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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: We begin with brief review of the Falun Gong cult and its connections. Part of a constellation of organizations and individuals working with former Trump chief of staff Steve Bannon to neutralize China, Falun Gong has garnered the support of CIA derivative Broadcasting Board of Governors in the effort.
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.
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. . . . .”
Program Highlights Include: The enormous amount of money under control of Falun Gong; similarities to the Unification Church; the anti-communist dogma of the cult (again, not unlike the Unification Church); the role of the internet and social media–Facebook, in particular–in the growth of Falun Gong’s operations; the spin put by NBC on Falun Gong’s beliefs.
1.We begin with brief review of the Falun Gong cult and its connections. Part of a constellation of organizations and individuals working with former Trump chief of staff Steve Bannon to neutralize China, Falun Gong has garnered the support of CIA derivative Broadcasting Board of Governors in the effort.
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.
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.
The Future: Technology, Theocracy and the Thousand Year Reich
Here’s a story to watch as the Wuhan flu continues to grow into a global pandemic related to Steve Bannon’s efforts to destabilize China : There’s a ‘news’ website founded by an exiled Chinese billionaire pushing the idea that the Wuhan flu virus originated in a Chinese government lab. The site also published a document described as “questionable” that fueled a conspiracy theory that the Chinese military spread the disease deliberately. The document has been popular on message boards like 4chan, which is particularly popular with the ‘Alt Right’. What makes this behavior by G News particularly interesting is that this billionaire, Guo Wengui (also known as Miles Kwok and Miles Guo), recently hired Steve Bannon for $1 million to make introductions to “media personalities” and advise on “industry standards.” Bannon and Buo also frequently appear together in videos on G News that attack the Chinese government
Another American who appears to be associated with G New is hedge fund manager J. Kyle Bass who reportedly has investment positions that profit from a decline in the value if China’s economy fails. Bass is the chair of the Rule of Law Foundation, a nonprofit that runs banner ads at the top and bottom of the G News website. Guo and Bannon happen to run a $100 million investment fund called the Rule of Law Fund, but Bass claims that his Rule of Law Foundation has no ties to that fund and that he has ties to G News at all.
As we’re going to see in the second article below, Bass has tied to the Trump administration via his friendly with Tommy Hick, Jr., a long-time friend of Donald Trump Jr. and current co-chairman of the Republican National Committee. Bass has reportedly used his connections to Hicks to meet with the Trump administration and share his views on China.
Recall how Hicks was one of the figures who reportedly met with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman as they were working on their Naftogaz scheme in Ukraine.
So a new anti-China disinformation site just popped up that appears to be working with Bannon and Kyle Bass and Bass appears to be working with the Trump administration. Ok, first, here’s the story about the new G News site and its ties to Bannon and Bass:
“On Jan. 25, G News published a false story saying the Chinese government was preparing to admit that the coronavirus originated in one of its labs. It did not, but the article still racked up over 19,000 tweets and 18,000 Facebook engagements, according to social tracking website BuzzSumo. The story was debunked by Facebook fact-checking partner PolitiFact.”
Making up fake news for Machiavellian purposes. It’s like a Chinese dissident billionaire Breitbart, including the involvement of Steve Bannon, who was paid $1 million to advise on “industry standard”. Presumably that advice involves Bannon’s expertise in shredding those industry standards:
$1 million for making introductions to “media personalities” and advising on “industry standards”. Nice work if you can get it.
And then there’s the involvement of US hedge fund manager J. Kyle Bass, who reportedly had investments that benefit from a weakened Chinese economy but who also claims to have no involvement with G News at all despite all of the available evidence:
No ties at all. It’s just a coincidence that Bass happens to chair the Rule of Law Foundation which runs banner das on the G News site and it’s just a coincidence that Bannon and Guo started a $100 million fund called the “Rule of Law Fund”. That’s Kyle Bass’s official answer on these matters.
