At the vice presidential debate, Walz tried to dismiss a previous misstatement as insignificant and said he could be “a knucklehead at times.”. Asked by a debate moderator on Tuesday why Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota had said that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, when he had in reality been in his home state of Nebraska, Walz said he was “a knucklehead at times.”