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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Continuing our look at global fascism, we visit Hong Kong and (by extension) China, where an intelligence community destabilization effort is underway. That effort is utilizing Islamic fascists in the Uighur community in Xinjiang Province and the Falun Gong, a fascist mind control cult that has developed close operational links with the Trump administration, Steve Bannon and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (a CIA “derivative.”)
Beginning our sojourn in Hong Kong, we review the prevalence of the Pepe the Frog icon in the Hong Kong protests. The New York Times’ disclaimer that the protesters are not “alt-right” should be seen in perspective.
With Steve Bannon at the epicenter of the anti-China movement, Pepe’s presence in Hong Kong is not surprising.
Note Bannon and company’s networking with the Falun Gong cult.
In our long series predicated on Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley, we noted the Internet Freedom movement and its fundamental position as part of the intelligence community’s “soft power” propaganda and regime change arsenal.
Yasha Levine sums up the fundamental contradictions inherent in this dynamic: ” . . . . If you stepped back to survey the scene, the entire landscape of this new Internet Freedom privacy movement looked absurd. Cold War-era organizations spun off from the CIA now funding the global movement against government surveillance? Google and Facebook, companies that ran private surveillance networks and worked hand in hand with the NSA, deploying government-funded privacy tech to protect their users from government surveillance? Privacy activists working with Silicon Valley and the US government to fight government surveillance—and with the support of Edward Snowden himself? . . . .”
In China, Falun Gong is among the recipients of Broadcasting Board of Governors money. Recall that the BBG is a CIA “derivative.”: ” . . . . It also funded several small outfits run by practitioners of Falun gong, a controversial Chinese anticommunist cult banned in China whose leader believes that humans are being corrupted by aliens from other dimensions and that people of mixed blood are subhumans and unfit for salvation. . . . ”
After excerpting a puff piece that lionizes Falun Gong in their struggles with the Chinese, we highlight the beliefs of the organization.
The Falun Gong teaches that: post menopausal women can regain menstruation, considered mandatory for spiritual evolution; gays are demonized; mixed race people are demonized; cult members are discouraged from seeking modern medical treatment; space aliens are inhabiting human bodies and are responsible for modern technology such as airplanes and computers; tiny beings are said to be invading human bodies and causing “bad karma;” master Li Hongzhi knows the secrets of the universe; master Li Hongzhi can levitate and walk through walls; master Li Hongzhi can install a physical “Falun”–swastika–in the abdomen of followers which revolves in various directions; Falun Gong teaching demonizes feminists and popular music; there will be a “Judgement Day” on which communists and others deemed unworthy by master Li Hongzhi will be neutralized.
We conclude with part of an article which will be presented and analyzed at greater length in our next program.
Falun Gong–largely through its Epoch Times newspaper–has established a major social media presence and is a key ally of President Trump’s re-election effort: “. . . . In April, at the height of its ad spending, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and digital video outlet New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher, according to data from the social media analytics company Tubular.That engagement has made The Epoch Times a favorite of the Trump family and a key component of the president’s re-election campaign. . . . .”
1. Beginning our sojourn in Hong Kong, we note the prevalence of the Pepe the Frog icon in the Hong Kong protests. As will be seen in our next story, The New York Times’ disclaimer that the protesters are not “alt-right” should be seen in perspective.
Ask the Anti-Defamation League, and they will tell you Pepe the Frog is a hate symbol, a cheerleader of racism and anti-Semitism, a friend of alt-right extremists. The sad, green frog is widely viewed as toxic across the world, a signal of a sinister and dangerous worldview.
So it can be a bit jarring to see Pepe in his new role: a pro-democracy freedom fighter in the Hong Kong protests, siding with the people in their struggle against an authoritarian state. The protesters here hold signs with his image, use stickers of him in messaging apps and discussion forums, and even spray paint his face on walls.
Protestors graffitied a “Press Pepe” at the Lennon Wall at Hong Kong’s Central Government Office tonight. Civil servants gonna see this in the morning…#HongKongProtests#antiELAB #antiELABhk #Pepe#PressPepe pic.twitter.com/xWxQFWLP5p
— Alex Hofford (@alexhofford) August 18, 2019
Does that mean that Hong Kong protesters are alt-right, or that they support the racism he represents?
The question confuses many protesters, many of whom had no idea about the symbol’s racist connotations elsewhere in the world. They just like him. . . . .
2. Steve Bannon–one of the luminaries of the “Alt-Right,” and a former key Trump aide is centrally involved in the anti-China effort. This suggests that the presence of Pepe the Frog’s image in Hong Kong might have something to do with the “Alt-Right” after all.
