Tim Walz Said He Was in Hong Kong in 1989 During Tiananmen. Not True.
Tim Walz Said He Was in Hong Kong in 1989 During Tiananmen. Not True.
Mr. Walz taught at a high school in China as part of a program sending American teachers abroad, but he did not actually travel to the country until August 1989.
As recently as February, Mr. Walz said on a podcast that he had been in Hong Kong, then a British colony, “on June 4 when Tiananmen happened,” and decided to cross into mainland China to take up his teaching duties even though many people were urging him not to.
But it was not true. Mr. Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, indeed taught at a high school in China as part of a program sending American teachers abroad, but he did not actually travel to the country until August 1989.
Why bother making something like this up?
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I’m not a fan of the “whataboutism” that’s bound to pop up in these replies. I like Walz quite a bit, but he got caught in a lie and it’s good to call both sides on things like this. It reminds them that we’re paying attention.
Absolutely, but it's important to measure lies by their impact - this is a rather irrelevant lie while "Hatians are eating your pets" caused an outbreak of xenophobia and domestic terrorism.
Both are bad - one is clearly worse.
I wouldn't call what Walz did necessarily a lie.
A lie requires an intent to deceive. August vs that spring is close enough in a general sense, and he wasn't saying he was physically at tianamen square. Especially when you consider that the massacre kicked off a lot of riots and unrest which likely continued while he was there.
Trying to spark off a race war on multiple occasions with multiple, intentional, falsehoods vs over-generalizations are not the same thing.
It's such an irrelevant fact check though. He didn't lie about the actual thing that made the story (going into China shortly after Tiananmen), but they got him on where he was when he decided to go? It's disappointing that his story isn't pristinely accurate, but it's not actually an important detail of it. It's like fact-checking Kerry's military service and focusing on which town he was living in when he signed up.
This just looks like NYT trying to find equivalent numbers of falsehoods so they can prove they're not biased.