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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Test if there are high ranking people in the Trump campaign here.

Under his watch, Minnesota's public health authorities set up a hotline to allow people to report their neighbors for violating the state's strict social distancing rules, which included the threat of 90 days in jail for violators. When Republicans in the state legislature called for the hotline to be shut down, Walz defended it. He also told pandemic-weary Minnesotans to stay away from relatively safe outdoor activities like spending time on the state's famous lakes.

He has a German name, looks like a cousin of Erich Honecker and the above paragraph. Nickname him Stazi Walz and be done with him. It will stick.

Given the importance of the Midwest in US politics, doing anything to suggest German = bad is not a good idea. Plus, AFAIK, most people these days have no idea who the Stazi were ("Some sorta Nazis?").

Covid totalitarianism was memory holed so I doubt this slogan would work, but tbf the closest thing German's have to any collective identity is their weird guilt pride. So I don't see calling him a nazi backfiring by angering Americans of German descent, if anything it would be extra effective on them.

the closest thing German's have to any collective identity is their weird guilt pride

That sounds more like Post-WWII Germans, but most German immigration to the US was well before that.

Germans have their weird guilt thing, but German-Americans do not. German immigration almost entirely stopped before 1930, so virtually no German-Americans have any ancestral connections to the Nazi party. German-Americans still wouldn’t care, but that’s mostly because they’re completely assimilated.

Isn't Minnesota known for Swedish-Americans anyways, though?

The state is both heavily Scandinavian and heavily German.

Making Covid stuff into a campaign issue in 2024 doesn't sound likely, and polling indicated there were a fair few voters back then (ie. the olds, some Republicans too) who liked the Stasi stuff and would have preferred more of it.

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