Note Bannon and company’s networking with the Falun Gong cult and “Chinese Muslim Freedom Fighters”–read “Uighurs.’
“A New Red Scare Is Reshaping Washington” by Ana Swanson; The New York Times; 7/20/2019.
In a ballroom across from the Capitol building, an unlikely group of military hawks, populist crusaders, Chinese Muslim freedom fighters [Uighurs–D.E.] and followers of the Falun Gong has been meeting to warn anyone who will listen that China poses an existential threat to the United States that will not end until the Communist Party is overthrown.
If the warnings sound straight out of the Cold War, they are. The Committee on the Present Danger, a long-defunct group that campaigned against the dangers of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, has recently been revived with the help of Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, to warn against the dangers of China.
Once dismissed as xenophobes and fringe elements, the group’s members are finding their views increasingly embraced in President Trump’s Washington, where skepticism and mistrust of China have taken hold. Fear of China has spread across the government, from the White House to Congress to federal agencies, where Beijing’s rise is unquestioningly viewed as an economic and national security threat and the defining challenge of the 21st century.
“These are two systems that are incompatible,” Mr. Bannon said of the United States and China. “One side is going to win, and one side is going to lose.” . . . .
3. In our long series predicated on Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley, we noted the Internet Freedom movement and its fundamental position as part of the intelligence community’s “soft power” propaganda and regime change arsenal.
Yasha Levine sums up the fundamental contradictions inherent in this dynamic: ” . . . . If you stepped back to survey the scene, the entire landscape of this new Internet Freedom privacy movement looked absurd. Cold War-era organizations spun off from the CIA now funding the global movement against government surveillance? Google and Facebook, companies that ran private surveillance networks and worked hand in hand with the NSA, deploying government-funded privacy tech to protect their users from government surveillance? Privacy activists working with Silicon Valley and the US government to fight government surveillance—and with the support of Edward Snowden himself? . . . .”
In China, Falun Gong is among the recipients of Broadcasting Board of Governors money. Recall that the BBG is a CIA “derivative.”
. . . . The CIA had been targeting the People’s Republic of China with covert broadcasting since at least 1951, when the agency launched Radio Free Asia. Over the decades, the agency shut down and re-launched Radio Free Asia under different guises and, ultimately handed it of to the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
When the commercial Internet began to penetrate China in the early 2000s, BBG and Radio Free Asia channeled their efforts into web-based programming. But this expansion didn’t go very smoothly. For years, China had been jamming Voice of America and Radio Free Asia by playing loud noises or loping Chinese opera music over the same frequencies with a more powerful radio signal, which bumped American broadcasts off he air. When these broadcasts switched to the Internet as just another communication medium being used b America to undermine their government. Jamming this kind of activity was standard practice in China long before the Internet arrived.
Expected or not, the US government did not let the matter drop. Attempts by China to control its own domestic Internet space and block access to material and information were seen as belligerent acts–something like a modern trade embargo that limited US businesses’ and government agencies’ ability to operate freely. Under President George W. Bush, American foreign policy planners formulated policies that would become known over the next decade as “Internet Freedom.” While couched in lofty language about fighting censorship, promoting democracy, and safeguarding “freedom of expression,” these policies were rooted in big power politics: the fight to open markets to American companies and expand America’s dominance in the age of the Internet. Internet Freedom was enthusiastically backed by American businesses, especially budding Internet giants like Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Google and later Facebook and Twitter. They saw foreign control of the Internet, first in China bug also in Iran and later Vietnam, Russia, and Myanmar, as an illegitimate check on their ability to expand into new global markets, and ultimately as a threat to their businesses.
Internet Freedom required a new set of “soft-power” weapons: digital crow bard that cold be used to wrench holes in a country’s telecommunications infrastructure. Int he early 2000s, the US government began funding projects that would allow people inside China to tunnel through their country’s government firewall. The BBG’s Internet Anti-Censorship Division led the pack, sinking millions into all sorts of early “censorship circumvention” technologies. It backed SafeWeb, an Internet proxy funded by the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. It also funded several small outfits run by practitioners of Falun gong, a controversial Chinese anticommunist cult banned in China whose leader believes that humans are being corrupted by aliens from other dimensions and that people of mixed blood are subhumans and unfit for salvation.