Now here’s the ProPublica report from last year that described how Bass’s hedge fund was positioned to benefit from a falling Chinese economy. The report is actually primarily about Tommy Hicks Jr., a long-time friend of Donald Trump Jr. who was named the co-chair of the Republican National Committee in January of 2019. Hick and Bass appear to be quite close too. The article describes the role Hicks has played in the Trump administration developing a national strategy around 5G wireless technology, a topic that involves questions of national security and possible risks associated with Chinese technology firms. Hick appears to have regularly met with White House officials on the topic and uses his ties to the Trump family to arrange for associates to meet with White House officials. Associates like Kyle Bass, who was allowed to present his views China’s banking system to Heath Tarbert, an assistant secretary at Treasury in charge of a powerful intergovernmental committee that reviews foreign investments in the U.S. for national security concerns. As the article notes, Bass has become a vocal advocate for an aggressive US policy against China:
“Tommy Hicks Jr., 41, isn’t a government official; he’s a wealthy private investor. And he has been a part of discussions related to China and technology with top officials from the Treasury Department, National Security Council, Commerce Department and others, according to emails and documents obtained by ProPublica. In one email, Hicks refers to a meeting at “Langley,” an apparent reference to the CIA’s headquarters.”
Yep, Tommy Hicks Jr. isn’t part of the government, but he sure acts like it, at least when it comes to issues related to China and technology, which both heavily overlap with US 5G wireless technology policies. And it’s that clear conflict of interest that gets more conflicted when we learn that Hicks has been using his Trump family connections to arrange for meetings by Kyle Bass so Bass can air his views on China:
And it was Hicks acting as this lobbyist middle-man that arranged for Bass, an advocate for aggressive policies towards China, to be allowed to basically personally lobby the person in charge of a powerful intergovernmental committee that reviews foreign investments in the U.S. for national security concerns. And Bass just happens to have raised $143 million in investments for two funds that benefit from a declining Chinese economy:
Adding to the conflicts of interest in this whole arrangement is that Hicks and Bass have invested together since at least 2011 and Hicks doesn’t dispute that he and his family are invested in Bass’s funds:
So, on one level, it’s just another tale of corrupt insider dealing coming out of the Trump White House involving Trump’s family and friends. A typical story we should expect at this point.
But it still seems like an unusually corrupt story even by the debased standards of Trump-related corruption. Because we have the creation of a website that’s explicitly pumping out fake news that appears to be designed to provoke anger in the Chinese populace against the Chinese government. The site appears to be a co-creation of Steve Bannon and tied to Kyle Bass, who manages funds that explicitly benefit from a declining Chinese economy. And Bass appears to have an inside track to White House China policy via his friendly with Tommy Hicks, Jr., the long-time friend of Donald Trump, Jr. We’re used to stories involving right-wing fake news, stories about the Trump children selling their access to the White House, stories involving business insiders profiting from their Trump policies, and stories about Trump trying to destabilize entire countries. This story has it all, which is reminder that the destabilization of societies can make a lot of money, especially for the people carrying out the actual destabilization.
The issue of growing anti-Asian sentiments in America was back into the headlines on Tuesday following a string of mass shootings at a trio of Asian massage parlors in Atlanta. While the motive of the shootings remains unclear — with early reports indicating the shooter was struggling with deep religious convictions and a sex addiction — the events served as a grim reminder of the national wave of anti-Asian hate crimes since the start of the coronavirus lockdowns last year fueled by the Trump administration’s persistent usage of terms like “the Kung Flu” and insinuations that the coronavirus was the fault of the China government.
