In herdlike fashion, the media describe Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as “folksy,” suggesting that he is just a regular guy with whom Middle America can identify easily. Supporters on social media liken the Democrat to a cool grandpa.
Judging from his education policies, however, Walz would be like your folksy grandpa only if you are descended from radical critical race and gender theorists.
Walz may look like a regular guy, with a bit of a belly and thinning grey hair, but his policy record is so extreme as to place him outside the mainstream of American politics.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz championed creation of a so-called Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Center at the Minnesota Department of Education “to build toward an education system committed to anti-racism.”
For those who may be unfamiliar with the particular meaning of the term “antiracism,” it doesn’t just involve being opposed to racism, as most Americans are. Marxist activist and professor Angela Davis, also once a vice presidential candidate (but for the Communist Party), put it this way: “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”
Boston University professor and anti-racism author-activist Ibram X. Kendi explains that anti-racism requires that we depart from traditional American support for treating everyone equally as individuals regardless of race, and impose government policies to discriminate with the intent to rectify past discrimination.
As Kendi describes it: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
To teach Minnesota’s children that they must embrace anti-racist discrimination, Walz pushed for the creation of Ethnic Studies requirements.
Katherine Kersten, senior policy fellow at Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, writes:
The radical Ethnic Studies addition to Minnesota’s proposed social studies standards encourages students to disrupt and dismantle America’s fundamental institutions. … The model curriculum’s ‘guiding principles’ call for ‘transformative resistance’ and repudiate ‘forms of power and oppression’ that include ‘cisheteropatriarchy’ and ‘anthropocentrism’—the belief that human beings are superior to animals. The curriculum originally incorporated student chants to bloodthirsty Aztec gods, but recently dropped these following a legal settlement.
During Walz’s governorship, the Minnesota Department of Education stacked the Ethnic Studies drafting committee with radical activists, including Jonathan Hamilton of Education for Liberation Minnesota, who had denounced the state’s public education system as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is.”
Walz’s record is no less extreme when it comes to gender issues in education. One of Walz’s signature accomplishments as Minnesota governor was to sign an executive order that ensured minors could undergo surgical and pharmacological procedures that would alter whether they looked like a boy or girl.
Ignoring concerns about whether children could meaningfully consent to irreversible “gender-changing” drugs and surgeries, Walz directed state agencies “to refuse approval of health plans that do not cover gender-affirming care and to investigate any complaints about denial of gender-affirming care.”
Walz also signed into law what the LBGTQ rights group GLAAD calls a “trans refuge bill,” saying it “protects transgender people and their families from legal repercussions for traveling to Minnesota to receive transgender health care.”
The governor did so despite objections that the law might undermine parents in other states who disagree with these medical procedures by allowing one parent to abscond to Minnesota with the child.
Walz ensured that these pro-trans/anti-female policies were incorporated into schools. In particular, the governor fought to allow biological males to compete in female school sports, arguing: “I’m not concerned about making life more difficult for children who already have an incredibly high suicide rate—children and people who want to be who they are.”
The folksy grandpa had nothing to say about whether allowing boys in girls sports might make athletic competition dangerous for girls who have to compete against bigger, stronger biological males who say they identify as girls.
Walz also signed into law a bill that placed “free” tampons and menstrual pads in all school restrooms, including those for boys. As the bill’s sponsor explained: “Not all students who menstruate are female. We need to make sure all students have access to these products.”
In backing the bill, Walz endorsed the idea that boys could go into girls’ bathrooms and vice versa.
Walz used Minnesota’s schools to advance a radical agenda of turning our children into activists who would seek to tear down our institutions and embrace “anti-racist” discrimination.
He exposed schoolgirls to stronger males who “identify” as girls in athletic competition as well as in girls’ locker rooms and restrooms.
Tim Walz’s education record is not so folksy after all.
