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?
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.