But, of course, the anti-Asian fervor didn’t suddenly erupt with the outbreak of the coronavirus. Recall the July 2019 National Conservatism conference, where Peter Thiel called for an investigation into Google based on Thiel’s speculation that it was secretly colluding with the China military. As the following article points out, when Thiel made that speech, he was echoing the message Steve Bannon had been pushing for years, like the interview Bannon did of Donald Trump in 2015, where Bannon basically said there are too many Asian CEO in Silicon Valley and that Asian students graduating from US universities should be returning to their countries. That was the message Thiel was amplifying. A message warning against not just the Chinese government, but Chinese and Asian immigrants in general:
“The billionaire investor Peter Thiel has accused Google of “treason” and called for a law enforcement investigation of the search engine’s parent company. He speculated that the Chinese government has invaded its employee ranks. A German immigrant via South Africa, Thiel is not alone; his remarks echo the repeated assertions of the rabble rouser Steve Bannon that there are too many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley.”
The American far right hasn’t exactly been keeping it a secret: they don’t particularly care for Asians either.
And yet, as we’ve seen, one of Bannon’s biggest projects in recent years has simultaneously been the fomenting of revolution in Hong Kong — with an eye on revolutions in China — and some of his closest allies in this endeavor have been Chinese dissidents like exiled billionaire Guo Wengui and the Falun Gong cult. Falun Gong’s Epoch Times has, in turn, became one of the biggest promoters of Donald Trump on social media.
It all raises a darkly fascinating question: so do Steven Bannon’s Asian allies care about the fact that one of his main hobbies is whipping up anti-Asian sentiment in America? It’s the kind of question that’s been repeatedly raised in recent years given the surprising number of Asian groups that appear to be open to working with Bannon.
And not just Chinese dissident groups. For example, what might the predominantly ethnic Korean and Japanese congregation of the Unification Church and its offshoots think about Bannon’s anti-Asian hobbies? The Unification Church has a long-standing close alliance with the Republican Party. What does the Unification Church leadership have to say about the Bannon-led growing anti-Asian movement within the party. It would have been a great question to ask the church’s leadership back in October during the second annual Rod of Iron Freedom Festival — a pro-gun festival thrown by Justin Moon’s Kahr Arms gun — after they invited Bannon to make a virtual appearance at the event:
” Attendees were treated to a smorgasbord of fringe conspiracies trotted out by politicians, right-wing icons, military veterans, and religious leaders. Stephen Bannon, the former White House senior counselor and Breitbart founder, even made a special virtual appearance, in which he warned of a Democratic conspiracy to rob President Donald Trump of the election through voter fraud, “particularly in certain areas of Pennsylvania.” He encouraged the crowd to watch polling places to protect against such attack, adding, “We need tough people.””
Steve Bannon and the Unification Church are clearly seeing eye to eye on a broad range of political topics. He wouldn’t have been invited if he wasn’t. But this wasn’t simply a Kahr Arms pro-gun rights event. Kahr Arms is basically an extension of Justin Moon’s fun-focused Unification Church offshoot, with many people from Korea and Japan coming to attend the event. This was effectively a joint guns/Unification event:
So, again, we have to ask: do the members of these predominantly Asian far right movements allied with white nationalists like Steve Bannon actually care that Bannon is actively focused on whipping up generic anti-Asian antipathies intended to make Asian unwelcome in the broader American society?
Here’s a pair of articles about the investigations surrounding Guo Wengui that raise a number of interesting questions about the nature of Guo’s organization and following. In particular, questions about whether or not he’s attempting to cultivate a cult-like following more along the lines of Falun Gong. Because as we’re going to see, part of what makes the ongoing US investigation in Guo in relation to the fraudulent GTV Stock issuance so scandalous is the fact that Guo and his co-conspirators were fleecing Guo’s adoring audience. And the scams weren’t limited to stock. Guo was issuing cryptocurrencies — G‑Coins or G‑Dollars — that he was selling to audiences as an investment that would yield “significant returns”. The idea was these coins would eventually be usable to spend on a new online platform that they would also be creating with the money issued by the stock issuance. So the scam wasn’t just a stock issuance scam. There was a parallel cryptocurrency scam.
