People Share Their 'Street Names' vs. Their Real Names In This Viral Trend
Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz was almost dealt a devastating blow yesterday when an image purporting to show his family supporting Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump began to circulate online.
In the image, eight Nebraskan relatives of Walz posed for a photo wearing shirts that read "Walz's For Trump."
The photo seemed to indicate that Walz's family members didn't endorse him, much like the family members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have come out strongly against him.
Some conservatives online gloated about how Walz seemed to lack the support of his own family, and Trump himself even reposted it.
However, the grammar-conscious online suspected something wasn't right with the picture. Surely the Walz family doesn't pluralize their name as "Walz's," right?
They don't – its "Walzes" – and this turned out to be a clue leading to the eventual truth: The people in the photo are, in fact, related to Tim Walz, but they are distant cousins.
It was clarified to the Associated Press by the spokesperson of Republican politician Charles Herbster, who was the first to post the photo online. The eight people in the photo are descendants of Francis Walz, the brother of Tim Walz's grandfather, and they agreed to let Herbster post the picture.
The people in the photograph remain anonymous, but they did clarify in a statement to AP that they are real distant cousins of Tim Walz who printed "Walz's for Trump" on a T-shirt. It is unknown if the people in the picture have the surname "Walz" or why they made an error in pluralizing their purported family name.
"The picture is real. The shirts are real. We are the Nebraska Walz family and we are related to Gov. Tim Walz, our grandfathers were brothers. The message on the shirts speaks for itself, 'Nebraska Walzs for Trump,'" they wrote.
Tim Walz's sister, Sandy Dietrich, said she and her brother were not close with "that side of the family" and "didn't know them."
Whatever the case, the grammatical error on the T-shirts seemed to embody the difficulty Republicans have had drumming up scandals about the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate.
After the "J.D. Vance Couch saga," online Republicans attempted to drum up an exceptionally lewd and false story about Walz and horses that failed to gain much traction.
Recently, Tim Walz's estranged brother Jeff generated headlines for saying in a Facebook comment that he had "stories" about Tim, implying that Tim's scandalous youth would turn off voters.
He later clarified that one such story was that his siblings knew not to sit next to a childhood Tim because he would get car sick.
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