Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

There’s over 200 miles of distance between the Tri Town Baptist Church in East Millinocket, a small Maine town with a population of under 2,000, and York County, with over 200,000 people.

But when prison inmates at the York County Jail began testing positive for coronavirus, Democrat officials chose to blame the Tri Town Baptist Church for the sins of York County Jail.

The story is a familiar one because the media loves to tell it so often.

A wedding was held at the small Tri Town Baptist Church which with its white wooden steeple and whitewashed clapboard walls looks as if it had been plucked from a picture postcard.

Democrat officials claimed that the wedding then spread the virus across Maine and to the jail.

The inmate’s death can’t be confirmed as due to the virus until another 50 years have gone by because of HIPAA privacy restrictions, but that hasn’t stopped the media from doing it anyway.

While the media’s calumny poured down on the small church, with the wedding being blamed for deaths and illnesses across the state, it has gone on distributing food to people in need.

York County has around 1,000 cases of coronavirus while Penobscot, the home county of East Millinocket, has a bit over 200. Is it really more likely that the place with a quarter of the cases and death toll infected the second largest infected county in Maine, or the other way around?

And yet the media claims that the little church generated 147 cases across all of Maine. It’s amazing that this wedding generated far more cases outside its county than inside it.

Serious journalists might have also asked whether the spread is real or manufactured by the massive increase in testing volume after the supposed wedding that infected Maine. But there’s no room for serious journalists in journalism who might follow the story wherever it leads past the politically convenient lies and to the real story which is a lot closer to the centers of power.

The wedding at the small church in East Millinocket is also being blamed for deaths at a nursing home in Madison, over 120 miles away, where a nursing assistant who had a sore throat, a cough, and was so sick that she was shaking, went on working for ten hours.

Was the Maplecrest Rehabilitation and Living Center staffer a wedding guest? No.

Democrat state officials claim that the virus was passed through a child who was at the wedding, who passed it to a parent, who was not at the wedding, who then passed it to a staffer, who might or might not be this nursing assistant.

Is this the likeliest way for the nursing home residents to have come down with the virus?

There were already nursing home residents infected with the coronavirus at the facility. And members of the staff allegedly moved between the infected patients and the regular residents.

Admitting and maintaining patients with the virus in a nursing home, and then having staff move between the units is why tens of thousands of nursing home patients died around the country.

Why blame a church wedding for the deaths of nursing home patients 120 miles away in a facility that housed infected patients, where an infected staffer was so sick she was shaking?

Maplecrest Rehabilitation and Living Center is owned by North County Associates, which is one of the biggest managers and operators of nursing homes in New England. Its CEO and owner, John Orestis, is a former state legislator and the former Democrat mayor of Lewiston.

And Orestis continues donating to Democrat politicians.

Long before the wedding that made a small church into the object of the media’s hate, there had been outbreaks at two other North County Associates facilities: Edgewood Rehab and The Commons at Tall Pines. The Tall Pines outbreak led to 13 deaths of residents. Tall Pines, where North County Associates serves as the management company, had the lowest possible rating.

Family members described neglect, floors sticky with urine and maggots.

Not only did Tall Pines have twice the number of health citations as average in Maine, but an area in which the facility was found to have problems was infection prevention and control.

There’s a story here that the media is carefully directing attention away from through bigotry.

Maine Democrats chose Nirav Shah, a former Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, who had previously been accused of badly mishandling a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in the Illinois Veterans Home which killed 13 people, to head the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Democrat point man on fighting the pandemic in Maine had already failed badly in Illinois.

Despite that mess, Governor Janet Mills, the leftist leader of Maine, picked Jeanne Lambrew, Obama’s intended head of the Office of Health Care Reform, as her Commissioner of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. Lambrew chose the disgraced Shah and the media turned him into a mini-Fauci with his own cult of personality because he quotes song lyrics.

The deaths at the Maplecrest Rehabilitation and Living Center in Madison point much more obviously to the Democrat establishment than to the small church in East Millinocket.

But that’s exactly why the church has become the fall house of worship for the Democrats.

The Democrat media has served up an endless parade of tales of the selfishness of the married couple, of the pastor, who has expressed a heretical “skepticism” about the lockdowns, and drawn elaborate maps resembling a paranoic’s fantasy as to how the virus spread from the church to the jail and the nursing home, along with angry quotes from family members.

It’s a familiar story and one that the media loves retelling every chance that it gets.

“They defied health rules for a SF wedding. The virus didn’t spare them,” a San Francisco Chronicle article gloated about a wedding at a cathedral which it blamed for spreading the virus to Arizona and Nashville. The wedding, which took place in a basketball court after city officials shut down the cathedral, would have involved 80 people in a building meant for 800 people.

The New York Post sent in its reporters to obtain wedding videos of Chassidic Jews, resulting in Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo promising to crack down on religious Jews. Even though

the only wedding the tabloid’s intrepid Jewish wedding investigators actually personally witnessed involved about 20 people dancing in a mostly empty room.

Wedding outbreak stories have become a staple of the media’s pandemic shaming.

And they have certain things in common. The wedding party are members of a traditional religious group, Baptists, Catholics, or Orthodox Jews. The stories are an unsubtle form of religious bigotry whose object lesson is that traditional religious groups spread disease.

This medieval bigotry is being spread by the media under the false flag of science.

The supposed sources of these outbreaks are often small towns. Democrat officials in Minnesota tried to blame 75 coronavirus cases in 14 counties on a wedding in the town of Ghent which has a population of 370.

Meanwhile, curiously enough, Black Lives Matter rallies, no matter the size, never seem to spread anything. Al Sharpton can hold a 50,000 BLM rally in D.C., where participants were jammed into a narrow space around the Lincoln Memorial for hours, without any spread.

Meanwhile, in Portland, Maine, 2,000 could gather for a Black Lives Matter rally without ever spreading the virus. In Sanford, which calls itself “The Heart of York County”, hundreds of Black Lives Matter rioters confronted police. But, unlike weddings, these events don’t spread the virus.

A Catholic wedding of 80 people outdoors in San Francisco is a superspreader event, but not a Black Lives Matter protest involving thousands. The hypocrisy is as obvious as the bigotry.

But bigotry isn’t just about hate: it’s also about distracting from the crimes of the ruling class.

The death toll from the pandemic has been concentrated in nursing homes. The pattern is familiar. Elderly nursing home residents are housed in the same facilities as infected patients. Overworked staffers, some of them third worlders with little concept of hygiene, move back and forth between units, spreading the virus, and killing dozens and even hundreds of the elderly.

Sometimes Democrat governors, like Cuomo in New York, Murphy in New Jersey, Wolf in Pennsylvania, Newsom in California, and Whitmer in Michigan, order homes to accept the infected. Other times, as in Maine, they fail to keep the infected out of nursing homes.

New York, Maine, and California’s Democrat ruling classes need scapegoats to cover up their role in the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents. And the media helpfully supplies scapegoats in the form of Chassidic Jews, a Baptist church, or a Catholic cathedral.

And a locked down public obsessively following media coverage of the pandemic angrily joins the Two Minutes Hate by the Democrat establishment that murdered their grandparents by hurling stones at some of those religious believers who “selfishly” had to have a wedding.