TSA lingo, the Quad-S — searched and harrassed every time they boarded an airplane.
“I enlisted because of the terrorist attack on 9/11,” she told journalist Matt Taibbi. “I can’t think of a a word that adequately captres how I feel. The closest I can think of is the deepest sense of betrayal. It cuts to the core.”
Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in Congress, was so effective in debating Kamala Harris in the 2020 election that Harris dropped out of the Dem presidential primary.
Gabbard said recently that Kamala Harris is the “new figurehead for the deep state” and would be “incredibly dangerous” as commander in chief.
With Harris on the verge of winning the nomination, was Gabbard’s harassment payback? And is it a preview of what we might see from a Harris-Walz administration?
It certainly is if Walz can be believed.
During the pandemic, the governor of Minnesota not only imposed a draconian lockdown on his state’s residents, he set up a “snitch line” for citizens to report on their neighbors for not masking up at home or leaving the house or living their lives. Fox News’ Jesse Watters got his hands on a few, through a FOIA request.
Walz also used executive orders to fine small businesses that didn’t padlock their doors” and “charged dozens of people who broke his COVID rules while he let the rioters burn downtown.” Now, talking about critics who push back against his abortion policy, which allows termination of pregnancies into the ninth month, or his decision to appease gender ideology by ordering tampons be put in every boys’ school bathroom, his response is, “Mind you own damn business.”
In Britain, citizens who write social media posts criticizing the government’s decision to admit thousands of illegal immigrants are called “far-right thugs” and arrested for expressing their opinions. Advocates for censorship are thrilled, suggesting a kind of “militant democracy” that would suppress any speech not to their liking. And the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Mark Rowley, is threatening to imprison and extradite American citizens over their online posts, including Elon Musk.
Two years ago during his campaign for governor, Walz said, “There’s no guarantee to free speech, on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
One other thing I’ve been musing about lately. Have you ever — say in the last twenty years — heard a chant of “USA” break out at the Democrat political rally? Have you ever heard of a Trump rally where that didn’t happen?
Black voters are saluting conservative values. I will have more to say about this in a later post, but clearly African-Americans know what it means to lose their freedoms.
And no group shows patriotism than our soldiers, who pay it forward with their lives, and often with their limbs. They deserve better than to come home to the country they fight for only to find that their views have been censored.