Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz has a strained relationship with the truth.
During his first run for Congress, he lied to the public about being arrested for drunk driving in 1995 and falsely stated that he had retired as a master sergeant from the Minnesota National Guard.
Now he's been called out for yet another falsehood, and it's no small one: A “reproductive rights” obsessive, Mr Walz has repeatedly claimed that he and his wife, Gwen, conceived their two children through IVF.
That's false, and not only Republican opponent J.D. Vance noticed it. Even Trump-hater Jake Tapper of CNN called him out, while panelists at the Democratic National Convention struggled to explain Walz's lies, or, worse, his ignorance of procedure.
The Associated Press and The New York Times also corrected Waltz's frequently-told falsehoods.
“That's not inaccurate.”
While criticizing J.D. Vance on MSNBC, where Walz falsely stated he had started his family through IVF, Tapper aired Waltz's comments.
JD Vance has no idea about that. And he goes on to say all of this. Today is IVF day. Thank you IVF. My wife and I have been blessed with two beautiful children.
“That's not accurate,” Tapper said, explaining that Gwen Waltz released a statement explaining how the children were conceived.
“Like many who go through something like this, we kept it mostly a secret at the time, not even sharing the details with our amazing, close family,” Gwen Waltz said. “She's a nurse and helped me administer the injections I needed throughout the IUI process. I would rush home from school to give her the shots and make sure everything was going according to plan.”
IUI is intrauterine insemination, where sperm are injected directly into a woman's uterus.
“Governor Walz speaks like a normal person would,” a campaign spokesman said. “He used commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments.”
The CNN panelists told Tapper much the same thing.
Early yesterday morning, Vance responded to a video of Waltz claiming that Vance would have stopped the procedure by writing that Waltz “lied” about the procedure.
“If it were up to J.D. Vance, I would not have a family because of IVF. Democrats invest in prenatal care,” Kamala HQ wrote on Walz's video.
We support universal preschool. We provide school lunches. I won't budge on family values. We make having children more affordable by providing paid family and medical leave. Where are the J.D. Vance programs?
However, the Waltzes did not use IVF.
“Tim Waltz shares family's experience with IVF, but they used a different method,” the AP headline noted. Subsequent articles suggested that Gwen Waltz wanted to clarify the issue before Republicans drummed up a new falsehood from her far-left husband.
“After an Alabama court blocked in vitro fertilization procedures in the state in March, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz decided to speak out about his struggle to have a child with his wife, Gwen,” the Associated Press began.
That same month, his team sent out a fundraising email titled “Our IVF Journey” with a headline that referenced “his family's IVF journey.”
And earlier this month, Walz criticized Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, saying, “If he's right, I'm not going to have a family because of IVF.”
As Waltz introduced himself to voters as Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris' running mate, he made his family's fertility struggles the centerpiece of his story, as a way to connect specifically with voters alarmed by the erosion of reproductive rights in the U.S. But Gwen Waltz released a statement on Tuesday detailing her experience more comprehensively, revealing that she had relied on a different method called intrauterine insemination, or IUI.
The Times' headline was even more to the point: “The Waltzes' fertility treatment was not IVF but another common procedure. Unlike IVF, the procedure the Waltzes used does not involve freezing embryos, and therefore has not been targeted by anti-abortion leaders.”
The paper also explained that Walz lied when Harris introduced him as her running mate in Philadelphia. “Even if we wouldn't have made the same choice for ourselves, there's a golden rule: take care of your own business,” the Minnesota governor said. “And that includes IVF. This is personal to me and my family.”
So Walz's repeated claims that he had a child through IVF are either a lie to paint Republicans as the enemy of couples struggling to conceive, or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Either way, it doesn't look all that great, in political terms.
Other falsehoods
This is the third documented lie by a close friend of a sex pervert and a radical Islamic anti-Semite.
In 1995, Nebraska police arrested Waltz for drunk driving after he was driving 95 miles per hour on a highway in a 55 mph zone. His blood alcohol content was 0.128, well above the legal limit of 0.08 percent. Prosecutors dropped the drunk driving charge and had Waltz plead guilty to reckless driving.
But when he first ran for Congress in 2006, his campaign manager claimed he was not drunk when police took him to jail.
The Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin reported:
Walz's campaign manager, Kelly Greeley, did not dispute that Walz was speeding when he was stopped that night but said he was not intoxicated. She argued the misunderstanding was due to hearing loss resulting from his years of service as an artilleryman in the Army National Guard.
“He couldn't understand what the officers were saying,” Greeley said.
Waltz is also facing defamation charges for claiming he went to “war.”
Kamala HQ promoted the comment on X:
I was in the Army for 25 years, I hunt, and I have voted for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can have background checks, we can study the effects of gun violence, and we can make sure that the weapons of war that I carried in war are only carried in war.
In fact, Walz has never served in a war, resigning from the Minnesota National Guard just before his unit was deployed to Iraq to run for Congress.
Waltz also falsely states that he retired as a Master Sergeant, which is not true. The National Guard promoted him to that rank on an interim basis, but he did not complete his training. He retired as a Master Sergeant.
