Trump supporters are desperate. First, they attacked Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard because he retired to run for Congress at a time when his unit knew they might be deployed to Afghanistan in the next two years.
The Trump rumor mill has been working overtime to depict Walz and his wife as dangerous, leftwing radicals.
Snopes debunked a rightwing rumor that Tim and Gwen Walz have a net worth of $182 million and their daughter Hope got a student loan of $82,000 forgiven. In fact, the Walz family has a net worth made up of their pensions; they own no stocks or bonds. In 2023, they had a joint income of $299,000, with almost half coming from pensions. By contrast, Republican VP candidate J.P. Vance is a multimillionaire, with a net income of $1.2 million-$1.3 million in 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal. Some Americans like the fact that Walz is not wealthy, says the WSJ, but others think he lacks the financial acumen of a wealthy man.
Now, says The New York Times, they say Walz wasn’t really a coach because he was not the head coach of the high school football team. Only the head coach, they claim, is a real coach. How petty can they be?
Meanwhile, hard–right Congressman James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced that his committee will investigate Walz because of his visits to China as an exchange student and as chaperone for student exchanges. Is he a spy?
All of this is a reflection of Republican desperation and Red-baiting.
Jess Bidgood, a reporter for the New York Times, asked her colleague Alan Blinder of the New York Times to explain whether Walz was really a coach:
Fact-checking questions about Walz’s role as a coach
A surprising argument has emerged from some right-wing circles: that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was not a high school football coach because he was his team’s defensive coordinator, not the head coach. I asked my colleague Alan Blinder, a font of football knowledge who wrote about Walz’s coaching career *and* answers my questions about sports whenever I have them, to explain what’s what.
Setting aside that assertion’s spuriousness for the moment, our reporting last week on Tim Walz as Coach Walz suggests just how comfortable he is with not being the top dog.
Rocky Almond, who coached basketball with Walz in Nebraska in the early 1990s, said that Walz had “been the supporting actor for his whole life,” recalling a trip to China that the future vice-presidential pick organized. Even though Walz was the group’s veteran Asia hand, Almond remembered a coach who never tried to seize command.
“He just was always in the background,” said Almond, who thought the vice presidency was “the perfect role” for his old colleague’s temperament.
“I think he had the intensity, but it was a positive energy,” said Jeff Tomlin, the Nebraska high school head football coach who brought Walz aboard to coach linebackers. “He was a very good assistant that way. As the head coach, you sometimes have to be an enforcer and really guard your culture and make hard decisions. As assistant, you want to be loyal to your head coach and back up your head coach, and he was all of those things.”
And as for that question of whether Walz should count as a coach at all? Some players on his Minnesota title-winning team still refer to him as “Coach Walz,” and football staffs are filled with specialty coaches who are, in fact, coaches with headsets and playbooks.
“Defensive coordinator is arguably the most important position on a coaching staff other than the head coach,” the ESPN commentator Paul Finebaum mused to me today. “You can’t win a game, let alone a state championship, without being able to stop someone.”
— Alan Blinder
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The suggestion that Walz was only an assistant strengthens my admiration for him. That was me for the first nine years of my teaching career at a rural high school. In many ways it was more challenging than being the head coach, because I had a full teaching load (six preps for most of that) in addition to being out many evenings during season. Since I felt my first obligation was academic, I often found myself sitting in the stands with those blue mimeograph blanks, drawing geometry problems that would lead students to major theorems and figures while the second basketball game went on before me.
Walz continues to impress. Conspiracy theories are about all the GOP has left. Trumpism is undergoing the atrophy of age.
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The “RePUG-ME-CONS” are incredibly desperate! So they LIE!
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One of my favorite Twitter parody accounts—3 Year Letterman, who inhabits the persona of a “youth football coaching legend” and licensed notary public, has presented the defensive coordinator issue as one of “stolen valor.”
https://x.com/3yearletterman/status/1820912108927926297?s=46&t=vV_4bJ7GuABaalzetJofQA
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Who is this guy? Walz was coach in Alliance, Nebraska, I thought.
