In Minnesota, Tim Walz Had a Covid Snitch Line

On August 1, 2020, Julie McCarthy sent an email to the Department of Public Safety to express her dismay about a recent visit to Sager’s Liquor in Hugo, Minnesota, where she observed numerous people violating the law. 

“Employees were not consistently wearing masks during the 10 minutes my husband spent in the store,” she wrote. “six of eight people present in the store did not wear a mask in the short time he was in the store.” 

Like many state leaders across the country in the spring of 2020, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz passed an executive order placing restrictions on the everyday movements of Americans. But Walz went further. His administration set up a hotline and encouraged Minnesotans to report on those in violation of the governor’s Covid mandates. Though the policy was met with controversy, Walz refused to back down. 

“It’s for their own good,” Walz told local media in March 2020.

Walz, who in August was tapped by Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris as her running mate, did not mention the fines up to $1,000 or 90 days behind bars for violators. 

McCarthy’s email is just one of hundreds of “snitch” documents now available online following a public records request. The documents, which have received little attention to date, shed light on a terrifying phenomenon: Americans reporting one another to authorities for the crime of going about their lives.  

‘I Have Attached Photos’ 

In October 2020, seven months into the Covid pandemic, rumors began to circulate that First Apostolic Lutheran Church was going to hold a church service in contravention of state law.

Though Minnesota had eased its Covid emergency order in May to allow “non-essential” businesses to reopen and retailers to operate at 50 percent capacity, churches, synagogues, and mosques were restricted to no more than 10 worshippers. A woman who identified herself as Amy Keranen emailed the Department of Public Safety to inform the agency of Apostolic Lutheran Church’s alleged plan.

“I am aware that the apostlic [sic] Lutheran church at 2300 Cox Trail medina MN is planning to hold church services,” she wrote to the hotline. “And they will be serving meals in the church dining hall. I don’t believe this fits with legal requirements.” 

It’s unclear if the state took any action against Apostolic Lutheran Church, or if church services were even held. But the email shows the zeal with which some Americans reported on one another in response to Walz’s invitation.  

Reporting on one another isn’t exactly new in America.  It’s associated with some of the darkest chapters in American history. 

The Salem Witch trials of 1692 saw no fewer than 144 people (including children) accused of witchcraft by their colonial communities. Nineteen were executed — after trials, of course.

Christopher Nolan’s recent movie Oppenheimer explored another notorious chapter in America’s accusatory history: the McCarthy Era, a period that saw a “Red Scare” sweep across the country over fears of communism. As Nolan’s movie shows,  communists did exist in America. But it was McCarthy’s calculated and sometimes unsubstantiated accusations against his countrymen that created a climate of fear and political persecution.

Minnesota’s Covid snitch line doesn’t exactly mirror these famous historical examples. Citizens in 2020 weren’t being accused of  witchcraft or Soviet spying; they were accused of much more mundane “crimes.”  

“A bunch of teens gather in the skateboard park nearby,” reported one unidentified man. “There is definitely not social distancing between them. It’s in Plymouth. Plymouth Creek Park.”

An astonishing number of emails show Minnesotans reporting on fellow citizens simply because they were enjoying recreation outdoors in contravention of Walz’s six feet social distancing order.

In other cases, informants seem upset that businesses were trying to make a profit to survive. 

“There is a bar/grill in Scanlon, MN that refuses to do what has been instructed of us, simply because the owner can not afford the loss in revenue and will continue to keep his bar open despite what the Governor has said or ordered us to do,” wrote a man who identified himself as Jeremy Johnson. “I have attached a few of the photos.” 

‘Ms. Schneider is traveling on Wednesday’

Unlike previous accusatory fevers in American history, the targets were not labeled devil worshippers (the Salem Witch trials) nor treasonous commies (the Red Scare). They were accused of breaking bureaucratic rules and dogmas. (That these were not rooted in rigid science is something architects of America’s Covid response concede today.) 

In this sense, Covid snitching is more reminiscent of the reporting network that emerged near the end of the Cold War in East Germany. Many Americans are familiar with the Stasi (abbreviation for Staatssicherheit), the secret police founded in 1950 in the German Democratic Republic. The infamous GDR security unit has received abundant academic and cinematic attention, as has the Stasi’s use of “informal employees” (informants known as “IMs”) to report on their friends, family, and colleagues.

But the feared Stasi were just one part of a much larger network of spies that emerged in the 1980s before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a 2015 Der Spiegel article, author and documentary filmmaker Peter Wensierski helped expose evidence that snitching in the GDR went far beyond the Stasi and included “almost every area of East German society.” 

“Government agencies, political parties, associations, companies, universities, cultural institutions: Everywhere, people reported incriminating information about those around them,” wrote Wensierski. “They were totally normal citizens of East Germany who betrayed others: neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members.”

These were not IMs, Wensierski points out, and they were not snitching exclusively to the Stasi (though reports could certainly end up there). Much like Walz’s snitch line, German citizens reported on neighbors for behavior that hardly seems criminal. A bit of humor directed in the wrong direction could be enough to generate a report, and perhaps land a jokester in prison. Or perhaps holding the wrong political views, or taking an unauthorized trip. 

