Category: The American Spectator
‘Repulsive’: Critics blast Walz for invoking Anne Frank, comparing ICE enforcement to systematic genocide
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) has repeatedly turned to the 1930s in search of potential analogs for those people and actions today that he finds disagreeable.
Walz smeared, for example, Holocaust survivor Jerry Wartski and the tens of thousands of other Americans who attended a campaign event for President Donald Trump in October 2024, comparing them to the Nazis who rallied at the location in February 1939.
‘Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration, fraud, and lawlessness plaguing Minnesota today.’
Walz claimed on May 17, 2025, that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which was active during his former running mate’s tenure as vice president as well as during the Obama administration — was “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.”
In the wake of 37-year-old Alex Pretti’s fatal shooting by a federal immigration agent on Saturday, Walz once again went in search of a damning reference. This time, he likened Minnesota children whose streets are being cleared of violent criminal noncitizens to Jews in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands who were faced with systematized mass murder.
After further vilifying federal immigration agents and reiterating his demand that ICE leave the Gopher State, Walz said during a press conference on Sunday, “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank.”
“Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota,” added Walz. “And there’s one person who can end this now.”
Photographer: Jack Califano/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Anne Frank was a Jewish German girl whose family attempted to hide from Nazi forces in the secret annex of an Amsterdam residence. After two years of hiding, the family was captured after the Sicherheitspolizei raided the location in concert with Dutch police. Frank was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, where she and her sister died in 1945. Her father, Otto, survived Auschwitz, then later saw to the publication of Anne Frank’s diary.
Critics have suggested Walz’s comparison is indefensible.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, tweeted, “Ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust. Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law. She was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration, fraud, and lawlessness plaguing Minnesota today.”
“Our brave law enforcement should be commended, not tarred with this historically illiterate and antisemitic comparison,” added the rabbi.
Republican Rep. Randy Fine (Fla.) said that “comparing the removal of illegal immigrants to the Holocaust is antisemitic and repulsive.”
Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Jewish American activist and political commentator at PragerU, wrote, “One million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust. Illegal immigrants are offered thousands of dollars to take a free flight home. Tim Walz is an evil retard.”
The White House’s rapid response account said that Walz is a “truly disturbed, unstable individual.”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Former 911 Responder Shares Horror Stories Of Mail-Order Abortions
‘Is two enough,’ he asked, ‘or do I need to put in another one?’
Don’t Wait Until You Die To Give Your Kids Their Inheritance
A dollar at 25 can change a destiny. A dollar at 55 barely moves the needle.
Looking Back to Read Forward
The Washington Trail: A Slade and Cork Mystery By Lou Aguilar Aethon Books, 304 pages, $22 The usual practice in…
Mary Just Skinner
Long ago and far away, I was a lonely Junior at Columbia. I was in an incredibly great fraternity called…
Was 2024 the Hottest Year on Record?
We are often reminded that 2024 was the hottest year on record and that 2023 was the second hottest. The…
When a Bishop Forbids Kneeling
Catholic priests in the Diocese of Charlotte, in North Carolina, are asking the Vatican to possibly intervene as their bishop…
‘Gross’: WEF elites push for fake, lab-grown meat
Social media users reacted to elites discussing the consumption of lab-grown meat products during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week.
A video clip circulated on social media on Thursday of Andrea Illy, an Italian businessman and chairman of the coffee company Illycaffè, pushing for the adoption of tech foods.
‘This, I know, it’s kind of a cultural revolution.’
Sam Kass, a former White House chef and senior policy adviser for nutrition under former President Barack Obama, said, “A lot of what we’re starting to see are these replacements for these core foods. I’ve tasted a bunch of, you know, ‘future coffee, fake coffee.’ How do you see that application?”
Kass asked for Illy’s opinion on the matter, noting that, while the technology of cultivated food is “smart” and “interesting,” “from a values perspective” and as a chef, he does not want to see a future “where we’re starting to drink coffee from a factory as opposed to from a tree.”
Illy responded, “There is a terrible cultural resistance from [the] consumer to accept tech foods. But in my opinion, they represent the way forward.”
“We know from statistics … that 70% of the ecological footprint of agriculture is due to animal proteins,” Illy continued.
RELATED: Say no to synthetic: America needs real meat, not lab slop
Andrea Illy. Photo by Robin Marchant/Getty Images for illy caffe
He argued that the “excessive consumption” of meat “is the first cause of noncommunicable diseases,” which he claimed is “the number one health problem in the Western society.”
Illy suggested reducing meat consumption to a “healthy” level, while considering “the environmental impact.”
“Why should I use animals when I can cultivate meat and get only the best part of it?” Illy questioned.
RELATED: Bugs for thee, beef for me: How big business monopolizes meat
Andrea Illy. Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“This, I know, it’s kind of a cultural revolution,” he added, estimating that it would take decades to get people to adopt lab-grown meat as the new norm.
The WEF website boasts the adoption of cultivated meat. The organization explains that lab-grown meat begins with “extracting stem cells from a small sample of animal tissue” and placing those stem cells in a bioreactor. The WEF claims that cultivated meats offer “a multitude of benefits,” including reduced environmental impacts, lower resource use, elimination of the need to slaughter animals, and elimination of antibiotic use.
X users in the comments seemed less than enthusiastic about tech foods.
“They will eat steaks from the finest beef. Everyone else cancer cells cultivated in a laboratory,” one user wrote.
“Gross,” another stated.
