Tim Walz Is Terrified Ahead of Debate with JD Vance, Campaign Insiders Say

Vice President Kamala Harris and her surrogates must have some special insight into psychological manipulation.

Otherwise, one struggles to account for the strange reports and behavior coming out of the Harris campaign in recent days.

For instance, on Monday CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported that Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has fought intense nerves ahead of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate against Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, former President Donald Trump’s running mate.

Nearly a dozen Harris campaign insiders confirmed Walz’s frequent expressions of pre-debate anxiety.

Why exactly they would reveal such a thing remains a mystery.

Axios speculated that the CNN report amounted to “expectation management.”

Dovere, however, specifically noted that “aides insist this isn’t just about setting expectations.”

Of course, if you intended to set low expectations for Walz, you would hardly admit to it.

Thus, the aides’ denial of intent to set such expectations makes sense. But their openness about Walz’s apparent nerves still does not.

Then again, it made no obvious sense when, late last week, the Harris campaign sent out a fundraising that highlighted Trump’s polling strength in the three anticipated swing states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

Nor did it make obvious sense when, last Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan admitted that pollsters for her Senate campaign have Harris “underwater” in that crucial swing state.

Perhaps both Slotkin and the Harris campaign merely tried to spur fundraising by intensifying donors’ sense of urgency.

Otherwise, highlighting the vice president’s polling weaknesses probably strikes most observers as an amateurish act of extreme desperation.

In short, either Democrats have no idea what they are doing, or they have stumbled upon a psychological tactic that they believe will influence the minds of voters whom they need to capture.

One cannot dismiss the latter possibility.

In fact, for reasons few conservatives instinctively understand, the Harris campaign’s admission of Walz’s nervousness has powerful, manipulative potential.

For instance, one suspects that when most conservatives think of Walz they immediately remember his stolen-valor scandal. Perhaps, too, they recall his record as a COVID-era tyrant, as well as his unhealthy interest in children’s sexuality.

In other words, we see in Walz a combination of dishonesty, cowardice and even creepiness. And we regard his authoritarian bullying as a sign that he probably has deep feelings of personal inadequacy.

Needless to say, no society in human history has ever recognized those qualities as “masculine.” Yet Democrats have gone out of their way to depict Walz as a harbinger of a new kind of masculinity.

“The guy is reclaiming old White dude masculinity away from toxicity,” one unnamed Walz acquaintance told Dovere.

Thus, viewed as part of a larger project to redefine masculinity itself, the Harris campaign’s decision to reveal Walz’s nervousness in the face of a superior debater like Vance makes total sense.

How else might this constitute manipulation?

Keep in mind that Democrats, particularly in the age of wokeness, regard one’s alleged victimhood as empowering. The more beleaguered you claim to be — never mind the truth of it — the more the world owes you.

With that in mind, they have perverted and weaponized basic human compassion.

To accomplish this, they have inverted the plain meaning of words. In that way, censorship becomes democracy, so you must support the censors. Men can become women, so you must allow every dress-wearing male into your daughter’s spaces. And strength becomes oppression, so you must admire all forms of professed weakness.

Concurrently, they have created categories of alleged victims toward whom, they say, one must direct one’s compassion. Most of these categories involve skin color or chromosomes. While Walz’s whiteness and maleness would otherwise exclude him, his new and trailblazing brand of “old White dude masculinity” actually makes him a perfect candidate.

It all comes together in the mind of a woke Democrat.

Thus, had Walz simply appeared on the debate stage Tuesday, viewers would have had no reason to think anything unusual.

Now, however, Harris campaign operatives have prepped viewers with reports of Walz’s nervousness. In so doing, they have made him an object worthy of this new, perverted compassion.

Does all of this sound far-fetched? Perhaps it is. Perhaps it gives the Democrats too much credit. After all, the Harris campaign might simply qualify as desperate and amateurish.

Nonetheless, totalitarian Marxists have shown for more than a century that they understand psychological manipulation. So we cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that Harris and her surrogates, in their odd way, know exactly the effect that news of Walz’s nerves will have on viewers already conditioned to new conceptions of masculinity and compassion.

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