And based on the nature of the pitch they were making to potential investors, it sounds like the cryptocurrency part of this scam was targeting a particularly committed/gullible set of investors. You have to truly believe Guo’s going to create this vibrant platform that has so much demand the value of the G‑Coins and G‑Dollars is going to be greatly outstripped by the demand. It’s like investing in cult money, based on the assumption that the cult’s membership is poised to grow. A cult with it’s own cryptocurrency, where the earliest investors get the cult coins at the best price. It sounds like that was kind of what Guo was trying to create here which, again, raises the question of whether or not we are seeing Guo attempt to achieve real cult-like status. He certainly seems to have cult leader attributes like a larger-than-life personality and eagerness to make himself the focus of his media empire.
Another feature of these G‑Coins/G‑Dollars pitched to investors is as a safe haven against the collapse of the Chinese currency. Recall how Guo took $100 million of the raised money and gave it to Kyle Bass’s Hayman Capital to make major speculative bets on the destabilization of the Hong Kong dollar (while simultaneously lobbying the Trump administration to make moves to trigger that destabilization). So Guo was raising money to make those Hong Kong dollar mega-bets, in part by issuing a cryptocurrency pitched to investors as a safe haven against the destabilization of the Yuan. It shows of Guo is keenly interested in simultaneously destabilizing Chinese currency markets and making a fortune doing it. It also hints that part of the plan may have been specifically targeted at resident in China, who theoretically might be able to surreptitiously purchase these G‑coins online inside China. Recall how unregulated flight capital has been one of the Chinese government’s key fears regarding Bitcoin. If Guo could manage to sell these coins to a domestic Chinese audience it could be an exceptionally lucrative market, especially during a period of market turmoil for the value Yuan.
And then there’s Guo’s apparent attempt to intimidate other members of the Chinese dissident community, sending mobs of unhinged people to stalk the homes of his perceived enemies. Are any of those gang-stalked individuals Falun Gong-affiliated people? If so, it wasn’t mentioned in the reports. How about the mobs of people Guo sent to do the gang-stalking. Are any of them Falun Gong? Again, we haven’t heard reports one way or another, but it’s sure hard to ignore the cult-like behavior of these mobs.
Finally, as we’re going to see in the second excerpt below, it sounds like a number of people invested large portions of their savings, fueled through a faith in Guo himself. “His word is very attractive,” As one of the scammed investors put it. “He said he’s the only one who can save the world.” It just screams “cult!”. So given that this GTV stock scam involved the issuance of “G‑Coin”/“G‑Dollar” coins targeted at Chinese dissidents promising to expand his propaganda empire, and this pitch managed to raise $487 million in the process, just how much of a cult of personality has Guo managed to cultivate?
“GTV and Saraca also claimed the digital coins would likely offer “significant returns” based on the development of an online platform on which investors could use G‑Coins or G‑Dollars, the SEC said.”
Investors who purchased the G‑Coins and G‑Dollars were going to likely see “significant returns”. That’s an example of the claims made in this offering that that the SEC investigated. It wasn’t just a stock offering. It was a ‘digital asset’ offering. For coins that could be spent on a platform that was going to be developed with the stock offering proceeds. It’s quite a scam. And the audience for this scam is clearly the Chinese dissident community, offering them an opportunity to invest in Guo’s anti-CCP enterprise with the promise of major profits should he succeed:
And now here’s an article from September of 2020 giving us a better idea of the nature of the people who were taken in by this scam. People who ended up buying tens of thousands of dollars in stock and coins. And in many cases it sounds like these people have maintained their faith in Guo and consider their money well spent and a contribution towards the goal of the collapsing the Chinese government. Don’t forget that the GTV Media company is actually up and running, despite the $539 million fine. So if Guo has managed to find an audience that keeps the faith in the face of this fraud investigation, we have to ask what Guo could possibly do to break that faith. Which are the kinds of questions we tend to ask about cults:
“In April, he began soliciting funds for a new company called GTV Media, a social media platform that he said in online videos would be free from Chinese or American control and a safe place to invest should the Chinese currency collapse. Guo told The Post he is “advisor to and sponsor of” GTV, which his lawyer said is a new version of Guo Media.”