“WEF is full of demons,” a third wrote.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
What’s Greenland to us?
The late, great Angelo Codevilla had a way of cutting through the fog of foreign policy.
In the Claremont Review of Books in 2019, he asked, “What’s Russia to us?” He didn’t ask because he had any special admiration for Russia. He asked because Washington had turned Russia into a utility: a convenient villain that justified budgets, scolded dissent, and kept the governing class in charge. Codevilla’s point was simple but brutal. Strategy begins with interests. Interests require discrimination. Most of what passes for “grand strategy” amounts to habit and vanity.
Greenland touches national defense. Greenland touches Arctic geography. Greenland touches the supply chain for advanced systems. Those facts don’t bend around Davos etiquette.
That question — his question — fits the Greenland uproar better than any of the Davos hand-wringing last week.
European leaders want this story to be about Trump’s manners and apparent recklessness. They want it to be about “norms,” about “tone,” about the precious feelings of the alliance. They want Americans to believe the true scandal lies in a U.S. president speaking too plainly or belligerently.
Trump did speak plainly. In Davos on Wednesday, he pushed for “immediate negotiations” to acquire Greenland and ruled out the use of military force. He also floated a “framework” tied to Arctic security after meeting NATO’s secretary general, while walking back tariff threats that had rattled allies and markets.
Fine. Trump being Trump shouldn’t surprise anyone.
But Europe’s reaction should surprise people, because it revealed how unserious the continent has become — even about something as serious as Greenland.
Instead of handling business like adults — hard bargaining among allies over a piece of real estate that actually matters — European capitals staged indignation, offered lectures, and then produced the usual substitute for seriousness: a symbolic “show of force” meant for domestic consumption.
The numbers tell the laughable story. Sweden sent three officers. Norway sent two. Finland sent two liaison officers. The Netherlands sent one naval officer. The U.K. sent one officer. France sent around 15 mountain specialists. Germany sent a reconnaissance team of 13. Denmark led with about 100 troops. Reuters called it “modest.” That word was kind.
But that’s the European governing class in a nutshell for you: Perform alarm, then perform resolve, then declare victory over a crisis they helped manufacture.
All of this theater tried to sell one idea: Greenland needs protection from the United States.
Preposterous.
Greenland matters because it helps defend the United States. Pituffik Space Base — some Americans may still know it as Thule — sits where U.S. forces can track threats coming over the pole. The Arctic doesn’t care about European speeches. Missiles don’t fly around Greenland out of respect for allied etiquette. Geography dictates capability, and Greenland sits where the map says it sits.
RELATED: Pressed on Greenland, Trump tells Davos the US has weapons he ‘can’t even talk about’
Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images
Europe’s commissioners understand that. They just hate saying it out loud because it reminds them of the arrangement they prefer to obscure: America provides the real security; Europe provides the indignant boo-hoo commentary.
The Greenland tantrum exposed another reality that should make America’s sensible policy planners sweat, assuming they still exist: The industrial foundations of power have become strategic again, and the West has behaved like an empire that forgot how to build.
Rare-earths sound like an investor pitch until you remember where they go. Modern weapons systems and advanced electronics depend on them. We need minerals you have likely never heard of — neodymium, dysprosium, samarium, and yttrium — to keep our F-35s flying and our missiles precision-guided.
But the supply chain runs through the part nobody wants to talk about: processing and refining. China dominates that bottleneck — especially the heavy rare-earth elements that sit in the highest-end systems. One major estimate put China’s share of global heavy rare-earth processing at more than 90%. That’s a massive national security hole.
Greenland matters because it offers a way out — not a magic wand, but an exit. Greenland holds serious mineral potential. That potential shifts the long-term strategic balance only if development happens.
Greenland’s own politics have made development tricky. In 2021, Greenland reinstated a uranium ban that effectively froze the Kvanefjeld project, one of the world’s most significant rare-earth deposits, because uranium appears alongside rare-earth ore and triggers the political and regulatory trip wires that make major mining projects difficult to sustain.
Greenland’s voters have every right to weigh environmental costs. Strategy still counts consequences. But the practical result of the ban didn’t restrain Beijing. It protected Beijing’s advantage.
The Europeans, of course, love a green virtue-signal that imposes no serious cost on Europe. Through it all, however, the continent remains dependent on America’s military might, dependent on Chinese processing, and increasingly dependent on slogans to conceal both.
So yes — Trump’s aggressive posture creates complications. Acquisition talk puts Denmark in a public box and turns what should be an alliance negotiation into a freak show. It hands European leaders a stage they don’t deserve and an excuse to treat American interests as a moral problem.
RELATED: Trump announces ‘framework’ of ‘great’ deal with NATO on Greenland
Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
But Europe’s leaders made fools of themselves by trying to address a strategic reality through choreography. A reconnaissance team, a few liaison officers, and a weekend of headlines don’t secure Greenland against anyone. Their “show of force” invited contempt, not respect.
Codevilla’s 2019 essay mocked the way our establishment inflates foreign threats to discipline the home front. The Greenland episode shows a mirror image: European elites inflating a U.S. negotiating push into a crisis because they can’t handle an America that talks like a serious country.
Greenland touches our national defense. Greenland touches Arctic geography. Greenland touches the supply chain for advanced systems. Those facts don’t bend around Davos etiquette.
So use Codevilla’s test. Strip away the moral fog. Rank interests and act like the answers matter.
What’s Greenland to us?
A hell of a lot.
