Walz Lies About China, Too

AP Photo/Brynn Anderson

We all know Tim Walz has an allergy to telling the truth. 

His goal, apparently, is to fill the Joe Biden role in the upcoming administration by reinventing his biography. Kamala is perfectly suited to duplicate Slow Joe's inability to think or speak, and Walz takes on the "I was born a poor black child," and "was at the top of my law school class" side of the brain-dead presidency. 

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The nation got its first hints about Walz's problems with the truth when it was revealed that he had been claiming a rank he hadn't earned and valor in a war he never fought. Those, perhaps, are the most egregious of his lies, but they are just the tip of a very large iceberg. 

In a profile done by Minnesota Public Radio that goes to tremendous lengths to excuse his fabrications, we learn that his famous teaching ties to China are grossly exaggerated. They remain troubling--we get a number of references to the fact that Walz was just so damn good that the Chinese government gave him incredibly special treatment for some reason--but we also learn that Walz is so proud of his China experience that he has lied about it for decades to make it sound even more special. 

Walz is good at giving vivid accounts of events that never happened, such as watching fallen soldiers be loaded onto an aircraft in Afghanistan. This turns out to be his M.O. and not a one-off:

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At a 2014 congressional hearing held to mark the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tim Walz, then a congressman representing Minnesota’s first district, recalled being in Hong Kong when the Chinese Communist Party crushed the student protests that had roiled the country since mid-April of 1989. The unforgettable crackdown came on June 4 of that year.

"I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong, and was in Hong Kong in May of ‘89," he said. "And as the events were unfolding, several of us went in. And I still remember the train station in Hong Kong." He went on: "There was a large number of, especially European, I think, very angry that we would still go after what had happened, but it was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels."

That anecdote has since been repeated, without scrutiny, by the New York Times, CBS News, and National Public Radio, among others. In reality, local news reports show that Walz was at home in Nebraska in May and June of 1989, as protests convulsed China and the government’s response turned the world’s attention to its gross human rights violations. He wouldn’t depart for China until August.

 I realize that Hong Kong and Nebraska are difficult to distinguish, but a teacher describing a turning point in his life might manage the task of doing so. Hong Kong. Nebraska. Hong Kong or National Guard storeroom. Not quite the same thing. 

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Notice how Tim Walz transforms every aspect of this: 1) he was there (not true); 2) his going to China after one of the worst massacres in its history was for the good of diplomacy (insane); and 3) that he was in the thick of things (well, Nebraska, and that's pretty close, right?) instead of a viewer from afar. 

Very Joe Bidenesque. 

None of that was true, and all of it was intended to deceive the listener into thinking that Walz was especially brave and important. 

He was there, man. You have no idea how harrowing but enriching it was! He was a young ambassador to China, helping bridge the cultural gap at a crucial moment. 

Of course the corporate media accepted and amplified his account because, well, he is a Democrat. They dutifully printed his bogus account, and will dutifully bury the fact that it was all bulls**t now that it has proven to be. 

The student protests and the massacre "certainly had an enduring influence on me as a young man," he said.

The New York Times went on to report, inaccurately, that Walz was in "Hong Kong, just across the Chinese border, when People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush pro-democracy protests."

Walz "settled into the cocoon of daily life on a small-town campus, even as the chaos of the Tiananmen Square crackdown more than 1,100 miles away rippled across the country," reported the Times.

A news article published May 16, 1989, includes a photograph of Walz touring a National Guard storeroom in Alliance, Nebraska. The article noted that Walz was "tak[ing] over the job" as a support specialist at the armory.

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National Guard storeroom or ambassador from America to a troubled China. Almost the same thing. 

Walz didn't just lie about when he was in China, but also how often he went. We have been told over and over about his approximately 30 trips to the communist country, but that, too, turns out to be inflated by at least 100%

While in Congress, Walz sometimes exaggerated his already substantial experience in China. In 2016, he told an agricultural publication he had been there “about 30 times.” During at least two hearings of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China he claimed to have traveled to China “dozens of times.” Numerous media outlets have repeated those claims. But Walz’s annual trips with high school students between 1993 and the early 2000s would have accounted for around a dozen visits, give or take, and he made only one official trip there as a congressman.

APM Reports asked the campaign for documentation on the additional trips, and after weeks of searching, a spokesman finally acknowledged that Walz had traveled from the United States to China “closer to 15 times.

Later today I will have a VIP piece on Tim Walz's troubling relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. Minnesota Public Radio tries to whitewash it, but there are so many references to how improbable his ability to move back and forth from America to China with students was that it bears examination. 

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