May 2018 was when Zenz published his first report to the Jamestown Foundation. It didn’t pick up steam until Washington Post’s article about him on May 2019. It was pushed extremely hard April-May 2021 by bellingcat, Bloomberg, WSJ and SCMP. There are multiple waves of it because re-wording of the initial “study” findings keeps getting re-published and re-posted to places like Reddit. If you go on Reddit you will see the same debunked Zenz-based Uighur articles posted like clockwork every 3 months for years on end.
On the Jamestown Foundation founder William W. Geimer:
Geimer was described as “a visionary” by Jamestown Foundation Board member and former Central Intelligence Agency director R. James Woolsey, and by Jamestown Foundation Advisory Board member Zbigniew Brzezinski as “a patriot with a vision, an idealist with a program, and a leader who knew how to get things done”. Geimer’s funeral service was attended by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, also a Jamestown Foundation Board member.
Basically an anti-communist and imperialist DC based think tank published a “study” from Zenz. That study used Radio Free Asia as a source, as well as extremely flawed methods of extrapolation, to come to its conclusions and Zenz never visited Xinjiang nor does he speak or read Chinese or Uighur.
I feel like it became mainstream during the 2020 primary election cycle after Biden brought it up in a debate.
May 2018 was when Zenz published his first report to the Jamestown Foundation. It didn’t pick up steam until Washington Post’s article about him on May 2019. It was pushed extremely hard April-May 2021 by bellingcat, Bloomberg, WSJ and SCMP. There are multiple waves of it because re-wording of the initial “study” findings keeps getting re-published and re-posted to places like Reddit. If you go on Reddit you will see the same debunked Zenz-based Uighur articles posted like clockwork every 3 months for years on end.
On the Jamestown Foundation founder William W. Geimer:
Geimer was described as “a visionary” by Jamestown Foundation Board member and former Central Intelligence Agency director R. James Woolsey, and by Jamestown Foundation Advisory Board member Zbigniew Brzezinski as “a patriot with a vision, an idealist with a program, and a leader who knew how to get things done”. Geimer’s funeral service was attended by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, also a Jamestown Foundation Board member.
Basically an anti-communist and imperialist DC based think tank published a “study” from Zenz. That study used Radio Free Asia as a source, as well as extremely flawed methods of extrapolation, to come to its conclusions and Zenz never visited Xinjiang nor does he speak or read Chinese or Uighur.