Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz looked like a deer in the headlines when debate moderator Margaret Brennan questioned him about his lies regarding Tiananmen Square. He did not expect this question from his CBS allies and was unprepared for the line of questioning. 

He blathered on about his upbringing in rural Nebraska, stumbled over a plot line to support his lie, and finally admitted that he was a “knucklehead” who “misspoke” about the event. 

But is it a “misspeak” when the lie is repeated multiple times? 

In 2014, Walz, then a congressman from Minnesota, shared with other lawmakers that as a young man, he planned to teach high school in Foshan, Guangdong, and was in Hong Kong in May 1989.  

He repeated his claim during a radio interview five years later, saying he was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when the Tiananmen Square events took place. He added that after the protests, he stayed in China and mentioned that outside transmissions were blocked, and no phones or email services were available.  

As recently as February, he said on a podcast that he was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred. He added to his story that “quite a few of our folks” decided not to go in.  

Long live Tim Walz, the hero of Tiananmen Square. 

But that’s three “misspeaks” regarding the violent Hong Kong protest that left hundreds of people dead. More than one isn’t a “misspeak,” it’s an outright lie. Walz was not there despite his attempts to be as historically relevant as Forest Gump. 

According to newspaper reports from ABC News, Walz didn’t go to the area until August 1989. The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, which ended with a horrifically violent government response, lasted from April 15 to June 4 that year, about two months before Walz traveled to the country. 

However, “misspeaks” are the hallmark of Walz’s stories, bringing to mind another Democrat politician with a long history of embellishing the truth. 

Recall that President Joe Biden, channeling his own inner Gump, is a Catholic Jewish man who was a truck-driving product of his poverty-stricken upbringing in a Black Latino community. His embellishments are as deep as his foreign-funded bank accounts. 

In a 2018 video shared by the Harris campaign, Walz spoke out against gun violence. He said, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” The comment made it sound like Walz had been in a combat zone. 

While Walz served in different Army National Guard units for 24 years, he was never in a combat zone. His only wartime assignment was in Italy, where he replaced troops who were being sent to Afghanistan in 2003. He retired in 2005, shortly after learning his unit would be deployed to Iraq in 2006. 

Harris’ campaign called Walz a “retired Command Sergeant Major,” but Minnesota National Guard officials said Walz didn’t finish all the training and requirements for that rank. He retired as a Sergeant Major, but soon after, his rank was lowered to master sergeant because he was not qualified. It’s a lie Walz has been happy to repeat multiple times. 

Even his claims of using IVF are not rooted in reality. In March, after an Alabama court stopped in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz talked about his and his wife Gwen’s struggle to have children. That same month, his team sent a fundraising email titled “Our IVF Journey,” sharing an article that mentioned their IVF experience. 

Earlier this month, Walz criticized Ohio Senator JD Vance, claiming that Vance would have kept him from getting IVF to start a family. However, Gwen Walz later clarified that they didn’t use IVF but instead relied on another process called intrauterine insemination (IUI). 

For Minnesotans, Walz’s “misspeaks” are common. Among other blatant lies, Walz claimed that people from outside the state organized the 2020 protests that burned his city to the ground. Arrest records showed that his statement that “80% of the people involved were from outside the state” was wrong. 

In a 2022 interview, Walz said that “over 80% of students missed less than ten days of in-person learning.” However, his school closures lasted from mid-March 2020 until summer break in June, and many schools stayed online into 2021.  

Walz spins his tapestry of lies just like Biden does, and the media can’t “misspeak” on his behalf fast enough to keep up with him.