The Chinese government saw these anti-censorship tools as weapons in an upgraded version of an old war. “The Internet has become a new battlefield between china and the U.S.” declared a 2010 editorial of the Xinhua News Agency, China’s official press agency. “The U.S. State Department is collaborating with Google, Twitter and other IT giants to jointly launch software that ‘will enable everyone to use the Internet freely,’ using a kind of U.S. government provided anti-blocking software, in an attempt to spread ideology and values in line with the United States’ demands.”
China saw Internet Freedom as a threat, an illegitimate attempt to undermine the country’s sovereignty through “network warfare,” and began building a sophisticated system of Internet censorship and control, which grew into the infamous Great Firewall of China. Iran soon followed in China’s footsteps. . . . .
4. A puff piece from Wired magazine, which (through Nicholas Negroponte) has links to the intelligence community) sugar coats Falun Gong and their role in the online anti-China effort.
“Digital Weapons Help Dissidents Punch Holes in China’s Great Firewall” by Vince Beiser; Wired; 1/11/2010.
. . . . Huang has hunched shoulders and a round face thatched with bushy black hair; his bashful mien occasionally retreats into a nervous giggle. He’s no charismatic revolutionary. But by 2002, he had assembled a dozen like-minded Falun Gong-practicing colleagues. In the small garage attached to his four-bedroom bungalow, they developed a digital weapon for their compatriots back in China: a program designed to foil government censorship and surveillance. Dubbed UltraSurf, it has since become one of the most important free-speech tools on the Internet, used by millions from China to Saudi Arabia.
A separate group of Falun Gong practitioners, it turned out, was working on something similar, and in 2006 the two groups joined forces as the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. Most GIFC members spend their days as cubicle-bound programmers and engineers at places ranging from Microsoft to NASA. But off the clock, at night and on weekends, they wage digital guerrilla warfare on the Chinese government’s cyberpolice, matching their technical savvy, donated computers, and home-office resources against the world’s second-largest superpower. Again and again, Beijing has attacked the firewall-beating programs; again and again, the scrappy band of volunteers has defeated those attacks.
The victories don’t come easily. Huang quit a lucrative job to devote all his time to the cause. He has drained almost all of his savings. He had to sell his home and move his family into a rental, where he now works out of a spare room, making ends meet with freelance consulting gigs. Most days he sits in an armless swivel chair, bent over computers set up on a folding table. But there is one major consolation. “More and more people are using our technology,” he says. “And that’s the force that will tear down the Great Firewall.”
China maintains what is probably the world’s most advanced system for controlling digital communication. Authorities and opponents call it the Great Firewall, and the Chinese take it extremely seriously. At least 72 Chinese citizens—more than in any other country—are currently locked up for things they said online. Firewalls typically block access to certain sites, but the centerpiece of the Chinese system, called Golden Shield, does much more. It’s essentially a national digital surveillance network that monitors China’s estimated 420 million online citizens. This titanic task is facilitated by the fact that all international Internet traffic passes through just a handful of state-run pipelines. . . .
5a. Falun Gong’s racism, anti-gay sentiment and otherworldly beliefs, as well as the blind fealty its adherents pay to master Li Hongzhi, are a matter of record.
“Why All the Fuss about Falun Gong? [Cult Education Network];” Cult News; 1/28/2006.
. . . . At a hearing held by the city’s Board of Supervisors both sides of the Falun Gong controversy spoke out and some of strange teachings of Li Hongzhi leaked out.
According to Falun Gong’s leader “elder women will regain the menstrual period because a cultivation practice of mind and body requires menses.” Hongzhi concludes, “Otherwise, how can they cultivate their bodies without it?”
Hongzhi’s teachings about homosexuality must disturb many in the Bay area, which includes a large gay community. Li says that a “black substance” accumulates in the body due to homosexuality that causes bad health. Hongzhi’s homophobia also goes beyond simply describing its link to a “black substance” he has also called gays “disgusting,” and prophesizes that one day they will be ’eliminated’’ by ’the gods.’’
Hongzhi also appears to be a racist.
He teaches his followers that “mixed-race people [are] instruments of an alien plot to destroy humanity’s link to heaven.” And that these interracial unions are somehow part of “a plot by evil extraterrestrials.”
More bizarre is that practitioners of Falun Gong believe that “Master Li” actually can “personally install’’ falun (a wheel of law) in their abdomens, can “levitate,” “become invisible” and knows the “top secret of the Universe.”
Hongzhi also changed his date of birth from July 7 to May 13, which is when Buddha was born, reported Asiaweek.
Sound like a personality-driven “cult”?
