Tim, Don't Try to Pass Off a Lie by Saying You "Misspoke."

Tim Walz's love affair with China and its communist government

Much has already been written about Tuesday night’s debate between the two Vice Presidential hopefuls. Tim Walz has had a long love affair with China. Below I will address his attempt to excuse his lie during the debate about being in China during the Tiananmen Square “protests.” Not only did he try to minimize the lie, but he attempted to pass off the murder of innocents as “democracy protests,” without mentioning that his Chinese friends used tanks to massacre innocent, non-violent protesters so that others would get the message.

A Profile in Courage — Tank Man

What happened at Tiananmen Square?

Younger readers may not be fully aware of what the Chinese did to their own people including many young students in 1989, in what has come to be called the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was just one part of a larger protest movement that the Chinese Communists brutally repressed. This is how a U.S. State Department Historian describes the casualty toll (All bolded emphasis is mine.):

On the night of June 3 and 4, the People’s Liberation Army stormed the Square with tanks, crushing the protests with terrible human costs. Estimates of the numbers killed vary. The Chinese Government has asserted that injuries exceeded 3,000 and that over 200 individuals, including 36 university students, were killed that night. Western sources, however, are skeptical of the official Chinese report and most frequently cite the toll as hundreds or even thousands killed. Similar protests that had taken place in other Chinese cities were soon suppressed and their leaders imprisoned.

The message from the Party bosses was clear: You don’t protest against the Communist government. If you do you will find yourself in prison, if you are lucky. If you are not lucky, your organs may be harvested to give to more loyal subjects, or your relatives may get a bill for a few cents for the cost of the bullet fired into the base of your skull.

Credit: Getty Images

Walz’s love affair with China

Both China’s communist system and the Communist murder of hundreds or thousands at Tiananmen Square seems to be a central part of the Walz family’s self-identity. As The Washington Free Beacon has reported,

As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which ‘everyone shares’ and gets free food and housing, the Free Beacon reported in August.

‘It means that everyone is the same and everyone shares,’ Walz said during a lesson on China's communist system in November 1991. ‘The doctor and the construction worker make the same. The Chinese government and the place they work for provide housing and 14 kg or about 30 pounds of rice per month. They get food and housing.’

“Everyone is the same” and everyone gets the same things. This repressive communist system sounds suspiciously like the Harris-Walz call for “equity,” i.e., equal outcomes for everyone without regard to merit or hard work, not equal opportunity. That is the system that both Walz and Harris embrace.

Walz loves China so much that he has repeatedly lied about the number of trips he made there. The day before the debate, The Washington Free Beacon reported:

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz ‘was so proud of his extensive experience’ traveling to China that he ‘occasionally used to exaggerate it’ by claiming to have visited the communist country twice as often as he actually did, Minnesota Public Radio reported on Monday.

Walz went on around 15 trips to China in the 1990s and early 2000s—rather than over 30, as he stated earlier in his political career—his campaign told Minnesota Public Radio this week.

Walz and Tiananmen Square

Continuing his love affair with China, Walz and his wife, Gwen, got married on the 5th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. For some reason he wanted to link that event to his wedding day. Gwen suggested that it was because he might forget his wedding anniversary and wanted a way to remember the date. The newlyweds then honeymooned in China. And he calls Vance weird?

Walz’s efforts to link himself to Tiananmen Square continued long after his 1994 wedding. Like his lies about the number of his visits to China, in a radio interview in June 2019, Walz lied about being in Hong Kong when “Tiananmen Square happened.” Note the passive voice — It just “happened,” you see. You can hear him here (beginning at 2:33).

I was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when, of course, Tiananmen Square happened, and I was in China after that.

Walz was nowhere near either Hong Kong or China in June 1989. The AP Reports that he was thirteen time zones away in Nebraska. Why Walz felt compelled to lie about that is unclear, but it appears that he wanted to embellish his pro-democracy credentials. We can see that motivation from comments he made when he was a congressman, in the same month that he gave that radio interview. He was attending a congressional hearing on the Tiananmen Square protests. Directing his comments at Chinese survivors of the massacre who were present, he repeated,

Twenty years ago today I was in Hong Kong preparing to go to Fo Shon to teach at Fo Shon Number One Middle School. And I can tell you that for people of my generation, here, too, what you were doing in the democracy, that you were asking for and what the goodness of democracy symbolized was as strong for us as it was for you. It reinforced all that we care about, all of those things that we hold most dear.

“Twenty years ago today I was in Hong Kong ….” The hearing was on June 4, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the murders in Tiananmen Square. More self-embellishing lies.

