Tim Walz Has Broken Tucker Carlson’s Brain

The stunt was mainly an excuse for Walz to hype up young voters and remind them of Project 2025, which Coach Walz has been (successfully, I’d say) framing as the MAGA “playbook.” For Harris-Walz supporters, the highlight was probably the moment they did a live look into Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and Walz spontaneously reacted to the now-infamous comedy stylings of chucklefuck Tony Hinchcliffe: “Who’s this jackwad?” (You can take the high school teacher out of Minnesota, but you can’t take the Minnesota niceness out of the high school teacher.)

Trump supporters pounced on an apparent Walz “football gaffe” made during the stream; a tweet from Walz’s account (let’s keep in mind that the governor himself was actively playing a video game at the moment) gushed that Ocasio-Cortez “could run a mean pick 6.” (That’s not a play you can run, it’s what the defense can do if they intercept the ball.) It fell to JD Vance to try and turn that error into an attack. And, I’ll grant him this: After asserting, somewhat John Kerry–like, that “on the football field, you run like a spread offense or a West Coast offense,” he stiffly suggested, “Maybe I know more about football than Governor Tim Walz does.” This is a genuinely funny line, though I’m not sure Vance intended it to be. I propose that their discomfort with Walz’s gameplay stems more from his willingness to let a girl beat him more than any specific terminological misfire (which, let’s face it, was probably a harried staffer’s slip-up).

The right have been thrown into a panic about the possibility that gender roles don’t necessarily mean much; Walz appears untroubled by how other people act out their identities. In his words, he minds his own damn business. Almost all of their attacks on him have been launched in attempts to dent a masculinity that he wields effortlessly: “Tampon Tim,” questioning his military service, the grotesque mocking of his son’s not-so-manly exuberance, his own delightful, unselfconscious expressiveness. You can watch a supercut of intended mockery and justification for the slurs here and judge for yourself if any of his gestures seem “gay” to you.