Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life

by Brandon J. Weichert
Encounter, 2023, 244 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

randon J. Weichert wants to convince us that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese government to get rid of their arch-enemy, Donald J. Trump, who was blocking their path to global supremacy. But COVID-19 was only a “proof of concept.” Their ultimate goal, he says, is to develop “a bioweapon that only kills people with traits specific to the United States.”:

With the Americans distracted because of the bioweapon that China launched, the Chinese military would theoretically have free reign to do whatever it wanted. Or imagine that China's regime wanted to kill or sicken a minority group in America to gin up discord. With biotech, China could wreak havoc on an unsuspecting military long before direct battle began. [p.160]

COVID was a “biological 9/11”—a military sneak attack by China against the USA. With the the American economy “collapsing,” President Trump was driven out of office by what Weichert calls a “biased and vengeful mainstream media machine that worked in conjunction with the Democratic Party.” He concludes:

The fear pandemic was so serious that it triggered a series of knock-on responses that reversed the positive trajectory that the United States had been riding, putting the country instead on a path of terminal decline. And, more frighteningly, potentially toward a catastrophic world war—one that it might lose. [p.78]

My impression is that Weichert has been listening too much to China-hater Gordon G. Chang. A genetically targeted bioweapon doesn't yet exist and might well be impossible. There's also no evidence that China released SARS-CoV-2 on purpose. To convince us, his strategy is to invoke fear of science and suspicion of China's motives. Unfortunately, no one knows what the Chinese leaders are thinking and Weichert's background in science is weak. He says, for example, that SARS-CoV-2 is a chimera, a pastiche of pre-existing scary things:

Yes, there were HIV genes present. As well as Ebola, cancer genes, and even malaria (which is why some antimalarial medicines were helpful in dealing with the symptoms of people infected with COVID-19). [p.54]

This claim apparently comes from a non-peer-reviewed article at Biorxiv from a group in New Delhi. I saw that paper. It is utterly unconvincing and was quickly with­drawn by the authors and never resubmitted.

Sure, the PRC government lies, conceals vital scientific data, makes dissidents disappear, and welds its citizens inside apartment buildings. Granted, it is evil. There is also little doubt among scientists who have studied the DNA sequence of SARS-CoV-2 (though as yet no proof) that it was modified and passaged in humanized cells. But if it was a bioweapon, it was the most ineffective one imaginable. It killed mainly the elderly and weak; a significant percentage of those who died were killed not by the virus, but by ventilators and highly toxic drug treatments. As Weichert says, it was mainly a pandemic of fear.

The purpose of a proof of concept is to get information. If that's what COVID was, then the PRC government now knows that creating a deadly virus and releasing it to the world is one of the dumbest things anyone could ever do. Not only did it seriously weaken Xi Jinping's reign, it awakened the West to the fact that China's government is rapacious, militarily aggressive, unstable, and paranoid.

COVID was a powerful antibody: the West figured out that it is too dependent on China. Most of us now recognize that locking down the entire population to stop the spread of disease doesn't work. Half the population promises to shoot the next person who tries to force them to take another mRNA vaccination. Even our scientific journals stopped calling themselves racist, sexist, and transphobic for a while.

Weichert doesn't understand why our scientists are mostly libs. The reason is simple: their job is to beg the government for money. That gives them a financial interest in supporting whatever the government says. Government employees can't be fired, but from what I've been hearing from people at NIH, it is now a place where a turn of phrase that can be construed as showing insufficient enthusiasm for DEI brings down the entire hierarchy of bureaucrats who make it their business to make the employee's life so miserable that they resign. Indeed, the entire system of academic science is hopelessly corrupt from top to bottom. We don't need a biological 9/11 to lose our pre-eminence in science. We're doing just fine on our own.

China also doesn't need to release viruses to eliminate our President when they could just leave random black sandbags lying around for Slow Joe to trip over. Why go to all the trouble of inventing a deadly virus that might just kill them as well as us when they can just make the steps on Air Force One a little more slippery? If I were the US government, I'd watch out for strategically placed banana peels with Chinese writing on them.

jun 08 2023

Woke Racism

by John McWhorter
Portfolio / Penguin, 2021, 201 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

here are few topics as uninteresting as race. Yet our TV, newspapers, celebrities, and academics bombard us with it continuously. Maybe it's time for a little pushback.

What to make of those respected law professors at Northwestern University who all stood up and ritually R-bombed themselves? Or those people who ‘take the knee’ while raising their hands in the air as if in supplication? According to John McWhorter, a black professor at Columbia University, they are adopting the rituals of a new superstitious evangelical religion. This book is written for the author's fellow blacks, but because so many people have become adherents in this new religion, it affects the rest of us as well.

McWhorter says the use of ‘racism’ as the central focus of the lives of blacks, as demanded by figures like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Robin DiAngelo, infantilizes them. He says when people excuse their poor logic and falsehoods, like those in Nikole Hannah-Jones's inaccurate history of America, it is as racist as when the white punditocracy overlooked Coates's statement that he had no sympathy for the white cops and firemen who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He writes:

The only reason Coates was given this pass was condescension: brute denigration (word chosen deliberately) . . .It is to treat Coates like a child.

Not demanding the same standard of evidence because the speaker is black, says McWhorter, is “treating black people like dolts.” He says [p.110]:

Racist, too, are those who actually hear out black scientists claiming that the reason there are so few black physicists is “racism.”

He says it is a willful commitment to believing something demonstrably untrue:

The general idea that America is in some kind of denial about race—or racism, which is what people really mean when they say this—is perfectly absurd. America is nothing less than obsessed with discussing and acknowledging racism, and those who insist year after year that America wants to hear nothing of it are dealing in pure fantasy.

McWhorter says the religion's adherents, who consider themselves an Elect, are beyond reason: there's no point in trying to convince them, as their religion—not ‘religion’ as a metaphor, but a bona fide religion—is full of logical contradictions. Their main belief—and we're talking mainly about the left-wing chattering classes here as preached to by Coates et al.—is that ‘existing while white’ is an unpardonable sin. He says the ‘Elect’ will never stop. If ‘reparations’ happen, the new meme will be: Reparations are just a start.

Actual progress on race is not something to celebrate but to talk around. This is because, with progress, the Elect lose their sense of purpose. Note: What they are after is not money or power, but sheer purpose, in the basic sense of feeling like you matter.

The ‘Elect’ are so afraid of treating twelve percent of the population like people they won't admit that not doing so causes problems. One might quibble about whether using the tactic of calling one's opponent racist, just as the wokesters do, is really constructive. But there's a good case to be made that that's exactly what race essentialism is.

In any event, this book is an intelligent and thoughtful discussion of how the self-proclaimed antiracists have become what they hate and how it has harmed his fellow blacks. By saying aloud what the rest of us could never say, McWhorter brings an authoritative voice of reason to the subject.

feb 05 2022