PHX Reporter

Minnesota First Lady Gwen Walz, scheduled to appear at three Arizona campaign events today, said in July 2020 that she would “keep the windows open as long” as she could to smell the burning tires of the Minneapolis George Floyd riots.

Walz is the wife of Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in the 2024 Presidential Election.

“I would say those first days, you know when there were riots, I could smell the burning tires, and that was — that was a very real thing,” Walz told KSTP News Minneapolis. “And I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was — what was happening.”

Steve Cortes, founder of the League of American Voters, said Walz’s comments are “sickening.”

“In summer of 2020, the Twin Cities of Minnesota were ravaged by the BLM riots that Kamala Harris supported, including bailing out thugs who attacked cops,” Cortes told PHX Reporter.

“It’s sickening that Gwen Walz apparently found those deadly riots to be something almost theatrical, rather than a real life tragedy that included the destruction of an American police station by violent radicals,” he said.

Walz is scheduled to attend campaign events in Phoenix, Flagstaff, and Kingman today on behalf of her husband, who has been the governor of Minnesota since 2018.

Tim Walz oversaw the 2020 “COVID-19” lockdowns and was governor during the 2020 Black Lives Matter-George Floyd riots. Minneapolis experienced the majority of the destruction during these riots; stores were ransacked, streets trashed, and a police station burned to the ground; with little to no repercussions for the protestors. At least two people were killed and more than 600 arrested as rioters caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage across Minnesota.

During the lockdowns Walz set up an anonymous reporting system to allow people to snitch on their neighbors if they saw them breaking the mandated lockdown. He also failed to decisively respond to the riots before they spiraled out of control with the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct police station being overrun and destroyed by arsonists.

While Harris has said she never personally donated to the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF), which paid to bail rioters out after they were arrested, she was encouraging others to do so, posting the link on her social media and publicly supporting the group. 

The MFF has received more than $35 million in donations since the killing of George Floyd and with the help of high profile advocates like Kamala Harris, Cynthia Nixon and Seth Rogen.