On Gov. Tim Walz, Covid lockdown fanatic

At least he came by his insanity honestly (unlike his descriptions of his military service); ex-Minnesotan and censor-in-chief Andy Slavitt was one of his top advisors

Everything is connected. Especially Covid authoritarians.

Before he conspired to violate my civil rights and make Twitter ban my journalism in 2021, Democratic healthcare operative Andrew M. Slavitt was a top Covid advisor to Minnesota governor Tim Walz.

With Slavitt’s encouragement, Walz pushed a tight lockdown on his state. He encouraged residents to snitch on each other on a state-run hotline. And he sharply tightened Minnesota’s rules on gatherings in November 2020, long after it was clear Covid was a threat mainly to the very elderly and could not cause hospital overrun.

How badly did Walz panic in fall 2020? He essentially destroyed Thanksgiving. On Nov. 19, 2020, one week before the holiday, Walz barred “indoor or outdoor [emphasis added] gatherings, except with immediate household members” and added “no person from outside your immediate household should enter your home.” He also closed bars, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, organized sports, and pools.

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Of course, months earlier, when protests and riots over the death of George Floyd had rocked Minneapolis in May and June 2020, Walz had taken a different view. “We certainly believe that there’s a right that people have to gather,” he told reporters.

Walz’s crackdowns received less attention than those by Democratic governors in states like California and New York.

But his power grab was arguably more problematic because Minnesota is more closely politically divided than the coastal blue states and Walz’s lockdown faced more open opposition. In spring 2020, the protests were fairly narrow.

But after Walz’s November orders, business owners openly revolted, and police largely refused to enforce the rules.

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But Walz’s orders were not entirely ignored.

Lisa Hanson, a bar owner in a rural Minnesota town about 100 miles south of Minneapolis, was arrested in early 2021 for keeping her bar open. In December 2021, a jury convicted Hanson of defying the lockdown; she served 60 days in jail and was fined $1,000.

A newspaper account of the trial reveals the state judge who oversaw it effectively gave jurors no choice but to find Hanson guilty. He kept Hanson from challenging the constitutionality of Walz’s orders at the tiral. And in his jury instructions, he

told the jurors they must follow the rules of law, even if they don't agree with them. He said they were obligated to find her guilty if they concluded she operated the bar and restaurant, served food and beverages on-site during the dates cited in the charges, knew of the law's existence and intentionally violated it.

Huh. A politically motivated trial overseen by an aggressive judge, ending in a preordained conviction. Where have we seen that recently?

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As Walz cracked down, Andy Slavitt - who at the time was living in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb called Edina - was among his top advisers. An October 2020 profile of Slavitt called him a “a friend and trusted adviser” to the governor.

At the time, Slavitt had made himself among the loudest and most aggressive pro-lockdown voices on Twitter and nationally. In July 2020, he had tweeted that the United States “can virtually eliminate the [corona]virus any time we decide to” if it engaged in what he called “a 90% lockdown.”

Specifically, Slavitt suggested closing all “bars & restaurants & churches & transit” and “prohibit[ing] interstate travel.”

He also proposed curtailing even essential services: most of the Americans who couldn’t stay home in April because they were picking crops or driving trucks or working in health care would stay home with us.

It is hard even in retrospect to explain how radical Slavitt’s proposal was.

It would have been comparable to and possibly harder than the strictest lockdowns anywhere in the world, including China’s. (China had very strict residential lockdowns but continued to allow manufacturing, which Slavitt’s proposal would have shut.)

Still, Walz kept listening to Slavitt. In the October profile, he said he knew Slavitt “was pushing pretty hard, but that's the role he's supposed to play.”

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(Any Minnesotan will tell you: It’s nice to be important. It’s more important to (pretend to) be nice.)

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During Covid’s first and second waves in spring and summer 2020, Minnesota had escaped without much damage, and Slavitt had lauded its “strong” response - its strict early lockdowns.

But as the days shortened and the weather cooled in the fall, infections and deaths in Minnesota soared. This turn was predictable. During 2020 and 2021,Covid infections followed a striking geographic pattern in the United States (the regional trends have abated as the coronavirus has become endemic, though they still persist more weakly).

Still, the jump seemed to panic Walz. And on November 19, 2020, he announced his new restrictions. They incorporated most of what Slavitt wanted. Walz even strongly discouraged interstate travel:

It is simply not a good time for out-of-state travel that is anything short of essential, so this Order clarifies my recommendation that Minnesotans refrain from unnecessary out-of-state travel for the next four weeks and self-quarantine upon their return if they do decide to travel.

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In the end, Walz’s aggressive restrictions and lockdowns made no measurable difference to Minnesota’s Covid outcomes.

Four-plus years into Covid, Minnesota has reported 2.9 Covid deaths for every 1,000 residents. That figure is slightly better than the American average of 3.7 deaths, but almost exactly the same as its regional neighbors.

Minnesota’s per-capita death total is almost exactly the same as Wisconsin’s, which is also at 2.9, slightly lower than those of Dakotas and Iowa - all between 3.3 and 3.6 - and slightly worse than Nebraska’s, at 2.6.

Those states are all notably more conservative than Minnesota. But, as everywhere in the United States, regional disparities in obesity and healthcare made a far bigger difference than any government efforts to suppress Covid or force masks and mRNA jabs on an unwilling population.

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(Tim Walz would rather you didn’t. Reason enough?)

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Still, Walz’s Covid authoritarianism wasn’t entirely useless, at least for him.

As the public health response became increasingly political, he showed the Democratic establishment and the media which side he was on. Voters did not punish him for his choice. He won reelection in 2022 by a margin only slightly smaller than his initial 2018 win.

As for Slavitt, he wound up in the White House in 2021, where he led the efforts to press mRNA Covid jabs (and censor anyone who he believed might get in his way, me in particular).

And if Walz winds up as vice-president - and we are unlucky enough to run into another pandemic - expect that Slavitt will have Walz’s ear for a “90 percent lockdown,” mRNA mandates for kids, or whatever Slavitt has in mind next time around.