As American missiles struck Iranian targets and ended the 86-year-old theocratic dictator Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took to X with a two-word foreign policy treatise: "No new wars."
It did not go well for him.
The 2024 vice presidential nominee joined the chorus of Democrats criticizing the Trump administration's strikes on Iran, and the internet responded with the kind of bipartisan contempt rarely seen in American politics. Walz managed to unite the left and the right, not behind a cause, but against himself.
The responses came fast and from every direction, Fox News noted. Aviva Klompas, whose bio includes time at the Israeli mission to the United Nations, dismantled the premise entirely:
"Iran started this war 47 years ago when they took Americans hostage. Honestly, can people crack open a book before posting nonsense?"
Comedian Michael Rapaport slammed Walz by retweeting Klompas's response and then offered his own assessment of Khamenei's demise:
"I'm glad that old bag of s--- and his entire regime are gone."
Rapaport, who has been vocal against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, went on to take issue with critics of the Iranian strikes more broadly. He condemned those who remained silent as Khamenei oversaw mass murders of tens of thousands of dissidents in recent months. On Monday, he added further commentary on the dictator's death in characteristically colorful fashion.
Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a top pro-Israel voice in Congress, skipped the geopolitics entirely and went straight for the jugular: "Will this affect your Somali kickbacks?"
Conservative videographer Cam Higby, who had tweeted videos of his stringer-type visits to Minneapolis unrest, posed a different question: "Didn't you just try to start a war with Trump a month ago?"
That last one lands harder than it might seem.
Tim Walz has spent the past year as one of the most visible state leaders and Trump critics in the country. He has repeatedly condemned the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement efforts in his state. He has pushed the idea that President Donald Trump is a monarch, posting "No kings" alongside his opposition. He has positioned himself as the conscience of the resistance.
And yet the man who wants to be the moral authority on executive overreach once stood with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and declared:
"Minnesota stands with the people of Ukraine as they fight to defend freedom and democracy."
So military engagement abroad is noble when it involves a cause Walz approves of, but a strike against a regime that took American hostages, sponsored terrorism across the Middle East, and brutalized its own people is somehow a bridge too far. The principle isn't "no new wars." The principle is "no wars that help Trump."
This is the feedback loop that defines so much of the modern left. Opposition to the current administration becomes the only consistent value. Everything else, including coherence, is negotiable.
Fine's jab about "Somali kickbacks" wasn't random. Minnesota has wrestled with a Somali-linked childcare fraud problem that metastasized to other sectors, and Walz has faced scrutiny over his handling of it. The governor who positions himself as a guardian of democratic norms has presided over a state where fraud flourished under lax oversight. That context doesn't disappear because he posted two words about Iran.
Late Monday, reports surfaced that Khamenei's wife, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, succumbed to her injuries from the missile strike that killed her husband. The regime that terrorized its own citizens, hanged dissidents from cranes, and funded proxy wars across the region has been decapitated.
The appropriate response from an American governor is not complicated. You don't have to celebrate. You don't have to wave a flag. But "No new wars" in response to the elimination of one of the world's most brutal theocrats tells you everything about where Walz's priorities sit. Not with the Iranian women beaten for showing their hair. Not with the hostages taken 47 years ago. Not with the dissidents who disappeared into regime prisons.
With the narrative. Always with the narrative.
Walz wanted to score a point against the administration. Instead, he reminded everyone, left and right alike, why voters didn't send him to the White House.
