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If you’re even a little bit familiar with politics, you probably already know about the infamous October surprise, a news event that breaks the month before the election with the potential to influence the presidential race. This year, the political right has attempted to manifest a damaging story about Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz through sheer force of will (and misinformation).
A number of anti-LGBTQ+ far-right actors have falsely claimed Walz sexually assaulted male students while working as a high school teacher and football coach in Minnesota. But as a new report from Wired shows, a Russian-aligned propaganda network appears to be behind the effort to promote the false allegations.
Where did these debunked allegations come from? And what can these claims tell us about the state of right-wing online misinformation? If you’re behind on the whole story, here’s everything you need to know to catch up.
Right-wing pundits have falsely claimed that Walz sexually abused male high school students during his tenure as a teacher. Walz previously taught geography and coached football and basketball in Alliance, Nebraska, in the early 1990s. He then moved to Minnesota, where he worked as a social studies teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School from 1996 to 2006.
Those pundits and online commentators have shared debunked claims that Walz assaulted several students: one known as “Rick,” who was supposedly a foreign exchange student from Kazakhstan taught by Walz at Alliance; an anonymous former male student who purportedly attended Alliance in the 1990s; and Matthew Metro, who went to Mankato West High School in the late ’90s. (Matthew Metro is, in fact, the name of a student who attended Mankato West High School but has said that Walz was not his teacher and also that the alleged incident never took place.) “Rick” and the anonymous student seem to be totally made up and are not verifiably based on real former students.
According to Wired, the misinformation traces back to John Dougan, a former Florida police officer who now lives in the Russian capital of Moscow. As NBC News reported back in May, more than 150 fake local news websites that regularly push misinformation with a Russian propagandistic slant can be tied back to Dougan.
On October 5, Dougan appeared on the pro-QAnon podcast RedPill78 alongside an anonymous man referred to only as “Rick,” per Wired. During the interview, “Rick” claimed that Walz had assaulted him in 2004 when he was a foreign exchange student at Mankato West High School, the Minnesota school where Walz worked as a social studies teacher and football coach from 1996 to 2006.
During the 78-minute podcast, “Rick’s” voice was altered and his face was not shown. He said he was from Kazakhstan and participated in the U.S. State Department-funded Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) program, which gives students from countries formerly controlled by the Soviet Union the opportunity to spend a year studying abroad in the U.S. However, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told NewsGuard, a company that monitors misinformation, that it has no record of any FLEX student from Kazakhstan studying at a Mankato-area school between the years of 2000 and 2020.
Around a week later on October 13, the now-deactivated pro-Donald Trump X account Black Insurrectionist — who tweets under the handle @DocNetYoutube — shared a post in which he claimed to have received an anonymous email on August 9 from a man who said that Walz had sexually abused him in the 1990s after taking him to an Indigo Girls concert when he was a student at Alliance High School in Nebraska. According to Mother Jones, Black Insurrectionist included a screenshot of the purported email with a cursor at the end of the last sentence, clearly indicating that he had written the email himself. (The Indigo Girls detail appears to have been pulled from a real news story about Walz and his wife chaperoning a gay student’s tip to a concert.)
This isn’t the first time that Black Insurrectionist has spread easily debunked disinformation about the Harris-Walz campaign. Back in September, he pushed the unverified claim that an ABC News whistleblower said that the network conspired with the Harris campaign to rig the September 10 presidential debate in her favor.
On October 16, as Wired reported, a now-deleted deepfake video purporting to show Mankato alum Matthew Metro saying that Walz sexually assaulted him made the rounds on X. Although the video featured his actual high school yearbook photo, the real Metro told the Washington Post that the man in the video isn’t him. In fact, Metro explained that he never had Walz as a teacher, and that the alleged incident in the video never took place.
An October 21 Wired report concluded that the video was created by Storm-1516, a propaganda network dedicated to spreading the Kremlin’s political agenda to a Western audience. As NBC News reported on October 16, Storm-1516 has launched at least 50 false narratives since fall of 2023, which typically consist of faked primary sources that are sent to international news outlets and influencers. Many of these narratives seek to weaken Western support for military aid in Ukraine, discredit Harris, and support the re-election of Trump.
Plenty of MAGA accounts have spread these claims against Walz. Prominent right-wing figures who have amplified it include political commentator Candace Owens and alt-right personality Jack Posobiec, who’s known for helping to promote the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory.
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