Tim Walz Is the Embodiment of Oddity

For the past several months, Vice President Kamala Harris has been running on “weird.” Her campaign has consisted of, in addition to vociferously clamoring for the slaughter of the unborn through abortion, calling former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, “weird.”

“J.D. Vance is weird.”

“Donald Trump is weird.”

But last night’s vice presidential debate revealed definitively that it is Harris’s own running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is weird. Put aside, for a moment, the political maneuvering, the lying, the manipulating. Walz, who looks as though a terrified Don Rickles were cast in The Shaggy Dog and is about halfway through the makeup process, is simply weird.

First, I have to ask, who in his right mind admits on national television that he’s friends with school shooters? It clear what Walz was trying to say: his has such a kindly and nurturing (read: motherly) disposition that he has befriended those whose friendlessness is so extreme that it turns to violence. But even if he had said that, it would have been… well, weird. Instead, he made the far weirder choice of saying, “I’ve become friends with school shooters.”

This phrase alone seems key to unlocking who Walz is and why he’s so weird. Walz is, in a sense, motherly. Of course, as a man, he can never actually be a mother, which marks his “motherly” qualities and mannerisms as a sign of deep disorder. It explains why Walz values emotion over matters of simple right and wrong — think, for instance, of his allowing raging rioters to burn down half of Minneapolis before ever calling the National Guard; he placed emotional expression, which is rightly the domain of the mother, over order, discipline, and even safety, which are predominantly the realm of the father.

Walz and Harris both are campaigning on sheer emotion. It’s why they respond to questions the way that they do. When asked about her plans to fix rampant inflation, skyrocketing housing costs, and the economy she and her boss, President Joe Biden, have broken, Harris rambles on about growing up in a middle-class family and hopes others will relate to her stories about neighbors tending to their lawns. When Walz is asked about lying about being personally present at the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre, he, too, rambles: “I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the street lights come on…” It’s all emotion. No substance, no logic, no leadership, just emotion.

In responding to the Tiananmen Square question, Walz essentially admitted that he had lied and was aware that he had lied, but hoped that his emotional appeal would overcome the gravity of wantonly lying to the American public. “I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect and I’m a knucklehead at times,” Walz said, which is not a particularly winning strategy when asking Americans to put you in the White House. He continued, “Many times I will talk a lot, I will get caught up in the rhetoric.” Did Tim Walz just admit to being a compulsive, pathological liar on live national television? When debate moderators pressed him to actually answer the question, which he noticeably did not, Walz replied, with an odd shake of the head and defiant stare, “I misspoke on this and that’s — what’s what I’ve said.”

That stare is worth examining. Tim Walz’s eyes look as though the man is perpetually frightened, as if he were beholding some great horror unfolding before him. It’s clear that he is attempting to portray sincerity, but it comes across as too forced and, ultimately, scared. Anyone who has ever talked to (or, for that matter, even been!) a teenager will understand this. When you catch an adolescent or teenager lying, and that poor kid is trying to convince you that he’s telling the truth, he tries to engineer sincerity in his eyes and in his facial expression. But no matter how resolute the jawline, no matter how calm or relaxed the facial muscles may be, the eyes are filled with fear. Walz looks as though he is constantly, unceasingly afraid of being caught lying. Again, he hopes that his appeals to emotion will outweigh or overshadow his obvious lying.

It’s also worth asking about Walz’s hands. No, not what size his hands are, but about the fact that the Minnesota governor waves and claps as though he were wearing the gloves that go with a Disney resort’s full-size Mickey Mouse costume. Why? His exaggerated gestures and limp wrists exhibit, again, his overabundance of raw emotion, unchecked and unbalanced by reason; they betray his absence of discipline, self-confidence, or masculine energy. Whether clapping and cheering on his way to a football game (where he rooted against his own state’s team) or waving at campaign events, Walz’s incontinent flailing about, accompanied by his goofy parody of a grin, show that he is, quite simply, weird.

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Vance vs. Walz: A Royal Ass-Kicking That Was

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