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Is the parody that all the stuff is wrong?
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It’s a parody account. One of his hallmarks is he gets everything wrong.
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a bit subtle for this ole country boy
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Letterman should do an interview with Tim Walz where he debunks all the misinformation around Walz. It should be funny, clever and charming, and the two Midwesterners could produce a super-viral video that would attract a lot of young people. They should ridicule the GOP’s desperation.
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Supporters are desperate…Word-clouding a VP running mate won’t put the VP running mate in the drivers seat. The “Buck” doesn’t start or stop at the desk of a VP. The powers of the appointed don’t beg: “Put me in Coach, I’m ready to play.” Coach or not, monied or not, a VP doesn’t call the shots made by the appointed dictators of policies.
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There is nothing strange about a history teacher being interested in China and its ancient civilization. Walz spent his honeymoon in China and taught there for a year. I have two teacher friends that had a Fulbright and spent a year there as well. They are not spies for the Chinese government. Walz also took a number of student groups on visits to China. Where I taught our high school had an ongoing relationship with Senegal. Students from our school visited Senegal, and some of the African teachers and students visited our high school as well.
The GOP only understands greed so we can forget about them understanding a cultural exchange program. They are happy to live in their right wing bubble and stamp out any concept associated with DEI. The idea that the GOP wants to investigate Walz for his ties to China is a joke.
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Wait until they conjure up his laptop.
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retired teacher: John Dewey also visited China (1919-1921). His influence on university students at that time were like seeds for the remarkable changes that China was undergoing. That history is “thick” and I wonder what things would be like now if he had not done so. History is funny that way . . .
Of course, that information in the hands of Trump propagandists (the Two-Steve Stupid Machine of Miller and Bannon) and the 2025 pseudo-religio-fascists, the logic goes like this: teachers have read books by Dewey, Dewey went to China: therefore, all public teachers are Chinese spies. CBK
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Dewey spent time in Russia too, and he was often called a Communist. In fact, many of Dewey’s friends were killed by Stalin; Dewey was horrified.
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Diane: I didn’t know about the Russia visit–makes me want to to deeper into his life story.
But I CANNOT EVEN IMAGINE having one’s friends killed in such a way–that kind of puts the lie to the very idea that Dewey would be a communist–by the standards of his day (most on-the-ground political systems have morphed quite a bit since then).
And yet, if one wants to think so, and is ideologically invested in the idea, it must be so. I guess everyone on this list, with some exceptions, need to get a new Sharpie. CBK
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With the our federal debt due, to a great degree, to the policies of rich folk like Reagan, the Bush’s, and Trump, can we finally acknowledge that those with money aren’t particularly effective with economics?
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Paul,
The morbidly rich (Thom Hartmann’s phrase) are superb at getting richer and holding on to their money but they know nothing about using their wealth to help others gain access to the middle class or to alleviate misery.
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Hartman also hints at a problem I perceive: When a person controls a worth like a third world country, his ego turns to power and control. If we want to preserve the hope of representative government in whichever form, we must prevent power centers outside that government from competing with it. The balance of powers will not stand otherwise.
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pabonner: hmmmm . . . . CBK
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Nor are they interested in be effective with economics. They have their wealth so they could care less about the rest of the people in this country when it comes to economics. In their view, they have their wealth let the rest of the people in this country try to get theirs.
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Soon after Anchee and I got married in 1999, we were off to mainland China for our honeymoon where I met her parents who lived in the same one room flat in the French sector, where Anchee grew up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Because we visited China annually, Anchee bought a flat in Shanghai. A few years ago, she sold it.
With Anchee as a tour guide and wife, I’ve been all over China, but not everywhere. China’s a big country. almost the same size as the US lower 48.
Anchee’s books are on China’s blacklist so there are no legal Mandarin versions. The only way to find one in Mandarina is to buy it on the black market. She heard about the black-market copies and found one. After reading the illegal Mandarin version, she said it was a well-done translation from the English originals.
