Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

 I had the honor of speaking at an anti-Asian hate rally on Memorial Day.  I spoke about the Vincent Chin case and how scapegoating of Asians in the 1980s led to his murder.  I also drew the parallel of what was happening then in Michigan to what is happening today throughout the country.  That is, once again, Asian Americans are being scapegoated and thus leading to many victims of hate crimes.

Obviously, most people do not think that the scapegoating of Asians is justified.  But inadvertently, many say or write things that help the causes of the racists.  For example, Bill Maher said that there is nothing wrong with using the term China flu since Ebola is an area in Africa but that name is used to name a disease.  He doesn't realize that no Ebola Americans have been scapegoated for that disease, unlike Asian Americans with names like China flu or kung flu?  Agreeing with Trump just help him deflect blame and give racists excuses to attack Asians.

Now an article in the Wall Street Journal claim that an unnamed intelligence source said that three staffers from the Wuhan Lab went to hospitals before the first case of COVID-19 was reported.  Three Chinese people going to the hospital during the flu season?  Not unusual given that there are few private clinics in China.  No diagnosis was given, no evidence of positive COVID test, no evidence that they were admitted let alone being in the ICU.  So what is the significance of this?

But then other media picked up this non story, even liberal media like CNN and Sixty Minutes.  They make it sound like that the virus was leaked from the lab even though this is not really evidence of anything.  But next thing you know, Biden is asking the intelligence community to investigate and come up with the answer in 90 days.  He doesn't have more information than this article?  We need to investigate the origin of this virus, of course.  But this is a scientific endeavor, not an intelligence or political one.  We have not been able to figure out how HIV started after decades, so I doubt the CIA can do this in three months.

Now for my own conspiracy theory.  The author of the WSJ article is Michael R. Gordon.  This is the same guy wo used to write for the New York Times before the invasion of Iraq.  He wrote then that unnamed intelligence source said that Hussein had WMD, the same talking point of neoconservatives who wanted to wage war on Iraq.  His sources, if he actually had any, were totally wrong.  But not only did he not lose his job but he was the only journalist embedded in the military during the war.  Thus he got great access for reporting and later wrote books about the war.  Obviously, his writing helped the hawks convince the American people the need for the war.  In return, his status of a journalist was greatly enhanced despite him being totally wrong.

Is Gordon doing the same here?  I don't know but if the U.S. wants to make China look bad, one way would be to use both the conservative and liberal media to do the job as it did in selling the Iraq war.  If this time it leads to war again, what will happens to Asian Americans in this country?