Is Tim Walz A Chinese Secret Agent? F*ck It, Probably, Right?

Yeah, we knew this was coming.

The other day we were reading about America’s new dad, Tim Walz, mostly to see if he had any tips about how to tuck-point our front steps. And while we’re sure he has such tips that he will unveil at the convention, what we mostly learned was about his history with China. It seems Walz, like millions of other Westerners, has long been fascinated by the Land of the Dragon. Also like millions of Westerners, he has spent a fair amount of time living and working and touring China and taking his high school pupils from Minnesota on trips to China, and so on. (Maybe not millions of Westerners.)

Then we thought about how often we’ve heard some right-wing xenophobic weirdo like convicted felon Donald Trump or JD Vance sneer about communist China trying to infiltrate America to steal all our technology or our white women or whatever the fuck they are always screaming about. And we thought to ourselves, Oh Lord, this is going to be A Thing for the wingnuts, isn’t it?

Call us Nostradamus! Some of the dumbest elements of the Right are now melting down with evidence-free smears about Walz’s alleged sympathies, implying he is secretly a Chinese spy or a communist or a communist Chinese spy or whatever.

Here, for example, is former Trump ambassador to Germany and squinty-eyed dunce Richard Grenell, who has never met a silly, brain-dead argument about a Democrat he will not immediately squawk out like the one kid in your second grade class who was constantly disrupting math lessons in the vague hope that the attention from the teacher would fill the yawning empty chasm in his soul:

“Marxist Walz”! We see Grenell did not spend any of the years he was in Germany actually reading anything about Karl Marx. He was probably too busy attending AfD mixers and making the Germans so mad they publicly celebrated when he finally went back to the United States. But hey, if Professor Grenell wants to explain how Walz’s policies in Minnesota fit into Marxist theories of the communist mode of production, fine, we haven’t had a good laugh in at least a couple of hours.

Sen. Tom Cotton, God’s answer to the question “What would a human be like if he were Genghis Khan but ten thousand times less pleasant,” also is making his own demands:

Walz’s 35-year relationship with Communist China can actually be pretty easily summed up. There is a lot of reporting on it, such as this deep dive from Josh Rogin at The Washington Post. Maybe Cotton could have an intern read it and then brief him, using only very small words.

Fox News anchorhole Jesse Watters had a whole segment on Walz’s history with China, bringing on a former Trump State Department official named Morgan Ortagus so the two of them could talk about the anodyne activity of a high school teacher leading students on a trip to a foreign country in dramatic and downright spooky tones of voice:

WATTERS: In back-to-back elections, Democrats have put guys with deep ties to the Chinese on the ticket. What’s that about?

We can do this too. Like, say: For several years Fox News has given prominent anchor jobs to a sneering idiot juvenile adulterer who does nothing but praise a racist over-bronzed buffoon while spouting fact-free insinuations about the buffoon’s political opponents. What’s that about?

Not that these jackasses would tell you, but Walz has actually been very critical of China, particularly over its military expansionism and its genocide against the Uighurs. That is because he’s smart enough to understand the difference between a people with a culture thousands of years old, and the repressive dictatorships that sometimes rule them.

Walz even met with the Dalai Lama, which pissed China off, which we suppose is just what a Chinese double agent would do to deflect attention from himself.

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The funny thing is, this week comments were popping up on Chinese social media sites accusing Walz of having secretly been an American spy, casting suspicions that he had ulterior motives during the decade-plus he was leading groups of students on trips to China. Given the censorious nature of China’s government, we can assume such comments were left up because the ruling communists find such propaganda helpful.

The other funny thing is that among America’s political figures, Donald Trump is actually one of the biggest admirers of China’s communist government. He has spoken many times of his “great friendship” with China’s president/dictator Xi Jinping. He also praised the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square:

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Trump said. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

Tim Walz was in Hong Kong preparing to spend a year teaching in China when the Tiananmen Square crackdown happened in 1989. His reaction was to continue his journey to engage with China’s people, because unlike Trump and his ilk, he is not a vicious and dishonest asshole.

It will be good to have someone with Walz’s level of experience with China in the White House. It might also mean we won’t go to war against China as Trump advisor Steve Bannon has been pushing for years, but Bannon is in prison so who cares.

[The Times UK / Twitter / Twitter / WaPo / Twitter / Times of London]

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