“China spy??? HELLO?!?!” says the current top comment on the Gateway Pundit article “29-Year-Old Woman Arrested After Posing As Student At New Jersey High School,” posted Friday morning. We had meant to cover this one a few days ago but actual political news got in the way.
Not particularly long story short: Hyejeong Shin was arrested this month on one count of providing a false government document with the intent to verify one’s identity or age after spending four days pretending to be a 14 year-old freshman at New Brunswick High School. It’s not clear exactly how Shin was caught, but girls at the school said the woman was texting them to hang out and “started acting weird with them” after they didn’t show up, a student told WCBS New York.
Shin’s intent was also unclear. At worst it would seem to be a kidnapping/sex-trafficking recruitment scheme, at best just a weirdo who wanted some high school friends. Of course when you ignore those more prosaic possibilities, as well as that TikTok probably does the job of gathering data on American teenagers much more efficiently than any one single “spy” in a New Jersey public high school would have, or that Hyejeong Shin isn’t even a Chinese name, but a Korean one (there’s a K-pop star with the exact same name), it sure does sound like a Chinese Communist spy operation.