Perhaps you have noticed that Minnesota, my home state, has been in the news a bit of late.
Shocking, I know. While Minnesotans have long thought of ourselves as an example to the world, little did we know that the world would come to see us as an example of how NOT to run a state.
It wasn’t so long ago… say, a year or so… that Democrats wanted everybody to know that Minnesota was, in fact, exceptionally well run. So well, in fact, that its model of governance should be taken nationwide.
Minnesota Democrats won the “trifecta” in 2022 and basically enacted the entire Biden Dem agenda–family and medical leave, child tax credits, gun restrictions and lots more. @EJDionne was ecstatic. (“Momentous.) I made a mental note to come back in a few years and see if…
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) January 6, 2026
Minnesota Democrats won the “trifecta” in 2022 and basically enacted the entire Biden Dem agenda–family and medical leave, child tax credits, gun restrictions and lots more.
@EJDionne was ecstatic. (“Momentous.) I made a mental note to come back in a few years and see if Minnesota was actually a better place to live due to this “avalanche of progressive legislation.” I think we’re beginning to get the answer …
You may be thinking that I am referring to Kamala Harris’ decision to choose Tim Walz as her Vice Presidential candidate. But to be fair, Democrats had been keeping an eye on Tim Walz for some time before she and her top-tier vetting team, led by Eric Holder, the former Attorney General of the United States under Barack Obama, decided he was just the guy to help run the $7 trillion federal budget.
EJ Dionne, writing for the Washington Post in 2023, was so impressed by Walz’s governance that he said that the “Minnesota Miracle” of Tim Walz’s excellent leadership should serve as a model for Democrats across the country.
Walz, you see, is the perfect example of how progressives should do things.
… the Minnesota Miracle, which is only beginning to get the attention it deserves, is so important. The avalanche of progressive legislation that the state’s two-vote Democratic majority in the Minnesota House and one-vote advantage in the state Senate have enacted this year is a wonder to behold.
To detail everything Gov. Tim Walz and his legislative partners accomplished would far outstrip the space allocated here. Minn Post reporters Peter Callaghan and Walker Orenstein offered a bracing race through the list:
“Democrats codified abortion rights, paid family and medical leave, sick leave, transgender rights protections, drivers licenses for undocumented residents, restoration of voting rights for people when they are released from prison or jail, wider voting access, one-time rebates, a tax credit aimed at low-income parents with kids, and a $1 billion investment in affordable housing including for rental assistance.”
Take a breath and move on: “Also adopted were background checks for private gun transfers and a red-flag warning system to take guns from people deemed by a judge to be a threat to themselves or others. [Democratic] lawmakers banned conversion therapy for LGBTQ people, legalized recreational marijuana, expanded education funding, required a carbon-free electric grid by 2040, adopted a new reading curricula based on phonics, passed a massive $2.58 billion capital construction package and, at the insistence of Republicans, a $300 million emergency infusion of money to nursing homes.” The mix of tax cuts and increases, by the way, will make the state’s revenue system more progressive.
There’s a lot more, including laws strengthening workers’ rights and unemployment insurance for hourly workers previously left out of the system; a refundable child credit for lower-income Minnesotans; and free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota K-12 students.
It’s no wonder former president Barack Obama tweeted recently: “If you need a reminder that elections have consequences, check out what’s happening in Minnesota.”
Yep, that’s right. It’s not just Eric Holder who thinks Tim Walz is da bomb. Good ol’ Barry Soetero/Barack Obama himself believes that Tim Walz is the ideal progressive governor.
And, to be sure, they have a point. Walz’s great sin turns out to be that he is very good at enabling fraud, but very bad at hiding it from YouTubers. National Democrats mistook the fact that Walz could get away with such large-scale looting as proof that he is really, really good at this sort of thing, when in fact it just turns out that our local media is so in the tank for Democrats that they are willing to cover it all up, no matter how absurdly obvious it is.
Walz thinks this will help win back some of the voters who drifted Republican in the Trump years. “There’s nothing extreme about feeding kids,” he said. “There’s nothing extreme about women making their own health-care decisions. There’s nothing extreme about saying don’t demonize these trans children. Just make a place for them. We’ll all be okay. And I think I think it’s working.”
As Cuba, Venezuela, and every socialist and communist government have ever shown, progressive policies may work well for the people at the top, but they always and everywhere cause misery for everybody who is not in on the grift.
Of course, if Harris and Walz had won, they likely would have used a “disinformation czar” to suppress Nick Shirley and all the Army of Davids rooting out the fraud.
No doubt EJ Dionne and Barack Obama lament the fact that they couldn’t quite pull it off.
What has been exposed here in Minnesota is not some anomaly; this is what Democrats have themselves, time and again, made clear is their ideal form of governance.
Oct 2024. Eric Holder explains that his vetting of Tim Walz for Kamala’s VP didn’t miss “anything of substance.”
“Authentic guy with a great record.”
They knew about Walz.
Everything they said about this guy in the 2024 campaign was a lie. pic.twitter.com/mRrOMBfSri
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 5, 2026
Again, the former Attorney General of the United States under Barack Obama provided the vetting for Walz. He, and obviously everybody else, knew all about this fraud well before the choice was made to put him on the ticket. It was a qualification for the job in their eyes. While the scandal wasn’t dominating the news, all the basic facts have been out there for years.
The Minnesota child care fraud saga is so strange because years ago it was fully investigated, documented, and reported on by a team of state investigators set up to catch and stop child care fraud.
They spent years gathering evidence including many hours of surveillance… pic.twitter.com/YQHQ0gisoN
— MAZE (@mazemoore) January 6, 2026
They spent years gathering evidence including many hours of surveillance footage. In 2018 they compiled a detailed report and delivered it to their boss, the DHS Inspector General.
Directly from the report: “Investigators, as well as the Supervisor and Manager of this unit believe that the overall fraud rate in this program is at least 50% of the $217M paid to child care centers in CY2017.”
What did the Inspector General do with this information? She refused to meet with her own team, refused to discuss the findings of the report, and then spent $90,000 of taxpayer money to have an outside company write a report saying the fraud isn’t quite as bad as her own team of investigators was claiming.
Here’s an email summarizing the fraud that the lead investigator sent the IG in 2018. Those currently in the MSM claiming that child care fraud isn’t a serious problem should read this.
The real question is how highly paid state investigators spent years investigating child care fraud in MN, reported on said fraud, and eight years later not only was the fraud not stopped, it was bigger than ever.
4) Page 13 of 13 pic.twitter.com/7UNj0nn1SF
— MAZE (@mazemoore) January 6, 2026
Tim Walz’s fall from grace isn’t really a story about a corrupt politician being caught with his hand in the cookie jar; it’s not even clear that Walz HAD his own hand in that jar, except to hand out the cookies to his political allies.
Rather, it is about how the Pravda Media and the political establishment can commit fraud out in the open without consequences, at least until some viral YouTuber blows it all up. And even that couldn’t have happened without Elon Musk buying X and Donald Trump squeaking into the White House.
Does anybody believe that the story would have caught on if Walz were VP? I don’t. It would have been quashed in the same manner as the Hunter Biden laptop, with every major media outlet screaming “racism!”
This is how progressivism works. It is their ideal.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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