“If you want a good description of a cult, all you have to do is read what they say they are,” Margaret Singer told the San Francisco Chronicle at a Seattle conference in 2000. The psychologist, who was the most respected cult expert of the 20th Century observed, “They actually say ‘Don’t Think.’ Just recite the master’s teaching.”
Last month Steve Hassan a cult counselor from Boston told the Chronicle that Li’s followers are “told not to think negative thoughts, and are given fears if they consider any other reality” and that Hongzhi “comes very much out of the cult extreme, the authoritarian stereotype.”
David Clark, a Pennsylvania cult counselor sees Falun Gong’s human rights campaign as a “clever marketing mechanism.” “It is a way of gaining access to get people to join the cause,” he said.
“I consider myself a victim of the Falun Gong because my parents were hurt by it, and the harmony of our family has been seriously damaged,” a Chinese massage therapist who practices tui na, told the Chronicle in December.
An anti-Falun Gong Web site has been launched to expose “the false and contradictory claims of Li Hongzhi.”
For example, regarding health Hongzhi teaches “the root cause is karma…That’s the root cause of people’s health problems, it’s the chief source of them. Of course, there are two other forms. One of them is really, really small, high-density tiny beings. They’re something like a cluster of karma.” . . . .
. . . . Such beliefs have allegedly led some Falun Gong devotees to neglect their health by not properly consulting doctors in a timely manner and/or seeking medical treatment and instead relying upon Hongzhi’s supposed powers and religious practices.
Li likewise seems to denigrate hospitals. He says that their “treatment methods are at ordinary people’s level while illness is beyond the ordinary,” He claims, “It’ll be years before today’s Western medicine catches up” with him and what he knows.
Chinese authorities have reported that hundreds of Li Hongzhi’s followers have died in Mainland China due to medical neglect.
So besides racism, homophobia and often-bizarre supernatural mumbo-jumbo it seems Falun Gong can become a health hazard.
It’s no wonder why the Chinese government sees Hongzhi as “evil” and Chinese Americans have become increasingly wary of his disciples participating in their community events.
5c. The “Falun’ (“law wheel”) in the Falun Gong lexicon refers to the swastika. An ancient Buddhist and Hindhu symbol unrelated to Nazi racism and ideology, it has nonetheless been used by fascist cults in the post-World War II world to evoke the Third Reich.
Falun Gong believes that an actual, physical swastika (“falun”) is installed by master Li Hongzhi in the abdomens of Falun Gong members.
“The Gong Show” by Emily Yoffe; Slate; 8/9/2001.
. . . . New self-improvement courses, or cults, or religions—take your pick—tend to be composed of a mixture of common sense, moral guidance, and lunacy. But Falun Gong, Li’s introductory text, is predominately lunacy. You know you’re in trouble by Page 4 when Li explains that qigong—the cultivation of qi—is not exclusive to the Chinese; there are Westerners who are experts, too. One is the magician David Copperfield, “a master of supernormal abilities who once performed the feat of walking through the Great Wall of China.”
But in Li’s universe, the Falun is no mere symbol. At his lectures, Li “places” a Falun in the abdomen of each attendee. According to Li, “Falun is an intelligent rotating entity composed of high-energy matter. The Falun that I plant in a practitioner’s lower abdomen rotates constantly, twenty-four hours a day.” Though this sounds like what happens after eating a bad oyster, Li says it is a great innovation. The Falun allows followers to hold down jobs and go about their lives, while at the same time cultivating their supernatural abilities. Alternate sources of Faluns include reading Li’s books, watching his videotapes, or studying with other practitioners—who are only allowed to repeat the words of the Master. They may not suddenly discover their own secrets of the cosmos. . . . .
6. Falun Gong–largely through its Epoch Times newspaper–has established a major social media presence and is a key ally of President Trump’s re-election effort: “. . . . In April, at the height of its ad spending, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and digital video outlet New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher, according to data from the social media analytics company Tubular. That engagement has made The Epoch Times a favorite of the Trump family and a key component of the president’s re-election campaign. . . . .”
Started almost two decades ago with a stated mission to “provide information to Chinese communities to help immigrants assimilate into American society,” The Epoch Times now wields one of the biggest social media followings of any news outlet.
By the numbers, there is no bigger advocate of President Donald Trump on Facebook than The Epoch Times.
The small New York-based nonprofit news outlet has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the last six months, according to data from Facebook’s advertising archive — more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.
Those video ads — in which unidentified spokespeople thumb through a newspaper to praise Trump, peddle conspiracy theories about the “Deep State,” and criticize “fake news” media — strike a familiar tone in the online conservative news ecosystem. The Epoch Times looks like many of the conservative outlets that have gained followings in recent years.
