The Star Tribune (whose publisher was formerly in Walz’s cabinet) along with most of the media is totally distorting this controversy in order to give cover. There are a few separate controversies to understand here.
▪️The stolen valor issue isn’t about his retirement. It has to do with several instances he presented himself as being in war when he wasn’t. Particularly the quote, “the weapons of war, I carried in war.” This was a quote used and highlighted by the Harris campaign! Clearly he was presenting himself as a combat veteran in order to push gun control. For the Strib and other media to ignore this is totally dishonest.
▪️The issue with his retirement is a bit more complex. The media is pushing the fact that his unit was notified of deployment after he put in his retirement as proof he didn’t dodge. But leadership typically know about deployments way in advance of official notification. So it’s likely Walz knew prior to his retirement. But no proof that I know yet.
▪️Adding to this is his going to training to become a command sergeant major right before his retirement. To check the box of reaching that position, but then retiring before actually utilizing it in any way. And potentially avoiding deployment to boot as a leader. This isn’t the smoking gun like the stolen valor thing, but might become so if people dig into it.
▪️Imo, this is going to be a big problem for Walz as, while the media will try to cover for him, people will keep pushing this and potentially force him to answer the unforgivable sin of why he pretended to be in war. For those like me, who didn’t serve, it’s a little bit inside baseball, but veterans gossip like crazy and aren’t likely to let it go.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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