There is no context that can make that clip anything but vivid evidence of the totalitarian mindset of Harris’s VP pick and the Democratic Party.
Many, many Democrats have made equivalent statements, recently and years ago. So have many of their media allies, though the only one I can think of right now is Chris Cuomo, and to be fair, he’s an idiot.
There is no genuine controversy, not doubt, no question: “hate speech” and “misinformation” are protected under the Bill of Rights. For a Vice-Presidential candidate to think otherwise is disqualifying. Heck, it is disqualifying for a governor, even of a state as ethically addled as Minnesota. It’s disqualifying for a mail carrier. A third grade teacher.
Ironically, Walz’s statement itself is misinformation (Did you know Donald Trump lies all the time?). By his own deluded and anti-American values, Walz shouldn’t be allowed to make it.
Ethics Alarms 
“[A]round our Democracy.” Uh, Tim, that should be “my democracy.”
I was just reading about the riots in the U.K. They jail people in the U.K. for hate speech and misinformation. But only white rioters get arrested. Walz is just another standard issue lefty who wants the U.S. to catch up to all the damage that lefties have done in Europe.
Where did these people like Walz come from?
The Leonid Breshnev School of Capitalism?
But they really are from outer space, Joel. I guess this guy is as incomprehensible as Bernie Sanders. But Bernie’s just a standard issue red diaper baby from Brooklyn. Maybe the Farmer’s party in Minnesota is a Communist front.
They are called Democrats. Democrats have been saying stuff like this since the 1980’s at least. The schools teach it because the teachers are Democrats. In the ’80’s, they called it ‘political correctness’.
“Hate speech isn’t free speech” was a common cry among Democrat groups by the time I went to college in the late 1980’s. The universities implemented it as speech codes. They were sued and lost. However, because there are no penalties for trampling on people’s Constitutional rights, the schools just reimplemented the speech codes, got sued, lost…rinse and repeat. At some universities, students have put up tens of millions of dollars to fight the speech codes, only for the school to reimplement the codes before the ink is dry on the Supreme Court decision. For example, the courts have ruled that you can’t restrict free speech to ‘free speech zones’. You definitely can’t do it if you have to reserve the zone, pay a fee, and have the ‘free speech’ approved by the school. However, there are a couple dozen major schools with such policies and they have had them decades after that ruling.
Sorry, I wanted to add that in 2020, the LIBERTARIAN candidate for president made a similar statement. Yes, you heard that right. The Libertarian Party has been so infiltrated with leftists that it is now against free speech. She said ‘hate speech isn’t free speech’.
Well Michael, that’s depressing. But I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. I’ve seen my college and even law school go down the drain since the 1970s. Maybe Mrs. OB is right: in our early 70’s, why should we care? We’ll be dead before it gets really bad. It’s unfortunate for our kids and grandkids, but at times I can’t help thinking they’re getting what they want, good and hard.
Sorry, Walz’s statement is NOT misinformation. Misinformation isn’t information that is false. The COVID ‘vaccines’ are not 100% effective, masks do no prevent or even slow the spread of COVID, the COVID ‘vaccines’ are not actually vaccines, they are gene therapies. Those statements are all true, but they are also misinformation.
Misinformation is merely statements that disagree with authority. That is why the CDC issued a statement about COVID that CNN declared misinformation and the CDC declared CNN’s position to be misinformation. How can that be? Well, they are both ‘authorities’ and they had opposing positions on something for a brief period of time. Dueling authorities leads to dueling misinformation.
An outgrowth of Christianity and Western Culture is this concept of an absolute reality and absolute truth. I’m not sure if other religions of cultures actually have such a concept. As Christianity and Western Culture have come under attack, the concepts of absolute reality and absolute truth also have, notably by the postmodernists. Reality is what an authority tells you it is. If the authority tells you that men can become women, then men can become women. It the authority tells you that Donald Trump lies all the time, then Donald Trump lies all the time. Evidence to show that those statements are not true are misinformation. Absolute truth is considered an oppressive tool of Western Civilization to subjugate and discriminate against BIPOC people is a common statement. Using absolute truth to object to official truth is violence against the authority.
Walz is a Democrat and a teacher. He has declared himself an authority and the media have confirmed it. ‘Donald Trump lies all the time’ is official truth and evidence to the contrary doesn’t change that. You can see this in Great Britain where sharing the truth is a criminal offense because if people knew the truth, they would want to rebel and attack favored groups. In my town, a citizen was banned from all public property for revealing the corruption of elected officials. The judge declared that exposing the corruption would likely make people attack the elected officials in some capacity, so exposing the corruption is the same as promoting violence against the officials.
For about two decades now I’ve been observing that although his methods were absolutely un-American and unacceptable, Joseph McCarthy was also absolutely correct that communism had taken hold in Hollywood and in academia. They’ve had 75 years to indoctrinate the American population and ruin our culture.
I barely recognize schooling anymore. Remember when we learned to be proud of our melting pot? Now it’s divisive identity politics. Remember learning the Pledge, all verses of the National Anthem, and a variety of patriotic songs? Now that is considered brain washing, and redneck to boot.
If anyone is claiming that Socialism is neighborly, he’s never traveled. Where it is a stranglehold people suffer … equally though, so that’s equity.
Freedom and capitalism are messy but have provided more and better opportunities than all other systems combined. If we lose the battle for our country’s soul ….
I absolutely worry for my grandchildren.
Is this really that surprising, since the legislatures and courts have allowed the creation of “hate crime” penalties, so thought crime violations can be added to prosecutions for actual criminal behavior?
There are many people who agree with governor Tim Walz. It’s always puzzled me a bit. Here are some hypotheses in no particular order.
1. It sounds plausible, and a large proportion of our citizenry often default to “Hmm, that sounds about right, so it must be true.” “Sounds right to me!”
2. There are individuals who think it’s true and proclaim it like Tim Walz did, and when nobody contradicts such individuals, members of the public assume that it must be true since it was proclaimed as true. Sometimes the proclamation is made in casual conversation, but other times even by a school teacher or professor desperately trying to keep a lecture going rather than lapse into awkward silence. I can even imagine a governor of a US state saying it!
3. I would guess that all of the “hate crime” legislation contributes to the misunderstanding. Likely the historical record will come to show that the notion of “hate crime” as justiciable is a mistake. In the meantime, since there are “hate crimes” that are illegal, it stands to reason that “hate speech” is illegal. This is not true, but it sounds reasonable.
= – = – = – =
Truth and liberty loving Americans would do well to push back against these stupid claims that “hate speech” (whatever that means) is not protected by the Bill of Rights. Let’s push back.
Montesquieu provides us with a relevant caution:
“A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.”
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/montesquieu_105897
By pushing back against these stupid claims, we will make ourselves unpopular to some of those who misunderstand the Bill of Rights. We may not get invited to quite so many parties. It’s a price we should be willing to pay.
I’m going to practice my mini-speech in order to be ready.
charles w abbott
rochester NY