About Last Week…

So a guy who introduced himself in federal court Friday as David He was arrested for his role in the Reedley lab case.

He’s real name – as best as can be figured out – is Jia Bei Zhu.  He’s 62, a Chinese national, and (lower case) he has a track record of fraud and intellectual property theft and multiple identities and it seems an interest in medical technology.

He’s in a federal cell in Fresno now, awaiting a Tuesday arraignment hearing.  In theory he could get bail, but as he is the very definition of a flight risk that will hopefully not occur.

As noted in Saturday’s piece on the subject, he was arrested in Reedley after the city manager there emailed him and invited him to stop by to chat about his recent $30 million claim against the city.

Zhu took the city up on its offer and was popped by the feds the moment he got out of his car Thursday.

The question now for Zhu is the same one Jay Leno asked so famously of Hugh Grant – “What were you thinking!?!?”

One would think that someone so well-practiced in the dark financial arts and – at the time – practically unfindable – would know better than to risk exposing himself by lodging an absurd claim against a government agency – and then going to talk about it.  Did he forget governments have cops?

Or did he not care?

You see, Zhu has a history of skating on crimes and civil judgements and such and has a history of ties to the Chinese government.  Many years ago, he was in the cow business and imported cows into China – seemingly at the government’s behest –  in order to increase local milk production. From there he went on to stealing technology from an American company that allows bull semen to be separated in a way that one can than choose whether a mommy cow will have a boy or a girl calf.

That is extremely valuable technology and Zhu stole it and – quite possibly – brought it home to China.  Another company (shop? store? library? depository?) in China he may be involved in specializes in – yup – bull semen.   The firm is in the same Chinese Communist Party-built commercial tech park as other firms he has been specifically tied to – in fact, it’s down the street.

This brings us back to a simple question – how involved was the Chinese government in Zhu’s activities, including the Reedley lab?

If you are thinking quite a lot, you may be right. 

“Overseas Chinese are considered Chinese Nationals,” said China espionage expert Ina Mitchell. “They are not considered Canadian or American even if they have permanently lived in either country for years. They live under the constant threat of being taken back (Operation Foxhunt), or that their family members might be harmed. This is primarily how they are leveraged to work for the party in place. It also explains how they can get so many people to work for China inside Canada and the United States.”

In other words, despite the arrest warrant saying agents found no evidence of bioweapon manufacturing or storage, Zhu’s ties to the CCP are most likely deep and numerous.

I wonder if they want him back now?  Maybe not – he does owe more than $300 million dollars in civil judgements and while he may be tied to the CCP maybe not enough to be worth it.

One more note on Reedley – Zhu’s nefariousness can be found with a search Google, so how did the Go-Biz California state tax credit program end up giving him a $300,000 credit?  It’s good to know due diligence is out the window in Sacramento.

A fact confirmed by the appointment of Laphonza Butler to the late Dianne Feinstein’s senate seat.  Gavin Newsom didn’t ask her if she was interested in the job on a permanent basis – something he said he would do – and he didn’t even check her address before making the appointment.  She had to quickly change her residency to be able to take the seat and took two weeks to decided against running for the seat for a full term in 2024.

While we discussed some of the possibilities for Butler post-Senate in the above article, we forgot one:  Gavin is not running for president so she could not possibly be in line for a cabinet spot (I’m think Health and Human Services, you know, Xavier Bocckharhea’s job) in an administration that will not happen or if it happens will only be because either Gavin waited until 2028 or, with a heavy heart, agreed to shoulder the burden of running for national office after Joe got lost in the White House elevator.

Speaking of a heavy heart, Gavin said he had one after speaking with some of the victims of the Hamas attack on Israel as he’s there for some reason.

While his initial X/Twitter post has disappeared – presumably the victims really didn’t want their faces shown to the world in the tweet as the new one specifically does not (way to go Gavin, ya’ putz) – he has posted this Tweet, in which he states that “No one deserves to live in the kind of fear and terror that the Israeli people are enduring right now.”

Yesterday, I listened to the grief and terror in a mother’s voice as she spoke about her son — a Californian right now being held hostage in Gaza — whose arm was blown off by a terrorist’s grenade.⁰
No one deserves to live in the kind of fear and terror that the Israeli people… pic.twitter.com/hFKbVYPmW8

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) October 21, 2023

True, but let’s look a little deeper at the situation and confront the bugbear in the room that most of your progressive friends seem to tolerate, if not cheer on: antisemitism.

From a recent piece:  

So here’s the thought experiment: Imagine if you will that, for whatever reason (I don’t think it’s relevant for this discussion) that it was not Jews who settled Israel but, say Episcopalians or Deists? 

Do you think what is happening today and has been happening for a hundred years would have happened?  There would obviously be issues regarding land and space and co-existence and the arrangement would still be rather fraught, but do you think the permanent vitriol would still exist?  Would Hamas have invaded an Episcopalian Israel with such brutality?

I don’t think so, do you?

Antisemitism was intentionally baked into Palestinian nationalism – which is in fact a more recent creation than Zionism – from the very beginning.  Zionism is about creating a homeland for Jews; Palestinian nationalism has always been about creating a homeland without any Jews.

Hamas is about more than money and power and land and self-determination and rights – it’s about killing Jews because they are Jews.

Maybe Gavin can talk about that while flying to China to kiss the ring of our global insect overlords.

Okay – the Chinese are not insects – don’t take it that way – and not quite yet global overlords – I just put that in so we could end this relatively dire article on a laugh note with one of the most famous Simpson’s clips ever:

Thanks for reading the Globe!