There was a DragonBall Z Parody done a long time ago that had Vegeta battling Goku and his friends for control of the Earth. The entire series was pretty funny, but I remember to this day a conversation that was both hilarious and poignant at the same time.
Vegeta: That armor was a gift from my father!
Yajirobe: Oh, uh, I'm sorry. I'm sure your father was a great man!
Vegeta: I hated my father!
Yajirobe: Oh, well, I'm sure your father was a total prick then!
Vegeta: How dare you talk about my father that way! (*blasts Yajirobe to kingdom come*)
It used to be one of the core realities of family life is you can have your gripes, anger, and disagreements, but it was always an internal matter. Even if you hate your relatives, you would never publicly denigrate them to other people. Also, it was totally out of bounds for anyone to denigrate them in your presence. The family was bonded in blood, and someone who crossed the line of insulting your bloodline would pay for it. Bonds of blood are deeper than passing ideologies, even in tragic circumstances that differences make reconciliation impossible.
Everyone saw the famous disavowal from the Kennedy family when he endorsed Donald Trump, and that came as no surprise to anyone, as the Kennedy family is full of the most notorious scumbags to ever enter politics. Also, it’s perfectly on-the-nose for leftists to eschew family for political gain. These guys would shoot their own grandma if it gave them a chance at power.
This, however, disgusted me. In the constant need to own one’s opponents, even people on the conservative side go out of their way to destroy these bonds for cheap political points.
Here we have relatives of Walz, including an old lady would should know better, as she came from the before times when politics wasn’t all-encompassing. Those smug faces as they throw family under the bus for a viral Twitter post is everything that is wrong with the culture we live in.
In any sane culture where you have a wayward member of the family embarrassing you in public, or espousing horrific policies, you talk to him privately. Then, if he doesn’t change course, the other members family decides the next course of action. If necessary, in rare occurrences, even family sometimes needs to be cut off. What family would never do is countersignal to strangers. Whatever internal squabbles happen, you “shut the f*ck up” when anyone askes about it. It’s none of their damn business, and involving strangers serves only to turn a tragic mess into a farce.
This isn’t a matter of applying to loser “principles”. Blood is stronger than principles, elections, and owning your enemies. Family is a sacred temple that can never be questioned by anyone who lives outside its hallowed halls. To publicly rebuke one’s family is to make yourself a clown for public amusement. It’s trying to earn the love of strangers who will never be able to give to you what you threw away.
For those people on our side laughing about owning the libs, stop and consider what you are actually cheering.
Why assume that Tim Walz's family hasn't made it perfectly clear to him exactly what they think of him?
Sure, this kind of thing is wildly destructive. But you know what's worse? A family allowing someone like Tim Walz, who does everything within his considerable power to dissolve family bonds for wide swaths of the population, to enjoy the benefits of said ties with his own family. On the contrary, it is the responsibility of virtuous families everywhere to cast such cretins out of their "hallowed halls" until the cretins repent. You shouldn't be allowed to permit a mob to burn down Minneapolis and then show up for family holidays like nothing has happened. Maybe you are, but you shouldn't be.
To publicly rebuke one's family is costly, yes. But Tim Walz has spent the better part of two decades clowning himself, and by extension, his family, in supporting the most anti-family policies imaginable. We can surely be sympathetic for the bitter draught this family is now drinking, but let's be clear about who mixed it for them: Tim Walz.
Yes, as much as I'd like to see the campaign undermined, this sort of thing is too corrosive on a level deeper than politics. I got a sick feeling when that Facebook post by Walz's estranged brother was going around. This sort of thing is just poison.