CNN asks Walz about his “leadership qualities” and confronts him with the discrepancy.

During Tuesday’s debate, CBS moderator Margaret Brennan asked Walz to explain the discrepancy between his claim of being in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square in early June 1989, and widely published reports that he did not go to China until August, two months later.

One thing that other reports of the exchange have ignored, however, is that Brennan set up her question by asking whether Walz’s word could be trusted. That is important because he often is the last person advising the President on life and death matters. As Brennan noted, it also would tell us something about his “leadership qualities.”

The Vice President is often the last voice the President hears before making consequential decisions. We want to ask you about your leadership qualities, Governor Walz. You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn't travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy? 

Walz attempts to duck the question.

Walz’s response is revealing. He began with a page out of Kamala’s playbook: He tried to duck the question for the entire two minutes that the debate rules allowed for his response. Let’s take a look at the beginning of his answer in the transcript (and in the video above):

TW: Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I'm proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of 89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They, look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community.

This is obviously non-responsive. But who are “the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this”? What on earth is he trying to say? As for the rest of it, I am surprised only that he somehow left out that he “grew up in a neighborhood of folks who were very proud of their lawn.” Other than that omission, he seemed well on his way to regurgitating Kamala’s evade and escape technique. See it here.

But, let’s let Walz continue.

I've tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect. And I'm a knucklehead at times, but it's always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for twelve years. And in Congress I was one of the most bipartisan people. Working on things like farm bills that we got done, working on veterans’ benefits. And then the people of Minnesota were able to elect me to governor twice.

I will resist the temptation to comment on Walz’s “knucklehead” admission. But his appeal that we should somehow excuse his false claims because some Minnesotans elected him to congress and as governor reminds me of Abraham Lincon’s down-to-earth wisdom, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

So, look, my commitment has been from the beginning, to make sure that I'm there for the people, to make sure that I get this right.

It is unclear to me how falsely describing his proximity to Tiananmen Square in 1989 helps “to make sure that I get this right.” But let’s go on.

I will say more than anything, many times, I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric. But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this.

So, because Walz talks a lot and gets caught up in his own rhetoric, the truth is an inconvenient distraction? And what “impact” is he talking about? And what does this “impact” or whatever caused it, have to do with the question he was supposed to be answering? This is just a rambling ‘word salad.’ But there is a shred of truth in what Walz said here: His history is that he will “talk a lot” and get “caught up in the rhetoric.” Is this meant to somehow excuse his false representations about carrying a rifle in combat and retiring as a command sergeant major?

I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn't be praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn't start a trade war that he ends up losing. So, this is about trying to understand the world. It's about trying to do the best you can for your community, and then it's putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is. My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at, or whether it was being a good soldier or was being a good member of Congress, those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.

Ah, finally! We get to the meat of the matter: ‘It’s all Trump’s fault. He made me do it!’ But in contrast with Trump, the destroyer of democracy who praises Communist dictators, Tim Walz is just a good soldier and a good member of Congress, trying to do his best to understand the world and help his community. So, if he is a bit of a “knucklehead” who can’t always tell the truth, then we need to elect him anyway. Because he cares.

Brennan understood that Walz was stonewalling.

Unlike her counterparts at ABC, however, Brennan at least understood that he was ducking her question:

MB: Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy? 

TW: No. All I said on this was, is, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just, that's what I've said. So, I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest, went in, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.

The only clear part of this answer is the first word, “No” — Walz cannot “explain the discrepancy.” But his claim that he merely “misspoke” is not just more gobbledygook; it is a blatant lie. It was not an accident or slip of the tongue. It was calculated to allow Walz to avoid responsibility for his words and actions.

This was not the first time Walz used “I misspoke” as a defense to a lie. After his claim to have carried a rifle in combat was exposed as a lie, his campaign put out a statement: “The Governor misspoke!”

What lessons should we take from this one question and answer?

Walz’s evasion and his final attempt to excuse his lie by claiming that he merely “misspoke” tells us something valuable, albeit not what he intended. It answers Moderator Brennan’s concern about his leadership qualities and his truthfulness. Both are lacking, apparently because he sometimes “will get caught up in the rhetoric” and is “a knucklehead at times.”

The Latin phrase familiar to all lawyers, “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” (false in one thing, false in everything) comes to mind. It has long been part of our legal tradition. Judges routinely instruct juries that they may follow the common law legal principle it embodies: “A witness who falsely testifies about one matter is not credible to testify about any matter.”

Voters may apply the same principle.