I found English copies of her work in the largest bookstore I’ve ever been in. That was in Shanghai. It was a high-rise bookstore, every floor, with elevators and escalators, with one of the higher floors for foreign print copies only. There was no restriction to buying a copy of Anchee’s book in English there.
What I found strange is English is mandatory in China’s public schools. If most educated Chinese read English, what use is it to ban only a Mandarin version of the book?
With whom I married and the many trips we took to China, to a MAGA lunatic, I must also be a spy for China. Even more so, since I was married to a Chinese born American citizen who grew up during Mao’s era.
In 1999, when I first arrived in China, what I saw didn’t match what we are taught by the US media about China in the US. Shanghai by itself is up to date modern. IKEA is a popular place for senior citizens to meet over coffee.
In Shanghai, I saw a two story, all glass Pizza Hut on the bottom two floors of a high rise with a line stretching around the block, waiting to get in and eat.
The Chinese people may have more freedom than most citizen in the US, as long as they do not criticize the CCP in public. Most of them are not miserable. Many are also in love with the US middle class lifestyle. I’ve bene in many homes and they didn’t feel any different than middle class homes in the US.
And China’s Constitution clearly says it is forbidden to do that, to threaten the country’s harmony. In China, religions are not allowed to meddle in politics. n In China billionaires are not allowed to meddle in politics. The rich and powerful in China that break the laws have their own prison. It’s not a country club prison and its packed past capacity.
Anyone who’s interested may find an English version of China’s Constitution on the internet. I’ve read it. The CCP isn’t hiding who they are.
And China is responsible for 90% of the reduction of poverty in the world, that took place in China since Mao died.
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when my daughter was in Girl Scouts, I took her to a thing at the Chinese Center, a cultural thing at Middle Tennessee State University. The lady in charge of the of this mostly music museum was a fascinating lady.
She told us that she had the advantage growing up to be the daughter of a military man, which gave her the resources to attend college. Afterward, she became employed in traveling to the many ethnic groups in China to collect music that was common to the various cultures there.
I was far more fascinated than the girl scouts, but they created some cool paper art.
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Lloyd: Tell us: what is the great difference, then, between China and the United States or, more to the point, democracy and however you view the political state of China, lest you seem like Tucker Carlson, to some, who visited Russia recently and was apparently dazzled by their supermarkets. . . or paid well, or threatened, or, . . . . whichever. CBK
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Walz is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, that should be considered as an asset not something to be ashamed of. But the deranged GOP is using his Chinese teaching experience to label him as a red commie. McCarthyism just never goes away in this country and McCarthyism existed even before McCarthy was born. Proposing Medicare for all is horrible communism in the eyes of the GOP. If anything, the GOP wants to gut and eviscerate Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and any other social programs that help the poor and ordinary working class Americans.
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The morbidly rich believe that churches and charities should care for the poor, not the state.
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a generation before McCarthy, Martin Dies turned the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) loose on suspected communists. HUAC lasted through McCarthy and helped Richard Nixon get selected VP. Before that, A Mitchell Palmer used fear of immigrants and their perceived anarchism/Marxism to deport thousands of people and lay the groundwork for very restrictive immigration quotas in 1924.
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They’re like a pack of seventh graders bullying the new kid at recess.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they at least tried to do their jobs. Of course, first they’d have to learn them…
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@BeckyPringle On your CSPAN Assessments commentary: It’s not how kids learn, it’s how we traumatize when we conflate Learning & Teaching with Competition! Ivy league grading for ALL K-12 Now! Are you Mrs Pringle aware of Gov Newsoms efforts to remove misleading & biased textbooks from schools just like we removed misleading statues from parks – upon learning that publishers have removed WOKEness from school books at the behest of Southern Gov’s like Desantis? Error is Opportunity to Explore, earn Learning rewards & Teach, NOT Opportunity to be judged, Regret, be Punished & be Trained. Right?
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