But it isn’t.
Behind the scenes, the media outlet’s ownership and operation is closely tied to Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual community with the stated goal of taking down China’s government.
It’s that motivation that helped drive the organization toward Trump, according to interviews with former Epoch Times staffers, a move that has been both lucrative and beneficial for its message.
Former practitioners of Falun Gong told NBC News that believers think the world is headed toward a judgment day, where those labeled “communists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and those sympathetic to the spiritual community will be spared. Trump is viewed as a key ally in the anti-communist fight, former Epoch Times employees said.
In part because of that unusual background, The Epoch Times has had trouble finding a foothold in the broader conservative movement.
“It seems like an interloper — not well integrated socially within the movement network, and not terribly well-circulating among right-wingers,” said A.J. Bauer, a visiting professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, who is part of an ongoing study in which he and his colleagues interview conservative journalists.
“Even when discussing more fringe‑y sites, conservative journalists tend to reference Gateway Pundit or Infowars,” Bauer said. “The Epoch Times doesn’t tend to come up.”
That seems to be changing.
Before 2016, The Epoch Times generally stayed out of U.S. politics, unless they dovetailed with Chinese interests. The publication’s recent ad strategy, coupled with a broader campaign to embrace social media and conservative U.S. politics — Trump in particular — has doubled The Epoch Times’ revenue, according to the organization’s tax filings, and pushed it to greater prominence in the broader conservative media world.
Started almost two decades ago as a free newspaper and website with a stated mission to “provide information to Chinese communities to help immigrants assimilate into American society,” The Epoch Times now wields one of the biggest social media followings of any news outlet.
In April, at the height of its ad spending, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and digital video outlet New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher, according to data from the social media analytics company Tubular.
That engagement has made The Epoch Times a favorite of the Trump family and a key component of the president’s re-election campaign. The president’s Facebook page has posted Epoch Times content at least half a dozen times this year— with several articles written by members of the Trump campaign. Donald Trump Jr. has tweeted several of their stories, too.
In May, Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, sat down for a 40-minute interview in Trump Tower with the paper’s senior editor. And for the first time, The Epoch Times was a main player at the conservative conference CPAC this year, where it secured interviews with members of Congress, Trump Cabinet members and right-wing celebrities.
At the same time, its network of news sites and YouTube channels has made it a powerful conduit for the internet’s fringier conspiracy theories, including anti-vaccination propaganda and QAnon, to reach the mainstream.
Despite its growing reach and power, little is publicly known about the precise ownership, origins or influences of The Epoch Times.
The outlet’s opacity makes it difficult to determine an overall structure, but it is loosely organized into several regional tax-free nonprofits. The Epoch Times operates alongside the video production company, NTD, under the umbrella of The Epoch Media Group, a private news and entertainment company whose owner executives have declined to name, citing concerns of “pressure” that could follow.
The Epoch Media Group, along with Shen Yun, a dance troupe known for its ubiquitous advertising and unsettling performances, make up the outreach effort of Falun Gong, a relatively new spiritual practice that combines ancient Chinese meditative exercises, mysticism and often ultraconservative cultural worldviews. Falun Gong’s founder has referred to Epoch Media Group as “our media,” and the group’s practice heavily informs The Epoch Times’ coverage, according to former employees who spoke with NBC News.
Executives at The Epoch Times declined to be interviewed for this article, but the publisher, Stephen Gregory, wrote an editorial in response to a list of emailed questions from NBC News, calling it “highly inappropriate” and part of an effort to “discredit” the publication to ask about the company’s affiliation with Falun Gong and its stance on the Trump administration.
Interviews with former employees, public financial records and social media data illustrate how a secretive newspaper has been able to leverage the devoted followers of a reclusive spiritual leader, political vitriol, online conspiracy theories and the rise of Trump to become a digital media powerhouse that now attracts billions of views each month, all while publicly denying or downplaying its association with Falun Gong.
Behind the times
In 2009, the founder and leader of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, came to speak at The Epoch Times’ offices in Manhattan. Li came with a clear directive for the Falun Gong volunteers who comprised the company’s staff: “Become regular media.”
The publication had been founded nine years earlier in Georgia by John Tang, a Chinese American practitioner of Falun Gong and current president of New Tang Dynasty. But it was falling short of Li’s ambitions as stated to his followers: to expose the evil of the Chinese government and “save all sentient beings” in a forthcoming divine battle against communism.