Wensierski recounted a man’s phone call to a police headquarters in Döbeln September, 1987. 

“Ms. Marianne Schneider is traveling on Wednesday, Sept. 14, to West Berlin for a visit. She doesn’t intend to return.” 

“And who are you?” 

Silence. 

“You would like to remain anonymous?” 

“Yes.”

How to Judge Walz’s Snitch Line

Defenders of Walz’s Covid hotline might argue Minnesotans’ pandemic  snitching was different. Informants in Minnesota were simply trying to keep fellow citizens safe. But snitchers in Germany could similarly argue they were simply making the world better by protecting the German state and advancing socialism. (READ MORE from Jonathan Miltimore: The Horrors of the Holodomor Must Not Be Forgotten)

Judging the human heart is never an easy matter, of course. No doubt many people believed (or convinced themselves) that informing on their fellow citizens served a greater cause. But informants are often driven by motives other than altruism, and the hotline documents show this.

In some emails, people seem primarily concerned that others are having fun while they’re following the rules and staying indoors. 

“Every night, and during the daytime now too — we have large groups of teenagers and young adults clumped in groups in the park,” one unidentified man reported. “Playing sports games. Playing on all the park equipment.”

Others complained that businesses deemed “non-essential” by the state (unlike liquor stores, which were never ordered closed) appeared to be open.

“I wanted to report the Harley Davidson in Elk River off 169 appears to continued (sic) to be open,” a woman who identified herself as Meghan Ferguson reported. “I don’t see how this is an essential service.” 

Some informant emailers sound genuinely afraid of the virus (an immuno-compromised man reported his neighbors for receiving a group of visitors), others seem less concerned with safety and more concerned with reporting rule breakers, such as one man who was greeted by a staffer at a Chick-fil-A.

“I asked her if she thought it was dangerous to be within six feet of a car with no mask or gloves to protect herself,” he wrote on April 1. “She immediately stepped back onto the curb and was still within three feet of my vehicle.”

The individual, who identified himself as David Palmer, said he proceeded to the window to receive his food, where he was met by a female manager with whom he shared his dismay.

“I was handed my food and told to have a nice day,” he wrote.

This doesn’t sound like a person terrified by a deadly virus, nor altruistically concerned for the public welfare. It sounds more like someone who feels powerless, but is trying to exert a measure of control over the behavior of others.  

In a way, such a reaction makes sense. In these centrally planned environments, both East Germans and Minnesotans had been largely stripped of their own freedom, and humans who’ve lost their own personal agency often are more tempted to unjustly exert control over others.

“The moment we undertake to direct the lives of others,” observed author Leonard Read in his 1964 book Anything Peaceful, “we lose our own moral compass, for we assume a power we do not possess.”

Tim Walz and the Banality of Evil

In 1961, the philosopher Hannah Arendt flew to Jerusalem to observe the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Watching the trial, Arendt realized Eichmann was no Iago or Macbeth or Richard III. He was a bland man, not distinguishable in any way except, perhaps, his “diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.”

Observing Eichmann, Arendt coined a phrase: “the banality of evil.” 

The words come to mind while reading the reports to Walz’s snitch line. Reports of “a large group of adults playing pickleball at Washington Park in Richfield” are nothing if not banal; yet, they are also sinister, which is no doubt what prompted one writer to quip that “totalitarianism consists in reams of paper.”

Arendt reminded us that the face of evil is often not what we expect. Like Solzhenitsyn, she understood that the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. Few people are genuinely evil; systems, however, often are, especially bureaucracy. The dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy is a theme that has been explored by countless thinkers, from Franz Kafka to the Nobel Prize-winning poet Günter Grass to Arendt, who described it as the root of collective evil.  

“The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them,” she wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Essay on the Banality of Evil.

What made Walz’s snitch line so evil was that it combined the madness of crowds with the bureaucratic power of the state. His policy did nothing to stop the virus and was quietly rescinded in November 2020, much like policies in a dozen or so other states. But fear, paranoia, and tribalism were fruits of the policy, which encouraged people of the Bread and Butter state to snitch on one another much like East Germans during the Cold War.  

Astonishingly, Walz, who has been campaigning across the Midwest, is now lecturing others about the importance of minding one’s own Ps and Qs.

“In Minnesota, just like in Wisconsin, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make,” he said, “even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves. We know there’s a golden rule. Mind your own damn business!”

The “mind your own business” theme is playing well to audiences. So well, that Walz included the phrase in his remarks at the Democratic National Convention, drawing massive applause.  (READ MORE from Jonathan Miltimore: Nancy Pelosi’s Other Legacy: A Mountain of Debt for Our Children)

Minding one’s own business is good advice and a tenet of classical liberalism. Unfortunately, as someone who has lived in Minnesota the last 15 years, I can assure you that Tim Walz is not interested in minding his own businesses. Nor does he respect the personal choices or individual rights of Americans. 

Walz may not be evil, but his snitch line was—and Americans should not forget it.

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