If Confucius did not say anything quite like that, he should have.

In a clip posted Friday to the social media platform X, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the comically overmatched and often creepy 2024 running mate to former Vice President Kamala Harris, told what looked like a small gathering of supporters that Democrats needed to form a "shadow government" in response to President Donald Trump's administration.

"We see one of the first things they do is try and restrict the vote," Walz said.

He did not specify, but apparently Walz meant that as a reference to Trump's executive order earlier this week designed to enforce federal laws by preventing non-citizens from registering to vote and making sure that only mail-in ballots received by Election Day will count toward final totals.

Democrats, of course, hate anything that makes election fraud more difficult.

Walz then admitted that he did not know exactly what to do about it, but he offered a potential strategy.

"I think we need a shadow government," he said. "So when all these things come up every single day, we've got an alternate press conference telling the truth about what things are happening."

By "shadow government," which sounds treasonous, Walz almost certainly had in mind a "Shadow Cabinet." In the United Kingdom's parliamentary system, the leader of the opposition party organizes a "team of senior spokespeople" to counter the party in power and thereby "present itself as an alternative government-in-waiting."

In other words, Walz believes that Democrats' problems lay not in their unpopular policies but in their unstructured messaging.

For instance, in that same speech the failed vice presidential candidate argued that Democrats needed louder and more strident defenses of policies Americans have rejected.

"We've been talking about this for years as a country of immigrants," Walz said in a separate clip on X. "And we let them define the issue on immigration."

Apparently Democrats "allowed" Republicans to point out the border invasion that millions of Americans also noticed.