Just as he was officially announced on the ticket, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, often lauded as the safest pick for Kamala Harris to make as a running mate, was already facing racist and nativist attacks from the online depths of the far right.
In media speculation leading up to Harris’s potential pick, Walz, a midwesterner who once coached a high school football team, was seen as evening out the Californian vice-president’s candidacy for the White House.
The thinking among pundits was that Walz, who is white and 60, was appealing to battleground states, namely Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – one of the keys to victory in the electoral college spread this November.
But the far-right users of Telegram, Gab, 4chan and other adjacent social media sites frequently used to spread extremist propaganda have taken a different tack.
The nexus of many of the early attacks have focused on the conspiracy theory that he changed the state flag of Minnesota to mimic a Somali flag.
“Replaced Minnesota flag with Somali flag, loves loves loves Somalis moving into America by planeload,” said one anonymous post on the chatboard 4Chan, with an image of Walz at a press conference.
“Timmy Somali changed the state flag to look African, lmao,” said another post on the same site, which was published following the news of Walz as Harris’s pick. “Dude is a fucking cuck. This is a worse VP pick than even Vance was.”
This rhetoric stems from Walz unveiling the new Minnesota flag in December last year. The 1957 version was criticized for overtly depicting a Native American man being driven away from the land by threat of a rifle. The new design partly features a blue backdrop with a white star – an allusion to the official state motto “Star of the North” – something the Somali flag also happens to include.
“Tim Walz is the perfect pick to sell you out to the hordes,” wrote one pro-Proud Boys channel on Telegram with more than 15,000 followers, putting a video of Walz and the new flag in the post.
As the brutal civil war persisted into the 90s, Minnesota became a destination for many Somali immigrants, who established a rich and successful group of new Americans. Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, who was born in Mogadishu, was part of that same wave of immigration fleeing the violence.
But, of course, the more than 85,000 Somali Americans in the state of close to 7 million has become the racist fodder of neo-Nazis, nativists and far-right commentators of all types in recent years.
“This is Minneapolis, Minnesota,” read one post with more than a thousand views on a neo-Nazi-sympathizing channel on Telegram, with photos of a vibrant Somali street festival in Minneapolis, not unlike annual Italian street festivals in every major US city. “This isn’t Mogadishu.”
Mainstream Republicans have started adopting this racist invocation of Somalia when it comes to Walz. Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to Donald Trump, went on Fox News on Tuesday night to say the Democrat ticket will “turn the entire midwest into Mogadishu”.
On Gab, a fringe and rightwing X-wannabe, an image showing a cartoon Harris and Walz carrying a Somali flag was making the rounds, while others largely focused on the Minnesota governor’s stewardship of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020, which first began in his state after the police killing of George Floyd.
“Minneapolis before and after Governor Tim Walz allowed BLM to destroy it,” wrote one Gab user posting images claiming to show Minneapolis buildings that were once pristine before the protests.
Walz’s midwestern, folksy appeal was undeniably a major reason Harris and her team took the decision to include him. He’s a counter to Donald Trump’s running mate: the Ohio senator JD Vance, who uses any public appearance to stress his working-class and Appalachian roots.
Vance and the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is an often antisemitic and racist mouthpiece for the extremist branches of the Republican party, immediately cited the BLM protests in their attacks on Walz.
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Vance accused Walz of allowing “rioters to burn down Minneapolis” while Greene said he similarly did “nothing while Minneapolis burned”, telegraphing a surefire Republican attack line in the coming months.
“The incoming rightwing assault on Walz will be pretty predictable,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism expert and professor at Queen’s University in Canada who has researched the rise of the far right since the Trump presidency.
Amarasingam explained that there was the underlying racial component to Walz’s candidacy that was sure to inflame the far right and be an implicit attack against him in mainstream Republican circles.
“American politics is so tribal now that the same reasons that make [Walz] attractive to the Harris campaign will be the same reasons he will be considered ‘un-American’ by the right.”
Amarasingam also pointed out that beyond his track record on Covid, LGBTQ+ and trans rights will surely be topics of conversation.
“The predictable culture war fault lines – immigration, equity, gender fluidity, race – will be trotted out as insults and accusations: he took too long to call in the national guard against BLM protests, his state was too restrictive during Covid and so on,” he said.
“When there aren’t verifiable policy choices to attack, conspiracy theories will take their place – like the idea that he changed the state’s flag to resemble the Somali flag due to an immigrant takeover.”
Another point of criticism on Walz that’s gaining momentum among Republicans is … tampons? Walz supported a law that went into effect in Minnesota this year, requiring tampons in both boys and girls public school bathrooms.
The perhaps uninspired hashtag “TamponTim” trended on X among rightwing circles for most of Tuesday. On Gab, there’s a meme dubbing Walz “Tampon Tim” and shows a manipulated picture of him menstruating from his jeans.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, wasted no time appearing on Fox News only hours after Walz was announced to criticize the vice-presidential pick and his legislative track record.
“As a woman, I think there’s no greater threat to our health than leaders who support gender transition surgeries for young minors,” she said in an animated appearance, “who support putting tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools.”