Is Tim Walz guilty of the Stolen Valor Act of 2013?
'This screams 'dishonesty and lack of integrity' at every turn!'
Note: Missouri state Rep. Darin Chappell, executive vice president of Veterans in Defense of Liberty, cowrote this column.
Stolen valor is an extremely serious charge and one not to be leveled lightly. Yet, this accusation has been made regarding Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the newly selected running mate of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Republican V.P. nominee J.D. Vance has accused Walz of stolen valor for statements made about the manner of Walz’s service and the way in which he retired from the Minnesota National Guard.
Let us be clear: Veterans in Defense of Liberty® (ViDoL) is not questioning or demeaning the 24-year service of Gov. Walz in any way. Regardless of how a member served his/her country in uniform, we applaud the sacrifice of all our honorably serving brothers and sisters in arms. The question of stolen valor, as it relates to Walz, is not whether he served honorably for more than two decades but rather what he has said about that service for political gain in later years.
Tim Walz is seen on video saying that he retired from the Minnesota National Guard “as a Command Sergeant Major.” It is true that Walz was provisionally promoted to Sergeant Major (E9) and filled the role of CSM for his unit before he filed his retirement papers. However, it is also true that Walz failed to complete the required coursework to finalize his promotion and, upon retiring in 2005, failed to serve the additional two years required of him to accept the promotion in the first place. Upon his retirement, Walz’s record shows him leaving service as a Master Sergeant (E8) and not as a CSM (retired) as he has been claiming for nearly 20 years.
To the civilians who have never served, this may seem like no big deal; after all, he was an acting CSM when he filed his retirement papers. Why all the fuss? However, for those of us who served, where the minutiae of service are etched so deeply into the mind that we can recall with the tiniest of detail the actions taken decades previous, this screams “dishonesty and lack of integrity” at every turn! Gov. Walz knows he did not fully attain the rank of E9, and he knows he is not a retired CSM. He knows that, and yet he has said otherwise in order to receive accolades he did not earn as a means to score political victories.
Further, in his political career, Walz has been a voice for gun control efforts, specifically in an attempt to ban “weapons of war/assault weapons” from civilian ownership. Definitional problems of such categories aside, Walz said, “We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at” in a recently released video on X by the Harris campaign. As a prior service Marine, J.D. Vance was quick to challenge Walz by asking him, when did he ever go to war, and which weapon did he carry there?
Again, Walz’s service in the National Guard is not being challenged by Vance or anyone else. However, when one makes claims about one’s service that are flatly untrue and are made for financial or tangible gain (like an elected office), one is then guilty of a violation of the Stolen Valor Act of 2013, signed into law by President Obama.
One wonders why Gov. Walz did not simply tell the truth about his military service. Twenty-four years of honorable service, two overseas deployments and fully attaining the rank of Master Sergeant, with a stint as acting Command Sergeant Major, is something of which to be proud. But all of that is sullied and his personal integrity called into question the moment he decided to lie. This tarnishes the individual’s personal integrity and undermines the transparency and integrity of the American veteran and, in this case, the political process.
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Originally Published at Daily Wire, World Net Daily, or The Blaze
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