Who is Tim Walz?

 

All across America families are in mourning: their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the rightwing hate and rage machine.

Jen Senko produced a movie — The Brainwashing of My Dad — about losing her own father to Fox “News”; it was also made into a book of the same title. She’s been a guest on my show a few times and her story is one replicated across America millions of times: her father — a totally normal Midwestern guy — began watching Fox “News” when he retired and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate.

Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad’s TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch’s infamous hate machine had thrown him into.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is America’s intervention against the mind poison Trump, Fox “News,” and rightwing hate radio have infected our nation with. He’s a normal guy, who joined the Army National Guard right out of high school at 17, rising to the rank of Commander Sergeant Major and becoming a top advocate for America’s vets during his decade in Congress.

He used the GI bill to go to college, getting his masters’ degree and going on to teach high school social studies. He coached his schools’ football team, taking it to the state championships for the first time ever. He smiles. His students love him, as does his family. He’s a normal guy. He’s the father everybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family wishes they had. He’s the grandpa everybody who’s lost one to Fox “News” wishes could sit down with their own and set him straight.

He carved butter at the state fair. He helped start the school’s first gay-straight alliance back in the 1990s when homophobic hate was still widely accepted; he said the coach doing so would be a powerful statement of support. He loves his country, his community, his family, and his nation.

No purchased bone spur X-rays for Tim Walz; he embodies the very definition of patriotism that I grew up with in the Midwest. He reminds me of my own dad who joined the Army at 17 to go fight Nazis in WWII, an echo of the past that most Americans recognize.

His contrast with Trump’s infidelities, con jobs, and constant angry bitterness is a sunlight-like disinfectant for our body politic. He shows up JD Vance — with his creepy obsessions with women’s genitals, birthrates, and Vance’s fealty to his billionaire patrons — for the weird guy that he is.

He even highlights jokes about Vance, saying: “I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

Trump and Vance are riding a wave of hate, fear, and bigotry made acceptable and even viral by a multi-billion-dollar media machine that emerged from the Reagan years.

To steal the minds of America’s grandparents, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch (the son of media mogul and notorious racist Sir Keith Murdoch) in 1985 so he could legally purchase US media properties; Fox “News” was launched here the following year, as Reagan ordered the FCC to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.

In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting; Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

“The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?”

While Rudd calls out the Australian equivalents of Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the focus of his article and the damage done within his own nation was the influence of Rupert Murdoch.

Noting that, “Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd added, “Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”

Brexit happened in the UK because of the newspapers and media Murdoch owns there, Rudd wrote, and:

“In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted.  They’re simply pro-white, pro-billionaire, and pro-oligarchy and thus, by extension, anti-democracy.

“In Australia, as in America,” he wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism. 

“Given Murdoch's impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it's time to revisit it.”

Fox and Murdoch’s power come, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.

“Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug,” former Australian Prime Minister Rudd writes, “who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear: either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically.

“This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists, both left and right, too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch’s interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them.”

When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6th coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest. 

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6th attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.

Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience. 

Along with their relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6th — while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House advisor to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:

“Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.”

While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox “News” did.

Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox “News” poison that is now so widely imitated across the rightwing media ecosystem, stealing the hearts and minds of millions. He’s America’s everyman, a welcome dose of sanity, and a wake-up call about how badly our country has been damaged by billionaire-funded rightwing hate.

So, let the dad jokes begin! As Liz Gumbinner points out, Seth Meyers’ head writer, Sal Gentile, summarized it brilliantly on X: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your carburetor, replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door and put a new chain on your lawnmower.” And, G-d willing and we all show up to vote, he’ll soon be Vice President of the United States.

 -Thom Hartmann

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