Fox News—well, the alert wasn’t going to be coming from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, or other Democratic-ticket PR firms—says that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “spent years promoting research facility that collaborated with ‘Chinese military company’ “ (August 29, 2024).
The outfit is the Hormel Institute, based in Austin, Minnesota. It’s part of the University of Minnesota. That Walz has been a booster of the Institute as late as the present year is confirmed by an April 2024 Hormel press release about how the governor had just been updated on “the Institute’s recent progress in groundbreaking biomedical and agricultural research and its expanding education and outreach initiatives.”
Sounds okay. Who can be opposed to research, education, and outreach, especially in matters biomedical and agricultural?
In the release, Walz, also featured in a Hormel Institute video, is quoted about how the Institute’s research will help with “green energy, sustainable agriculture, and the ability to feed a very hungry world.” (What is “unsustainable agriculture”? But never mind that now.)
The problem:
The Hormel Institute has done extensive work with the Beijing Genomics Institute, a group labeled by the Pentagon as a “Chinese military company,” some of which involved research on BGI machines and studies conducted with BGI laboratories in Shenzhen, China, for analysis.
“BGI may be serving, wittingly or unwittingly, as a global collection mechanism for Chinese government gene databases, providing China with greater raw numbers and diversity of human genome samples as well as access to sensitive personal information about key individuals around the world,” the National Security Commission on AI said in 2022. [An apparent misattribution. Congresswoman Anna Eshoo said it in a letter with a congressional letterhead to the president of the Association of Academic Medical Colleges.]
Which means that Hormel Institute and Walz may be “wittingly or unwittingly” helping provide China “with greater raw numbers and diversity of human genome samples as well as access to sensitive personal information about key individuals around the world.”
That was in 2022. The Hormel Institute press release with the Walz words about green sustainable feeding of world was issued in April 2024.
Moreover, in 2019, which was five years ago, Dr. Zigang Dong, then the executive director of the Hormel Institute, “abruptly stepped down from his post leading the institute in 2019 after 18 years in the position. Around the same time, it was revealed Dong was involved in an FBI probe where the bureau was investigating his ‘possible failure to report foreign backing when applying for grants.’ ”
Foreign backing from which foreign country exactly?
According to an Austin Daily Herald article from 2020 cited by Fox News:
Chinese partnerships with the University of Minnesota, and by extension The Hormel Institute, have been visible to the public eye for years. In 2015, the Hormel Institute unveiled its newest expansion and on-hand was a Chinese delegation, just three years after a partnership had been struck with the Henan Cancer Hospital in Zhengzhou, later to be known as the China-U.S. (Henan) Hormel Cancer Institute.
Fox News says that while still with the Hormel Institute, it was Dong who established this “multimillion-dollar international partnership with a research facility in China…and Walz was present to celebrate the announcement…. In 2014, Walz welcomed a delegation from China to the institute that included Wang Yanling, the vice governor of Henan Province and a Communist Party doctor. Yanling is listed as holding several positions in the Chinese Communist Party over the course of many decades.”
This thing where nobody in the U.S. involved in China-funded partnerships knows anything about any consequent enabling of Chinese Communist Party agendas vis-a-vis genome samples, “sensitive personal information about key individuals around the world,” or anything else—how plausible is it, really?
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: “Tim Walz, the Communist Anticommunist”
“The nominee for U.S. vice president on the Democrat ticket may be an excellent example of the saying ‘Big help with a little badmouth.’… Tim Walz has made good use of the leeway given for giving big help.”