Roughly translated by the group as “law wheel exercise,” Falun Gong was started by Li in 1992. The practice, which combines bits of Buddhism and Taoism, involves meditation and gentle exercises and espouses Li’s controversial teachings.
“Li Hongzhi simplified meditation and practices that traditionally have many steps and are very confusing,” said Ming Xia, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York who has studied Falun Gong. “Basically it’s like fast food, a quickie.”
Li’s teachings quickly built a significant following — and ran into tension with China’s leaders, who viewed his popularity as a threat to the communist government’s hold on power.
In 1999, after thousands of Li’s followers gathered in front of President Jiang Zemin’s compound to quietly protest the arrest of several Falun Gong members, authorities in China banned Falun Gong, closing teaching centers and arresting Falun Gong organizers and practitioners who refused to give up the practice. Human rights groups have reported some adherents being tortured and killed while in custody.
The crackdown elicited condemnation from Western countries, and attracted a new pool of followers in the United States, for whom China and communism were common adversaries.
“The persecution itself elevated Li’s status and brought tremendous media attention,” Ming said.
It has also invited scrutiny of the spiritual leader’s more unconventional ideas. Among them, Li has railed against what he called the wickedness of homosexuality, feminism and popular music while holding that he is a god-like figure who can levitate and walk through walls.
Li has also taught that sickness is a symptom of evil that can only be truly cured with meditation and devotion, and that aliens from undiscovered dimensions have invaded the minds and bodies of humans, bringing corruption and inventions such as computers and airplanes. The Chinese government has used these controversial teachings to label Falun Gong a cult. Falun Gong has denied the government’s characterization.
The Epoch Times provided Li with an English-language way to push back against China — a position that would eventually dovetail with Trump’s election.
In 2005, The Epoch Times released its greatest salvo, publishing the ”Nine Commentaries,” a widely distributed book-length series of anonymous editorials that it claimed exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s “massive crimes” and “attempts to eradicate all traditional morality and religious belief.”
The next year, an Epoch Times reporter was removed from a White House event for Chinese President Hu Jintao after interrupting the ceremony by shouting for several minutes that then-President George W. Bush must stop the leader from “persecuting Falun Gong.”
But despite its small army of devoted volunteers, The Epoch Times was still operating as a fledgling startup.
Ben Hurley is a former Falun Gong practitioner who helped create Australia’s English version of The Epoch Times out of a living room in Sydney in 2005. He has written about his experience with the paper and described the early years as “a giant PR campaign” to evangelize about Falun Gong’s belief in an upcoming apocalypse in which those who think badly of the practice, or well of the Chinese Communist Party, will be destroyed.
Hurley, who wrote for The Epoch Times until he left in 2013, said he saw practitioners in leadership positions begin drawing harder and harder lines about acceptable political positions.
“Their views were always anti-abortion and homophobic, but there was more room for disagreements in the early days,” he said.
Hurley said Falun Gong practitioners saw communism everywhere: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, movie star Jackie Chan and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan were all considered to have sold themselves out to the Chinese government, Hurley said.
This kind of coverage foreshadowed the news organization’s embrace of conspiracy theories like QAnon, the overarching theory that there is an evil cabal of “deep state” operators and child predators out to take down the president.
“It is so rabidly pro-Trump,” Hurley said, referring to The Epoch Times. Devout practitioners of Falun Gong “believe that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.”
A representative for Li declined an interview request. Li lives among hundreds of his followers near Dragon Springs, a 400-acre compound in upstate New York that houses temples, private schools and quarters where performers for the organization’s dance troupe, Shen Yun, live and rehearse, according to four former compound residents and former Falun Gong practitioners who spoke to NBC News.
They said that life in Dragon Springs is tightly controlled by Li, that internet access is restricted, the use of medicines is discouraged, and arranged relationships are common. Two former residents on visas said they were offered to be set up with U.S. residents at the compound.
Tiger Huang, a former Dragon Springs resident who was on a U.S. student visa from Taiwan, said she was set up on three dates on the compound, and she believed her ability to stay in the U.S. was tied to the arrangement.
“The purpose of setting up the dates was obvious,” Huang said. Her now-husband, a former Dragon Springs resident, confirmed the account.
Huang said she was told by Dragon Springs officials her visa had expired and was told to go back to Taiwan after months of dating a nonpractitioner in the compound. She later learned that her visa had not expired when she was told to leave the country.
