Russian Hackers Try To Smear Tim Walz As A Pedophile, Ha Ha Ha, How Original

Cheapfake it 'til they make it.

At this point we need one of Glenn Beck’s old chalkboards to keep up with all the dumb and false smears that have been thrown at but have not stuck to America’s dad Tim Walz since Kamala Harris made him her vice presidential nominee.

Walz is secretly a Chinese spy? Ha ha, no. Walz signed a bill allowing the state of Minnesota to kidnap your children and perform sex change surgeries on them, so that one day you send little Joey off to school and days later he comes home and he is little Jocelyn now? LOL, no. Tim Walz showed his anti-Italian bigotry by letting activists tear down a statue of Christopher Columbus? Mamma mia! You come into my house on the day my daughter is to be married with this hooey?

So what are the wingnuts to do when all else has failed? How about outsourcing their Walz-smearing to Kremlin troll farms, why not, if anyone is known for their finesse, it is Russians. And it worked in 2016, much to America’s eternal shame.

Wired reports that a particular Russian hacker unit called Storm-1516 has been behind a recent effort to push claims that Walz sexually assaulted one of his male students when Walz was teaching high school. Ooooo, America’s dad is secretly a pedophile, how creative. There is so much to be offended by with this whole effort, we don’t need to add “insultingly unoriginal” to the list.

The claims went viral on X last week, when an anonymous account called Black Insurrectionist posted screenshots of emails from a purported victim. Other X users quickly debunked the claims, citing formatting errors in the images that suggested the emails were fake.

So not just lazy from a creative standpoint, but lazy in execution as well. What’s next, Tim Walz has a Jewish ancestor? The Nazis always love that one.

Not that it matters, idiots like Jack Posobiec and Candace Owens both boosted the latest claims to their huge audiences whether they believe them or not. As Lyndon Johnson once said, “Let’s make the son of a bitch deny it.”

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Not satisfied with easily debunked emails, the hackers put out a video in which an alleged former student of Walz’s named Matthew Metro repeated the allegations. The video was posted by a widely followed, QAnon-linked account. Wired determined the video was a deepfake and the user eventually deleted it, but not before it had racked up millions of views

On Monday The Washington Post reported that there was indeed a student named Matthew Metro who attended the high school where Walz taught in the mid-1990s. The Post performed a journalism by tracking down the real Metro, whose friends had been sending him the video, presumably along with texts reading, What the fuck? Because clearly the guy in the video is not the real Metro:

The hoax was unusual in that it appeared to draw on open-source research to crudely steal the identity of a member of the public who had a tenuous historical connection to a candidate currently in the public eye. Moreover, the former student appeared to have been selected because personal details about his real life — among them, his sexual orientation — figured into the fabricated claim and could be seen as corroborating it.

One kicker here is that Metro’s time at Mankato West High School only barely overlapped with Walz’s, and Metro says the two have never met. The hackers just found a gay student who had attended the school in the mid-1990s and said, “Eh, close enough.” And as always, the lie got halfway around the world before the truth could get its pants on. Almost literally in this case, since Metro lives in Hawaii.

We’ve heard so many stories about politicians who are allegedly secretly gay, it’s just total yawnsville by now. Why can’t these guys ever come up with something interesting, like “Tim Walz once stole a secret fighter jet from the former Soviet Union and flew it to the West,” or “Tim Walz once murdered a penguin at the Minneapolis zoo.” It’s no more believable than anything else, but at least it’s original.

[Wired / WaPo]

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