The Timchurian Candidate

Don’t expect the mainstream media to cover this new story about Tim Walz or to interrogate the accusations against him in any detail

At the beginning of August, I thought Tim Walz was totally cooked.

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, accusations of impropriety or dishonourable conduct as a serviceman were enough to kill a political candidate stone dead.

With John Kerry, back in 2004, the “Swift Boat” accusations were pretty vague and it’s still not clear to this day that he was guilty of whatever it was he was actually accused of, but the general odour of dishonour was enough to make Americans turn their noses up and vote for George W. Bush instead. And remember: Kerry was a man who served in a warzone—that warzone being Vietnam.

With Tim Walz, by contrast, there can be little doubt that he is guilty of stolen valor, that he has inflated his military rank and record and lied to the faces of Gold Star families and tried to pass himself off as a combat veteran suffering from PTSD. Walz even said at a 9/11 memorial event that he remembered watching bodies being loaded onto a military plane at “Bagram Air Base in Iraq.”

Like I said, there are two problems with this claim: Bagram Airbase is in Afghanistan, not Iraq; and Tim Walz never went to either of those countries. The closest he got to a Middle East deployment was running support duties in Italy, where the local Taliban is a culinary one that will only skin you alive if you order a milky coffee past midday.

Former National Guard members have lined up to launch buckets of steaming excrement over Walz. Men who served under him and above him. Walz is absolutely covered. A former commander of Walz’s battalion, John Kolb, described Walz as a self-serving coward whose abandonment of his battalion before its deployment to Iraq in 2004 was a blessing in disguise.

“I do not regret that Tim Walz retired early from the Minnesota Army National Guard, did not complete the Sergeants Major Academy, broke his enlistment contract or did not successfully complete any assignment as a Sergeant Major,” Kolb wrote on Facebook.

“Unwittingly, he got out of the way for better leadership.”

I’ll say it again: Ouch.

But it seems America is a different country now, even from 20 years ago. What was once fatal in the eyes of the American public, now barely leaves a wound.

I won’t say the accusations will have no effect—they could still tip the balance against the Harris-Walz ticket—but it will be hard to gauge their effects. It certainly looks like Kamala Harris’s choice of VP is driving independents in Minnesota away from the Democrats, especially white men. Minnesotans are the people who know Walz best of all, apart from the soldiers who served with him in the National Guard and can’t stop saying dreadful things about him. Minnesotans remember the snitch hotline from the pandemic and they see the transformation of parts of their state into an exclave of Somalia and they know who’s responsible. They see him smirking on Twitter and pretending he cares about the state of his truck’s air filter—“just like they do.”

Even so, it’s clear these accusations about his military service are not going to force Tim Walz to bow out as Kamala Harris’s running mate, or force Kamala Harris to fire him. I thought they would. I was wrong.

The general sense with Walz, whether he’s talking about his wife’s fertility treatments, his political “origin story” or just opening his mouth, is that he is a pathological liar. The kind of person who simply can’t stop telling lies, even about small, silly things that can easily be refuted.

You may have met liars like Tim Walz. I have. They simply can’t be helped. The best thing you can do is to extricate or insulate yourself from them.

Such people are dangerous even at the best of times. But Walz is much more dangerous than that, I think, and not just because he’s running for the second highest political office in the land. Walz may also be a spy for the Chinese government.

Walz is now being investigated for his ties to the Chinese Communist Party, spanning a period of decades. The House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. James Comer, announced an investigation last month. Comer sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, demanding information on Walz’s links to the CCP, and issued a press release about the investigation.

“The CCP has sought to destroy the United States through coordinated influence and infiltration campaigns that target every aspect of American life, including our own elected officials,” Comer said in the press release.

“Americans should be deeply concerned that Governor Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, has a longstanding and cozy relationship with China. Mr. Walz has visited China dozens of times, served as a fellow at a Chinese institution that maintains a devotion to the CCP, and spoke alongside the President of a Chinese organization the State Department exposed as a CCP effort to influence and co-opt local leaders. FBI briefers recently informed the Committee that the Bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force investigates CCP activity that is similar to China’s engagement with Governor Walz. The American people deserve to fully understand how deep Governor Walz’s relationship with China goes.”

The press release goes on to detail how Walz began organizing school trips to China, funded by the CCP, in the early 1990s, and then set up a private company which organized annual trips to China, until it was dissolved days before Walz entered Congress in 2007. Walz has visited China an estimated 30 times, and held various positions of influence with regard to US-China relations.

He’s also promoted a biotech lab in Minnesota with close links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the COVID-19 virus originated from.

One former student who travelled to China with Walz described him recently as “Maoist to the core.”

And the accusations keep coming. A new, hugely serious, one is that Walz may have transferred classified military secrets about a nuclear-capable howitzer gun to the Chinese, in the mid 1990s. That’s what a former member of Walz’s battalion alleged this week.

Speaking to Alpha News, the retired soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described how the standard operating procedure manual for the M109A5 howitzer, detailing the gun’s nuclear capabilities, went missing.