Campaign season
By 2016, The Epoch Times Group appeared to have heeded the call from Li to run its operation more like a typical news organization, starting with The Epoch Times’ website. In March, the company placed job ads on the site Indeed.com and assembled a team of seven young reporters otherwise unconnected to Falun Gong. The average salary for the new recruits was $35,000 a year, paid monthly, according to former employees.
Things seemed “strange,” even from the first day, according to five former reporters who spoke with NBC News — four of whom asked for anonymity over concerns that speaking negatively about their experience would affect their relationship with current and future employers.
As part of their orientation, the new reporters watched a video that laid out the Chinese persecution of Falun Gong followers. The publisher, Stephen Gregory, also spoke to the reporters about his vision for the new digital initiative. The former employees said Gregory’s talk framed The Epoch Times as an answer to the liberal mainstream media.
Their content was to be critical of communist China, clear-eyed about the threat of Islamic terrorism, focused on illegal immigration and at all times rooted in “traditional” values, they said. This meant no content about drugs, gay people or popular music.
The reporters said they worked from desks arranged in a U‑shape in a single-room office that was separated by a locked door from the other staff members who worked on the paper, dozens of Falun Gong volunteers and interns. The new recruits wrote up to five news stories a day in an effort to meet a quota of 100,000 page views, and submitted their work to a handful of editors — a team of two Falun Gong-practicing married couples.
“Slave labor may not be the right word, but that’s a lot of articles to write in one day,” one former employee said.
It wasn’t just the amount of writing but also the conservative editorial restrictions that began to concern some of the employees.
“It’s like we were supposed to be fighting so-called liberal propaganda by making our own,” said Steve Klett, who covered the Trump campaign for The Epoch Times as his first job in journalism. Klett likened The Epoch Times to a Russian troll farm and said his articles were edited to remove outside criticism of Trump.
“The worst was the Pulse shooting,” Klett said, referring to the 2016 mass shooting in which 50 people including the gunman were killed at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. “We weren’t allowed to cover stories involving homosexuality, but that bumps up against them wanting to cover Islamic terrorism. So I wrote four articles without using the word gay.”
Klett said that the publication also began to skew in favor of Trump, who had targeted China on the campaign trail with talk of a trade war.
“I knew I had to forget about all the worst parts of Trump,” Klett said.
Klett, however, would not end up having to cover the Trump administration. Eight days before the election, the team was called together and fired as a group.
“I guess the experiment was over,” a former employee said.
The content
The Epoch Times, digital production company NTD and the heavily advertised dance troupe Shen Yun make up the nonprofit network that Li calls “our media.” Financial documents paint a complicated picture of more than a dozen technically separate organizations that appear to share missions, money and executives. Though the source of their revenue is unclear, the most recent financial records from each organization paint a picture of an overall business thriving in the Trump era.
The Epoch Times brought in $8.1 million in revenue in 2017 — double what it had the previous year — and reported spending $7.2 million on “printing newspaper and creating web and media programs.” Most of its revenue comes from advertising and “web and media income,” according to the group’s annual tax filings, while individual donations and subscriptions to the paper make up less than 10 percent of its revenue.
New Tang Dynasty’s 2017 revenue, according to IRS records, was $18 million, a 150 percent increase over the year before. It spent $16.2 million.
That exponential growth came around the same time The Epoch Times expanded its online presence and increased its ad spending, honing its message on two basic themes: enthusiastic support for Trump’s agenda, and the exposure of what the publication claims is a labyrinthian, global conspiracy led by Clinton and former President Barack Obama to tear down Trump. One such conspiracy theory, loosely called “Spygate,” has become a common talking point for Fox News host Sean Hannity and conservative news websites like Breitbart.
The paper’s “Spygate Special Coverage” section, which frequently sits atop its website, theorizes about a grand, yearslong plot in which former Obama and Clinton staffers, a handful of magazines and newspapers, private investigators and government bureaucrats plan to take down the Trump presidency.
In his published response, publisher Gregory said the media outlet’s ads “have no political agenda.”
While The Epoch Times usually straddles the line between an ultraconservative news outlet and a conspiracy warehouse, some popular online shows created by Epoch Times employees and produced by NTD cross the line completely, and spread far and wide.
One such show is “Edge of Wonder,” a verified YouTube channel that releases new NTD-produced videos twice every week and now has more than 33 million views. In addition to claims that alien abductions are real and the drug epidemic was engineered by the “deep state,” the channel pushes the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely posits that the same “Spygate” cabal is a front for a global pedophile ring being taken down by Trump.
