CLAY: We are headed up to the great state of Minnesota. Golden Gophers 4-0. If you are a Minnesota sports fan, you can celebrate. I bet Buck didn’t know that.
BUCK: I’m all about the Golden Gophers. All about it.
CLAY: P. J. Fleck has got ’em at 4-0. I bet that our next guest, Dr. Scott Jensen would know about that because it looks like they may be making a trip to Indianapolis. Only one top 25 team on the schedule the rest of the way. Dr. Jensen, are you a Golden Gopher guy?
DR. JENSEN: In my family we have a total of 10 degrees from the University of Minnesota. We actually have Gopher blood in our veins.
CLAY: It’s been a good season so far. So, that’s a positive. Buck and I are fired up. I want to set you up. You’ve got an MD. We do not. As more and more the evidence comes out about the deleterious impact of lockdowns, of school, everything else associated with that, how wrong were we on covid, and how much are you hearing from Minnesota voters about the errors of that way? Is it a significant impact in your race?
DR. JENSEN: It is a significant impact, and it seems like almost each week that passes there’s more to tell us. I mean, we see Joe Biden say the pandemic is over and we see everybody scrambling and we see his own experts and researchers criticizing him. Then he tries to walk it back.
But at the end of the day, I think we’re gonna recognize that what we did for those two and a half years when we locked kids out of school and we locked nursing homes into facilities that had literally become infested with that virus through policies, if you will, Tim Walz and a variety of other Democratic governors, those policies caused horrific deaths in the nursing home population.
When we locked businesses down capriciously where — in Minnesota we had two different lockdowns but the second one you couldn’t get a haircut — evidently the science showed us that the virus didn’t like hair anymore. These are the kinds of shortsighted policy making that really hurt us and the whole idea of one-size-fits-all doesn’t work.
And then we had for a while the denying of natural immunity. Then we had the goal posts being moved. And then we saw the epidemic of fear and we tried to see people’s thinking processes paralyzed by fear. There were so many things done wrong that we’ve got a lot to learn.
BUCK: Dr. Jensen, I want to ask you about the issue of crime in your state. We have been talking here on the show since we started in June of 2021 together about what happened in 2020 and the BLM riots and what that did to the country, obviously began in Minneapolis.
There was a very loud defund the police movement there. You actually had a police station burned to the ground in Minneapolis which I think a lot of people forget about, certainly the national media wants people to forget about it right now. What has happened?
I mean, since there were people painting murals of George Floyd and at BLM marches, protests, and riots, and the Democrats deciding that defund was their mantra for the entirety of 2020, what has crime done in Minneapolis and across your state?
DR. JENSEN: It has bled everywhere. And it isn’t just the urban areas. What we saw literally was Minneapolis became the epicenter of a nationwide violence. And at the end of the day, you could literally say that Tim Walz was the godfather for all of that violence.
He created it by quitting. He quit on Minnesota. He quit on the National Guard. We had TV journalists saying, where’s our governor? This is what Tim Walz has done. It’s almost as if he was just — he was tired out, he was just too lazy to get down in the streets and really help him.
So, when he finally did put the National Guard out, late, he tried to blame Jacob Frey for it. When he let the 3rd Precinct building burn to the ground, he tried to blame it and say that it was the best advice of law enforcement. And that was entirely his decision.
I’m surprised, actually, that Minnesota hasn’t been sued by other states because other states wouldn’t have experienced the kind of decimation and devastation they did had it not been for Tim Walz’s entirely inept handling of the riots.
CLAY: Dr. Jensen, what should he have done? Let’s pretend that we’re in a different world and, you’re right, we hadn’t allowed the summer of violence to spiral out and to still be reaping unfortunately what we’ve sown in that time with all of the violent crime that has spiraled since, what should have happened in the wake of the George Floyd incident?
But so do our internal, if you will, tools that we utilize to maintain safety and lawful behavior. That’s what Governor Walz should have done. He should have tapped into the command chains that were in place. We have the state patrol. We have the National Guard.
We have relationships with other police departments in the suburban areas. All of these could have been a part of a unified response and a rapid response. Certainly not being dragged out day after day after day where literally we’ve got, like I mentioned before, TV journalists saying, where’s our governor?
It should be a unified, strong, not either/or but both/and. This should have been everything going out there because this was a huge issue. And literally we have a billion dollars of damage. People died. People were hurt. And in those areas today we still have people just overwhelmed by fear.
They don’t want to move. They don’t have a place to move to. The governor could have used his bully pulpit to elevate the work that the police were doing, the state patrol could do, the National Guardsmen. But instead, our governor chose to denigrate the very people he had led by calling them 19-year-old crooks. It was astonishing.
BUCK: Speaking to Dr. Scott Jensen who is running for the governor’s position in Minnesota. Dr. Jensen, we got a lot of people across Minnesota who are listening right now, and we’ve seen some polls that show that you are making this a competitive race.
It’s a shame that Minnesota’s thought of increasingly as a blue state, but you may be able to turn some of that around and you’re gonna need some independents certainly and maybe even some Democrats to switch around to decide they’re gonna give you a shot.
If you become the governor of Minnesota, a state where I actually expended a lot of time growing up — it’s a beautiful place — how will it be different than if Walz is able to continue in his role?
DR. JENSEN: We’ll trail blaze the issues. We’ll have the hard conversations. We’ll speak for all Minnesotans and we will tell the truth. We’re not going to politicize. That’s not who we are. And the fraud that has become identified with Minnesota politics will disappear.
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but over the last 72 hours we’ve had breaking news where in almost an unprecedented move the judicial system of Minnesota came out and Judge Gothman basically called Tim Walz a liar in regards to some of Tim Walz’s comments in terms of Judge Gothman’s rulings.
Judge Gothman said this is inaccurate what he has said. Tim Walz doubled down and said, well, the judge did this or they would have held us in contempt. The fact of the matter is Judge Gothman had never made any ruling requiring Minnesota to make fraudulent payments to feeding our future.
And so, I think Tim Walz right now is being called out by numerous factions across the state of Minnesota including people on the other side of the aisle. The excellence in government that Minnesota used to be associated with is no longer a part of it. And I think that’s why you’ll see Real Clear Politics call our race a toss-up.
And in doing that, that was before this largest fraud of a covid relief policy in the entire country taking place in Minnesota. And that’s why we’re telling people, you know, we’ve got a chance. We’ve got a chance to turn Minnesota red and we need hope because Walz’s team, they’ve got five to one money on us.
But if people are willing to help us out and give at Dr. ScottJensen.com, it would help us immensely. And we’ve already broken all records for fundraising for any Republican governor’s race. And we got over a hundred thousand people that have joined our email team. We’ve got 35,000 unique donations.
So, there’s a movement going on in Minnesota, and I hope you keep watching it because the two of you, your voice matters. It really amplifies to the whole country what’s going on in Minnesota. And if in Minnesota we see Minnesota turn red and have a governor that’s Republican for the first time in a long time, that’s gonna change the landscape in a lot of other states as well.
CLAY: No doubt. Dr. Jensen, we appreciate you coming on the show. We’re wishing you well. Let us know how we can help out, and good luck to you in making the Minnesota governor’s race a true battleground.
DR. JENSEN: Thank you both so much. Together we stand.
CLAY: No doubt.
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