Who Fact Checks a Democrat?

The self-appointed “fact checkers” generally fall silent when a Democrat tells a whopper. We are seeing a lot of that in Minnesota these days, with incumbent Governor Tim Walz locked in a tight race with Dr. Scott Jensen. Walz didn’t have a lot of composure to start with–he is an angry, intemperate man–and whatever composure he had seems to be crumbling under pressure. The result is frequent departures from the truth.

On Sunday, Walz was interviewed at the State Fair by a liberal reporter from WCCO television. He unleashed a couple of epic lies. First, he claimed that there had hardly been any school shutdown in Minnesota: “Just to be clear, over 80% of our students missed less than 10 days of in-class learning.”

This assertion is inexplicable. Gov. Walz shut down the entire school system on March 15, 2020. His administration then put in place a complicated matrix using county health data and school district boundaries for schools to reopen in the fall of 2020. Most public schools did not return to in-class learning until the spring of 2021. “Less than 10 days”? That is not true of any public school student in the state. For most, it was a year.

In the same interview, Walz was asked about Minnesota’s skyrocketing crime. Walz came up with a purported statistic that apparently was made up on the spur of the moment:

Minnesota is one of the three states with the lowest crime rates in America. The fact as it stands today is, there are 45 states with higher crime rates than Minnesota.

Disregard the contradiction. This claim is simply insane. But who will fact check it, since Walz is a Democrat? Center of the American Experiment Policy Fellow David Zimmer did:

The statement and the figures are just plain wrong.

Using 2020 FBI data, which represents the latest national data set on crime, Minnesota ranks 27th overall in Part 1 crimes (a combination of significant violent and property crimes), 13th overall in violent crime, and 30th overall in property crimes (ranked lowest to highest).

See the linked post for a chart that shows these data.

As we have noted in our HighcrimeMN campaign, Minnesota rose above the national average in Part 1 crimes in 2020 for the first time in our history.

The FBI classifies serious crimes like murder, rape, robbery, arson etc. as Part 1 crimes. This chart tells the story. Minnesota is now worse than the national average in the rate of per capita serious crime:

Scott Jensen, to his credit, makes great use of these data in his campaign. Hence the need for Walz to lie.

When a politician says something that is grotesquely wrong, as Governor Walz did with respect to both education and crime, it is natural to ask: is there some possible germ of truth that he misconstrued? In this case, is there some crime statistic in which Minnesota ranks third from the top? Or bottom? It turns out there is.

One ranking in which Minnesota ranks #3 lowest in the nation is in the lack of criminals being sent to prison. Our incarceration rate is lower than 47 other states, despite our rapidly rising crime rate.

Minnesota resembles New York and California. All three are failing states that have consciously chosen a pro-criminal ideology that proved catastrophic for normal citizens.

One wonders: what could cause an incumbent governor to spew out obvious lies on critical topics like crime and education? Perhaps that is one for the psychologists. But maybe Tim Walz, like Joe Biden and other Democratic politicians, believes he can say anything, no matter how absurd, without worrying about press scrutiny. If you say it, and no one “fact checks” you, maybe it passes for truth.

Maybe. But in this case, Walz was fact checked on both topics by an American Experiment press release, earlier today, that went to all relevant reporters, among others, and on crime in the linked post. And of course by HighCrimeMN.com, plus social media and a billboard and radio ad campaign on crime that is about to kick off.

Beyond that, Walz’s lies are so absurd that no one whose children’s education was devastated by Walz’s covid shutdown, or who has suffered from the violent crime that has descended on the Twin Cities on Walz’s watch, could possibly be fooled.

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