Debate Debacle: Walz’s Anti-American Agenda Laid Bare

Walz’s weird, unlikeable debate performance belayed a deeply troubling vision for what America should look like.

Few people watched last night’s vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. But those dozens that did witnessed an absolute bloodbath and yet more proof that Walz cannot be allowed anywhere near power.

Let’s start with the obvious. Walz did not compose himself as a leader should on stage, appearing more like a deer in the headlights than potentially the second most powerful person on Earth. The memes on social media featuring Walz’s bugged-out eyes and sweaty face and Vance’s Jim Halpert-esque looks to camera might be hysterical, but they also depict a man unready for prime time power. 

Walz’s repeated gaffs added to this sense of unworthiness. “I’ve become friends with school shooters” and women as a pre-existing condition are statements that sound more like something out of the Joe Biden playbook than a steady executive. 

But rather than deep dive into Dad’s weird idiosyncrasies, I’d rather discuss the genuinely frightening and un-American prescriptions Walz displayed during the debate. 

Multiple times, Walz has expressed his disdain for the First Amendment and desire to see federal power tamp down on so-called disinformation. Back in 2022, Walz told MSNBC’s Joy Reid that “There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Walz then doubled down on that sentiment in the debate saying that the First Amendment didn’t protect “hate speech” even citing an overturned and irrelevant Supreme Court ruling about yelling fire in a crowded theater. 

As Justice Alito wrote all the way back in 2017

The idea that the government may restrict speech expressing ideas that offend … strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express "the thought that we hate.”

But Democrats like Walz refuse to let this idea die. They want to ban speech that they find egregious and kill the most essential right that Americans enjoy. Walz is expressing the dictatorial tendencies of European authoritarians who jail dissident citizens on spurious hate speech charges to avoid facing accountability for their numerous failures. 

These are not the sentiments of people concerned with preserving American democracy. 

Walz and his running mate consistently seem to think that they should be the sole arbiters of what speech should be considered hate speech. But they don’t seem to look in the mirror and reflect on how their own speech could be construed as hateful towards groups they consider fair game. Say something rude about a black man and it’s virulent hate speech. Say the same thing about a white guy and it’s speaking truth to power. 

Utter hypocrisy. 

That goes for Walz’s concerns for disinformation, too. It’s disinformation to correctly say that vaccines didn’t actually prevent transmission of COVID-19 like Dr. Fauci repeatedly promised, but not disinformation to lie about it in the first place. 

Question for Walz, is it disinformation to say you “carried weapons of war” in an attempt to ban Americans from owning their constitutionally protected arms? Or that you earned a military rank higher than what you actually did? No? Strange how that works. 

The truth of the matter is Democrats like Walz and Harris are terribly unconcerned with “protecting American Democracy” and far more interested in solidifying their power to control what the average citizen can and cannot do. 

Returning briefly to guns, the Harris/Walz administration has made no secret that they would move to ban as many weapons as they could the first second they got. Harris has repeatedly expressed a desire for mandatory buyback programs while Waltz said during the debate “sometimes it just is the guns” as an excuse to institute unconstitutional arms bans. Not that gun owner Tim Walz cares, he gets all the private security he wants! As for the average Joe? He’s on his own. 

Walz’s weird, unlikeable debate performance belayed a deeply troubling vision for what America should look like. Inevitably, biased media outlets will blast Vance’s unwillingness to say if Biden had won the 2020 election or not. But given that the concern is that a Trump would doom the Republic if allowed to return to power, ignoring blatantly anti-American comments from Walz does no service to preserving the country either. 

Walz is no friend to the American people. Last night just proved it.