New Documentary Sheds Light on Shocking Radicalism of Minnesota Gov. Walz

In the wake of shocking primary elections in New York City that saw multiple openly socialist candidates unseat sitting far-left Democrat congressmen, many Americans who only casually follow politics are likely asking themselves: Just how radical exactly is today’s Democrat Party? A new documentary titled Minnesota Mao (also available free on YouTube) which examines the history and legacy of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz may provide something of an answer.

Walz, of course, is most famous for his ill-fated tenure as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024. But Minnesota Mao takes a deeper look than the “mainstream” media ever did on either the state or national levels. It points us to a disturbing truth about not just Walz but the Democrat Party more broadly: What we just saw in New York is nothing new. Democrats were radicalized long ago, and this younger, more aggressive cohort is just saying out loud (very loudly) what the party has secretly believed for a long time.

Like the 2023 documentary The Fall of Minneapolis, which pulled back the curtains on the real story of George Floyd, the riots in Minneapolis, and Derek Chauvin’s trial, Minnesota Mao is written by J.C. Chaix and produced by the independent media company Alpha News, which covers stories the Minneapolis Star Tribune and other old-line media won’t touch.

The documentary was released on June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and, five years later, Tim and Gwen Walz’s wedding. Walz said he “wanted to have a date he’ll always remember.” That ambiguous line takes on a dark meaning as the movie probes his history.

The beginning of the film is a series of images, dramatic music, and words across the screen setting out the modern history of Mao and his Revolution in China. It then kicks off a series of interviews with figures who have been connected with Walz in some way. The first is Shad Olson, one of the students who went to China with the then-high school teacher Walz in the 1990s.

What bothered Olson on the trip was the American Walz’s expressed “beliefs and this kind of affection, admiration for a totalitarian dictatorship.” Seared in Olson’s memory is a night of shopping at the open markets and bazaars. Walz was buying dozens and dozens of copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which Olson notes is no mere “political treatise” but the “daily devotional of the Communist Party.”

That the inside of the book told the reader that Mao’s words “bring us joy” naturally reminds Olson of the attempt to sell Kamala Harris and Walz as the “politics of joy” ticket. The famous Harris promise to be “unburdened by what has been” and to provide a “way forward” strikes Olson not as generic progressive language but echoes of Mao’s Great Leap Forward – which killed upwards of 55 million people.

Walz’s connections to China might have been probed even further than the documentary takes them. The British Daily Mail reported in 2024 that many of Walz’s trips to China were funded in large part by the Chinese government. But, given Olson’s testimony to Walz’s professed love of “collectivist and controlled systems of government,” such Chinese investment was rational.

Olson sees Walz’s command-and-control tenure in Minnesota as a “beta test” and “sociological petri dish” for the kind of nationwide system Democrats would like to impose on Americans. Walz is famous for his own Year Zero approach to Minnesota history, having pushed the removal of historical names of lakes and high schools, the removal of statues, and even the replacement of Minnesota’s flag with something that looks… like a Somali provincial flag. 

For each chapter of the documentary, a quotation from The Little Red Book is given and Alpha News’s Liz Collin interviews someone else connected to Walz. Tom Behrends, who served with Walz in the Minnesota National Guard, testifies to Walz’s stolen valor. In the service of pushing gun control, Walz referred to “those weapons of war that I carried in war” (he never served in combat).

To boost his masculine image, Walz bragged about having retired as a Command Sergeant Major, the highest non-commissioned officer rank possible. The reality, as Behrends notes, is that he left the National Guard before being deployed to Iraq and never actually finished Command Sergeant Major Academy.

More darkly, Behrends tells the story of a classified manual for a new American tank disappearing around the time Walz took one of his 30 trips to China and reappearing shortly after he returned. China produced a model suspiciously similar shortly thereafter. Was it Walz? Behrends doesn’t have proof, but the circumstances do not look good for Walz.

There are plenty of other mysteries in the documentary. What was Walz’s relationship with Vance Boelter, who killed Minnesota State Senator Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot State Senator John Hoffmann and his wife? Boelter claimed in a letter to the FBI that he had been given a hit list by Walz. The documentary plays interviews with Boelter in which the murderer instructs Liz Collin to follow the story where it leads. It also notes that Boelter spent a good deal of time investigating things related to Chinese ties to Minnesota. Like the tank manual story, it’s not conclusive but suggestive. Boelter may just be a kook or trying to distract people from some other motive, but it’s a story that really hasn’t been explained.

Less shrouded in mystery are the many other topics taken on by the documentary that include:

• The incredibly loose voting mechanisms in Minnesota, the investigation of which, even by Minnesota cities and counties that are concerned about election integrity, have been blocked by the state;
• The long-running fraud scandals and the Walz administration’s rather blunt attempt to keep whistleblowers from revealing the shady behavior that was going on—especially by telling state employees that revealing Somali fraud was about “white supremacy”;
• The draconian COVID-19 diktats issued by Walz, all in the name of “control,” that destroyed countless small businesses and attempted to turn Minnesotans against each other with an official state snitch line;
• The long-running attempts at gun-grabbing under vague language targeting “military-style assault rifles”;
• The ideological warfare Walz and the Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party has ceaselessly waged around gender ideology and race.

At one hour and twenty-nine minutes, this documentary is not overly long. It is perhaps more directly politically conservative in orientation than The Fall of Minneapolis, which seemed to strive for a more non-partisan tone. Mainstream media outlets, of course, have steadfastly ignored both projects.

Minnesota Mao could have covered even more territory given the years of attempts at collectivism and control by Walz and the DFL. The cultural warfare in the realm of education is one example. Katherine Kersten of the Center for the American Experiment has been covering the years-long attempt by Walz and educational bureaucrats to turn Minnesota schools into educational indoctrination and activist-training camps, especially via a “comprehensive new K-12 ‘liberated’ ethnic studies regime.”

What Minnesota Mao’s well-produced and stylish look into Minnesota and its alternately absurd and frightening governor reveals is that the radicalism of the young DSA politicians is not really different from what it is replacing in the blue states. Tim Walz tried to cover up his collectivism in faux Midwestern accents and flannel. The newer politicians don’t cover it up at all.

We have all been warned.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.