If you were to ask any Democrat about germ warfare in the Americas, you’d almost surely hear from them about the time that “Americans” tried to kill Indians with smallpox-infected blankets. After all, it’s right there in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the most read (and most Marxist) history book in American education. The fact that it was an officer in the British military, not the colonists, who did this once in 1763 is irrelevant. Our nation is tarred.
Given the Democrat obsession with this particular “germ warfare” (conducted at a time when germ theory didn’t exist and, moreover, it was an exercise that almost certainly failed), it’s peculiar how some of the major Democrat-run media institutions haven’t been very exercised about a potentially devastating germ-warfare attack two Chinese nationals may have attempted against the United States. Instead, as always, they’re more concerned with attacking Donald Trump.
Image created using AI.
Yesterday, the DOJ issued a press release about a possible biological attack on America’s food supply:
Yunqing Jian, 33, and Zunyong Liu, 34, citizens of the People’s Republic of China, were charged in a criminal complaint with conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements, and visa fraud, announced United States Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon, Jr.
[snip]
The FBI arrested Jian in connection with allegations related to Jian’s and Liu’s smuggling into America a fungus called Fusarium graminearum, which scientific literature classifies as a potential agroterrorism weapon. This noxious fungus causes “head blight,” a disease of wheat, barley, maize, and rice, and is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year. Fusarium graminearum’s toxins cause vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive defects in humans and livestock.
According to the complaint, Jian received Chinese government funding for her work on this pathogen in China. The complaint also alleges that Jian’s electronics contain information describing her membership in and loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. It is further alleged that Jian’s boyfriend, Liu, works at a Chinese university where he conducts research on the same pathogen and that he first lied but then admitted to smuggling Fusarium graminearum into America—through the Detroit Metropolitan Airport—so that he could conduct research on it at the laboratory at the University of Michigan where his girlfriend, Jian, worked.
Given how disastrous the release of Fusarium could have been, one would think that America’s media, always looking for sensational headlines, might have covered the story with some enthusiasm. And yet...they didn’t.
Rather than focusing attention on a possible Chinese threat to America’s food crops—and, by extension, to every American—many in the media went a different way: They implied that what we’re witnessing is Donald Trump’s monomaniacal effort to drive foreign academics from America’s shores.
Thus, the New York Times offers this narrative approach, beginning at the very top of its article:
U.S. Charges 2 Chinese Students With Smuggling Fungus
An arrest by the F.B.I. comes as the Trump administration has promised to crack down on Chinese academics.
The Justice Department announced charges on Tuesday against two Chinese researchers accused of trying to smuggle a fungus into the United States, bringing the case as the government pushes to keep more Chinese students out of the country.
The Times was not unique. CNN went the same way, although it’s a bit more subtle, for it buried the Trump attack deeper in the article:
The charges come as the Trump administration is looking to revoke visas for Chinese students, especially those with alleged “connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week. The State Department has zeroed in on any potential wrongdoing from academics across the country in the last several months, including a Harvard researcher accused of smuggling frog embryo remains.
USA Today did the same, ending its article with an extended discussion about the fact that
The criminal charges come amid growing tensions between the United States and China over the Trump administration’s visa crackdown on Chinese international students. The Trump administration has ramped up deportations and has targeted international students as part of wide-ranging efforts to fulfill its hardline immigration agenda.
The problem isn’t foreigners from hostile nations allegedly knowingly smuggling dangerous biological agents into America. It’s that Trump is being mean to academia.
To their credit, not all outlets went this route (see, e.g., ABC and The WaPo). Notably, though, these and other outlets stuck to one-note reporting on a possible biological terrorist attack against the U.S. This was a striking contrast to the mainstream media’s hysteria about George Floyd and January 6, when they obsessed endlessly on the subjects regardless of the facts.
We’ve seen this refusal to recognize germ warfare before. Early on during the COVID years, conservatives said that China had released COVID from a lab, whether accidentally or not. That, we were told, was a conspiracy theory. It’s now a truth universally acknowledged that COVID did, in fact, come from a Chinese lab.
This time around, we’re being told, not that what allegedly happened is a conspiracy. Instead, the media suggest that we shouldn’t pay any attention at all to Chinese nationals risking our food crop, but should, instead, focus on Trump being mean to academia. Once again, our media show that they do want to inform Americans; they want to manipulate them.