Image courtesy of the New York Times and Digby.
Maybe NYT’s coverage will give this story some much deserved attention. Mother Jones, as Digby notes, has been on the story already. I am not really sure I could do justice to this story. The gist is that Cindy Yang – yes the owner of a chain of massage parlors involved in human trafficking – was quite the high-rolling political activist. Apparently she was quite involved with the GOP in her state since 2015, was quite the advocate of 2nd Amendment rights as understood by NRA nuts, and was involved with Chinese Communist Party front organizations involved in a propaganda effort to make annexing Taiwan seem like a reasonable thing to do. Her photo op with Individual-1 was, on the surface, paid for by receptionists and “massage therapists” employed by Ms. Yang. Where the money really came from is unclear, and it’s pretty apparent that none of these folks will talk voluntarily. There’s some speculation that these individuals were later reimbursed. I find this spectacle fascinating. I would not be able to come up with $5400 on a moment’s notice, and I work full-time at a job that gives me my own office. I cannot fathom how a receptionist would come up with that sort of dough (note – I was once a receptionist, although for a university office a long, long time ago).
If someone had told my three decades ago that the GOP and Chinese Communists would be in bed, so to speak, I would have told them to stop taking the brown acid before coming to me with their clearly insane ideas about the future. And yet here we are. In the course of my lifetime, we’ve witnessed a devolution from “Let a hundred flowers blossom” to “let one hundred hamberders covfefe”. There are many scandals surrounding Individual-1 and anyone associated with him, no matter how remotely. This is just one of them. The going keeps getting weirder every day.