One QAnon video, titled “#QANON – 7 facts the MEDIA (MSM) Won’t Admit” has almost 1 million views on YouTube. Other videos in the channel’s QAnon playlist, which include videos about 9/11 conspiracy theories and one titled “13 BLOODLINES & their Diabolical End Game,” gained hundreds of thousands of views each.
Travis View, a researcher and podcaster who studies the QAnon movement, said The Epoch Times has sanitized the conspiracy theory by pushing Spygate, which drops the wildest and more prurient details of QAnon while retaining its conspiratorial elements.
“QAnon is highly stigmatized among people trying to push the Spygate message. They know how toxic QAnon is,” View said. “Spygate leaves out the spiritual elements, the child sex trafficking, but it’s certainly integral to the QAnon narrative.”
Gregory denied any connection with “Edge of Wonder,” writing in a statement that his organization was “aware of the entertainment show,” but “is in no way connected with it.”
But The Epoch Times has itself published several credulous reports on QAnon and for years, the webseries hosts Rob Counts and Benjamin Chasteen were employed as the company’s creative director and chief photo editor, respectively. In August 2018, six months after the creation of “Edge of Wonder,” Counts tweeted that he still worked for Epoch Times. Counts and Chasteen did not respond to an email seeking clarification on their roles.
Even MORE Fun With Science: Earthquake Weaponry
My wife is from Hong Kong. She regularly gets text with video from her friends still there. What they’re describing is identical to what’s happening in America. CNN will report the authorities are the villains to the HK people and the protesters the white hats. The children in HK are being indoctrinated by teachers to hate Communism, the protesters regularly attack ordinary people on the street. The MSM are hated in HK for lying about everything the same way as America. Soros is seen as being behind the protests,the protesters were training for this the last three years. Maybe my wife’s friends are lying, there’s a language barrier, that’s just what she’s telling me.
Like an annual opening of the gates of hell, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is once again underway. If Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate had a conference, this would be it. The yearly ritual of insanity that’s maintained the tradition of growing crazier each year. Although this year it broke with tradition somewhat when the conference relocated from the DC area to Orlando, in keeping with the conference’s Cult-of-Trump theme.
But as we’ve seen, despite being a cult of Trupm, CPAC is still a big-tent organization. At least when it comes to cults. It’s like the Baskin Robbins of far right madness, including cults like Falun Gong, which saw its Epoch Times ‘news’ outlet play a main role at the conference for the first time in 2019, presumably as a reward for its dedicate portrayal of Donald Trump as an agent of God.
So here’s a look one another cult rooted in the far east that’s returning to CPAC this year. And while this cult is Japanese, it has a very similar core message to Falun Gong: warning of the growing dangers of China. It’s the Happy Science cult and cult member Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba will be returning. Aeba first attended CPAC in 2011 and has reportedly spent the last decade making outreaches to US conservatives. In particular Steve Bannon. Because of course.
Happy Science was founded in 1986 by Ryuho Okawa, a former Wall Street trader who claims to be the reincarnated form of Buddha, who himself was the reincarnation of an alien from Venus, El Cantare, who created life on earth millions of years ago. So the Happy Science founder is the reincarnation of the being that created life on earth. That’s quite a predigree.
The group requires members to pay money to advance within the group. The group was officially recognized as a religion in Japan in 1991, so it’s like a Japanese hybrid of Falun Gong and the Church of Scientology.
And what kind of spotlight is Aeba being given at the conference? A prime-time speaking slot following Donald Trump Jr. Because that’s how CPAC rolls:
“On Friday afternoon at the Hyatt Regency Orlando, Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba, a prominent Japanese conservative, will address CPAC about the threat China poses to the U.S., taking a prime spot in the lineup just after Donald Trump Jr”
He’s not just a guest. Jay Aeba is a guest of honor, given one of the top speaking slots of the conference. It’s a reflection of the success of his 10 year campaign to create ties to US conservatives like Steve Bannon. But it’s also a reflection of perhaps the most disturbing part of this story: One of Aeba’s goals is to learn how Japanese conservatives can emulate US conservatives. Yes, Aeba is tasked with figuring out how to turn Happy Science’s leader, Ryuho Okawa, into Japan’s Donald Trump:
And that gives us a sense of how deep Trump’s grip of the US conservative movement truly is at this point: the Cult of Trump is literally a model for authoritarian cults around the world. Trump has become a cult of personality guru. A Buddha for grifters. Or rather, the reincarnated form of El Cantare, bringer of life, for grifters. Cutting edge cultism is on display at CPAC and cults around the world are watching and learning. Welcome to Trump’s legacy. Well, Trump and the GOP’s legacy. It was a group effort.