URGENT: As fraud allegations spiral, Minnesota governor Tim Walz quits his reelection bid

This is a stunning demonstration of the power of X and citizen journalism. Walz has gone from the national Democratic ticket to preparing to leave state office in disgrace in only 14 months.

X for the win.

Just 10 days ago, a 23-year-old citizen journalist named Nick Shirley posted a video of empty state-funded “daycare centers” run by Somali immigrants across Minnesota.

Abuse of government programs by Somalis in Minnesota is not a new story. Yet the video became a national sensation. Shirley captured the brazenness of the apparent fraud, and the video has now been viewed 138 million times on X.

By this weekend, Minnesota governor Tim Walz was calling Shirley a “delusional conspiracy theorist” on X. News flash: if you are the governor of a state with almost 6 million people and you’re arguing with a 23-year-old online, you’ve already lost.

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(Citizen journalism. With your help.)

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This morning Walz announced he was dropping his bid for a third term as Minnesota governor, a move that would have been unthinkable even a month ago.

In 2022, Walz won reelection by almost 8 percentage points; in 2024, he ran alongside Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for vice-president. No politician has seen his career blow up this fast since… well, since Joe Biden had to quit his own presidential campaign.

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(Timmmmber!)

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Walz was always an absurd figure, a wannabe war hero who dodged service in Iraq.

He was Harris’s white male equivalent, a mediocrity picked to run for national office because of his race and gender. His refusal to call out Minnesota’s National Guard quickly during the 2020 George Floyd riots encouraged widespread looting and arson.

Still, the speed of his collapse is stunning, and proof of the confluence of three powerful political and media trends:

• Anger over unchecked immigration, which is growing, not shrinking, as the Trump Administration proves the Biden White House and Democrats could have effectively shut down migration at any time from 2021 to 2024 and instead allowed and even encouraged it.

• The realization that waste and outright fraud in quasi-welfare programs, particularly those administered by blue states but backstopped by the federal government, has reached massive levels. A federal prosecutor in Minnesota suggested that it might be $9 billion in that state alone in the last few years, or $1,500 per resident, in just a handful of Medicaid programs. That estimate suggests that hundreds of billions of dollars might have been wasted or stolen in New York, California, and other states.

• The rise of X as an outlet for citizen journalism, particularly on stories that conservatives favor and liberals would rather ignore (like the two above).

What happens next? Time will tell, but all three of those forces only seem to be becoming more powerful.

And so Walz’s reckoning feels like the beginning, not the end, of a trend.

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(To read the archives, including last year’s piece about Walz’s National Guard adventures…)

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