Stolen valor is a federal crime. This came up this week in relation to Governor Tim Walz’s military career, current candidate for Vice President on the Kamala Harris ticket.
Stolen valor is when someone embellishes or makes fraudulent claims about their military career. It is punishable by prison time because it is a very serious charge in the military.
Governor Walz is a veteran of the Minnesota National Guard. He was sent to Italy during Operation Enduring Freedom, which was what the U.S. called the war in Afghanistan between the years 2001 and 2021. In his campaigns he has played fast and loose with his association with Enduring Freedom, saying that he served “in support of Eduring Freedom” but never clarifying that he was neither a part of that operation nor in Afghanistan. His staff was pushed on this in 2009 by Enduring Freedom veterans in this video.
Another video was recently shared of Walz promoting gun control and saying “we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at.” But he wasn’t in war. Is that stolen valor? Even CNN now admits that Walz “has used language that suggested that he carried weapons in a fighting situation. There is no evidence that any time that he was in the position of being shot at and some of his language could easily be seen to suggest that he was.”
Does it matter? According to NPR, not really. This is just fodder of a few old vets on the Internet “who get on social media and call each other very bad words” and it’s otherwise fine. They say it’s a shame that military service is being politicized. Politicized bad but embellished fine? That’s an insensitive take but to be expected from NPR.
