Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is “surrounded” by red states, he says, which puts his priorities in stark — and he believes positive — relief. Walz, who earlier this year signed legislation making Minnesota a refuge for LGBTQ+ young people seeking gender-affirming surgery, has been hitting the interview circuit to tout the state’s recent move to give schoolchildren in his state free breakfast and lunch.
Feeding children is a normal thing to want to do, Walz asserts, while his Republican counterparts “obsess” over “weird” things instead. Asked about a quote attributed to him saying Republicans “are weird. Once they start running their weirdness shows up,” Walz replied, “I’ll stand by that.”
Walz listed what he called the “strange things [Republicans] become obsessed with,” including “demonizing our children, becoming obsessed with people’s personal lives in their bedrooms, restricting freedoms…They will weirdly obsess with everything to be mean and cruel and small in their ideas.”
Gov. Walz: I'm surrounded by red states that are spending their time figuring out how to ban Charlotte’s Web in their schools while we’re banishing hunger from ours with free breakfast and lunch pic.twitter.com/HF3OdoHpRS
— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) December 11, 2023
Walz, who is the Chair of the Democratic Governors Association (a position once held by Bill Clinton), says governors who address the middle class’s real needs and prioritize lunches over the banning of books are popular because of that choice — that’s where Americans “want to get to,” Walz asserts.
The Biden campaign (Biden-Harris HQ) reshared DNC War Room’s post of the segment on X, emphasizing the book bans v. free lunch argument with the caption: “Gov. Walz: I’m surrounded by red states that are spending their time figuring out how to ban Charlotte’s Web in their schools while we’re banishing hunger from ours with free breakfast and lunch.”
[NOTE: Walz seems to be using Charlotte’s Web, a beloved children’s tale by E.B. White, to spotlight the seeming absurdity of some book bans. Parents reportedly did get the spider’s story banned in Kansas in 2006 after claiming that because humans are “the only creatures that can communicate vocally, showing lower life forms with human abilities is sacrilegious and disrespectful to God.”]
