It’s hard to believe it’s barely been a week, but over the past few days, we’ve seen a remarkable, concerted effort from the left to whitewash Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) from a devastating radical to an all-American man who is the most brilliant choice ever for vice president. The whole sanitizing of Walz has been a sight to behold.
We’ve written a lot here at PJ Media about Walz’s stolen valor and the attempts to portray him as a combat veteran. Leftists are trying to paint him as a paternal figure in the ickiest of ways, calling him “America’s Dad” and going on about whatever the heck “dad energy” is. Even the efforts to highlight his Christian faith fall apart when you discover how progressive and heretical his church is.
Obviously, the left means for all of these efforts to detract from Walz’s radicalism. There’s nothing normal or “middle America” about the policies Walz has promoted throughout his political career.
Even sports media is getting in on the whitewashing. My favorite sports news site The Athletic published an article on Monday morning that consisted mostly of quotes from Walz’s former high school football players about how great a coach he was. The notification I received was cringeworthy enough:
The headlines tried to obfuscate the narrative behind the piece. The main headline on the article itself read, “Tim Walz’s former football players think back on glory days: ‘We were so bad before his era,’” while the headline on the home page tried to make it look like the article was about the players: “'Am I getting pranked?' Former football players of Tim Walz in spotlight amid VP candidacy.”
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Falling in line with the whitewashing of a radical, the article gives a “Friday Night Lights” patina to Walz’s pre-political career:
Before he was elected governor of Minnesota, before he represented the state’s first district in Congress, and long before he became a candidate for vice president, Walz was a coach and social studies teacher in the Midwest, first in Nebraska and then in Minnesota. The night he introduced himself on the national stage in Philadelphia, many of his fellow coaches and former players at Mankato West thought back to sticky fall evenings as they listened to their old defensive coach, who used to light them up in the film room and challenge them on the practice field 25 years ago.
Plenty of players and fellow coaches reminisced about how bad the team was when Walz came to Mankato West High School. Even when the team continued to perform poorly, Walz motivated his players in a contagious way.
So many of the players’ memories sound like most generic stories about football coaches. The cliches of a passionate coach with unique ways to motivate his players abound. One player mentions Walz’s “background with the National Guard.”
Another player talks about being surprised that Walz had political ambitions: “I just would have never guessed. We obviously had political debates in class, but you never knew where he stood on an issue. He’d always play devil’s advocate. Honestly, until, like 2004, ’05, and ‘06, I actually didn’t even know that he was really political. I just kind of knew him as a coach.”
Walz may have been a terrific coach, and none of the former players or fellow coaches expressed any opinion in favor of or against Walz as a governor or as a nominee for vice president. But the point of the article is patently obvious: Walz was a football coach, for crying out loud! Why wouldn’t he make a great vice president?
The article’s all-American portrayal of a radical like Walz wasn’t lost on some commenters. One of them wrote that “people don't want spoon fed propaganda about a guy whose biggest legacy in public office was establishing a COVID snitch hotline and letting his city burn to the ground.”
“Sure glad the Times bought the Athletic,” cracked another commenter. “Now we get the propaganda I come here to avoid pumped in direct.”
“The concept of these types of pieces are [sic] great,” wrote another. “The problem is that if this were someone on the other side, there is zero chance is [sic] would get published or even pitched. Wish we could get back to that time in our country smh.”
Therein lies the problem. I can’t recall any articles in The Athletic about Republican candidates reliving their “glory days” of high school sports. I haven’t gotten any hagiographical notifications about former athletes running as conservatives.
“I have never felt more gaslit than I have the last few weeks,” a friend of mine told me in a text conversation shortly after the article came out. “I cannot believe people are buying this crap.” This is what we’re up against. The legacy media and leftists everywhere are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans about Walz’s radicalism — to the point where even sports outlets are trying to go all “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” about Walz.
This is why it’s important to support truth-tellers. You sure won’t hear from the media about how far to the left Walz is, but we’ll keep exposing him. You can help us in our calling to report the truth with the conservative perspective you crave and a dash of style by becoming a PJ Media VIP.
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