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— NAVIGATING THE INSANITY* —
The latest conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign and Fox News are perpetuating is that China’s Communist Party has been “grooming” Tim Walz for decades. If that were true, which is about as likely as the former president no longer reposting weird images of himself like this one, then the US has already lost this battle of the superpowers.
Essentially, here is what Republicans want Americans to believe: When a 25-year-old American teacher went to China to teach US history and English for a year, he caught the attention of the Communist Party.
As this narrative goes, Chinese officials decided to make this young man their ultimate mole in the US. Why? Clearly because they felt that Walz would become the Democratic vice presidential candidate 35 years later, thereby giving China a man in the White House.
You have to hand it to them, that’s some amazing foresight, especially taking into account that public teachers from modest upbringings don’t usually end up on the ticket of a major political party.
And, as the story goes, this brilliant master plan was almost foiled by Walz himself. While sleeper agents are trained to lie low and not draw attention to their true masters, he traveled to China many times and, according to Republicans and Fox, committed a major blunder by intentionally getting married on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It defies belief that any reasonable human being would buy into this narrative.
Right-wing talking heads and Fox News hosts do, however.
“Do you believe that the Communist Party has been grooming Tim Walz?” lunatic Trump supporter Maria Bartiromo asked right-wing author Peter Schweizer on her Fox News show (in an exchange the Trump campaign deemed worthy of amplification).
The only acceptable answers to this question range anywhere on a scale from, “You’re kidding, right?” to “You must be out of your mind.”
Schweizer went in a different direction.
“I think there’s no question about it,” he said.
No question??? You have to admire his confidence in this hare-brained conspiracy theory.
Of course, there is an alternative explanation.
Schweizer was a student at the University of Oxford’s St. Cross College in England. So, doesn’t it seem likely that he came to the attention of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service at the time? After being instructed to build a cover identity as a right-wing writer, he was recently activated. His mission was to sow distrust between the United States and China, which would allow King Charles to reclaim both countries as colonies.
All kidding aside, even for a propaganda network like Fox, it seems insane to give this kind of nonsense airtime.
But it also shows that Trump and his allies have still not figured out how to deal with the new Democratic ticket, and that they are getting desperate.
*In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often funny analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