A safe place to invest should the Chinese currency collapse. That’s just one example of the kind of sales pitches Guo were relying on in this scheme. But it sounds like Guo’s pitch went far beyond just financial enticements. Guo was fundamentally selling himself as the core product. That’s the picture that emerges when we hear from the people who made these ‘investments’. People who listen to Guo daily and treat him like a god sent figure from heaven who will liberate China. Just like a cult leader:
And don’t forget Steve Bannon’s role in this enterprise. Bannon was going to be the chairman of this new GTV Media venture. Given the cult of personality dynamics around this, we have to wonder to what extent has Bannon himself been elevated to prophetic status in the minds of Guo’s audience:
Are Guo and Bannon building a kind of alternative Falun Gong network of fervent followers? It does kind of look like that. It’s hard to ignore the parallels. Because as the following Guardian article from April of this year describes, Falun Gong’s Epoch Times media empire isn’t profit driven. It’s driven by an agenda of changing public opinion towards overthrowing the Chinese government, financed through donations from Falun Gong’s followers. And while there is no evidence of direct cooperation between Guo’s operations and the Epoch Times, they’re more or less running the same messages of far right conspiracy theories.
So both Guo and Falun Gong have donation-driven media empires focused on basically the same goal and pushing basically the same message and preying on audiences with cult-like adoration for their leaders. And while Guo has gone to war with much of the rest of the Chinese diaspora, we don’t have reports of him taking aim of Falun Gong. So we have to ask: Are Guo and Bannon trying to dip into that Falun Gong cult marketplace?
“The principal goal of Epoch Times – now publishing in 36 countries under the supervision of a network of non-profits – is not to generate profit, he says, but to mount a long and broad “influence operation”. And the goal of that influence operation, in turn, is “to foment anti-CCP sentiment”.”
It’s not about making money. It’s about running an influence operation. An operation financed primarily by donations from Falun Gong followers. Compare that to the GTV Media scam, which has more or less the exact same influence operation goals and managed to raise nearly $500 million from Guo’s followers. Granted, in the case of GTV they were selling stock in what would ostensibly be a for-profit media operation. But the underlying dynamic is the same between these two organizations: they are both running more or less the same influence operation, heavily financed from the followers of the group’s charismatic leaders:
So what are we looking at here? Rival cults? Sibling cults? Are Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon trying to replicate the cult-like dynamics of the Falun Gong movement? Is this a quiet active partnership, where Falun Gong members are effectively lent out to Guo’s operation? At this point we don’t know but it seems like something that will emerge eventually...after Guo and Bannon have gang-stalked the rest of the Chinese dissident community into silence and it’s just GTV and Epoch Times left over.
Here’s an update on the fascinating cryptocurrency scam that end up landing Guo Wengui’s business empire with a $539 million SEC fine. First, recall how that fine was issue in relation to the issuance of stock in a new GTV Media company that was part of a larger ambition to create a cryptocurrency-powered platform where “G‑coins” or “G‑dollars” would be used to buy goods and services from Guo’s affiliated businesses. Part of the pitch to investors was the projected extreme appreciation of the value of these G‑coins.
So here’s the update: it appears Guo did indeed pull of this scam, despite the $539 million fine. At least parts of this scam. The loophole appears to be that it’s no longer center around G‑coins and G‑dollars. Now it’s the Himalaya Coin along with a Himalaya Dollar stable-coin. So the Himalaya Coin can fluctuate wildly in value while the stable-coin acts more like a currency safe-haven.
Unlike most cryptocurrencies, which can be purchased through third-party coin exchanges, the two cryptocurrencies are exclusively sold and used on a new platform, the Himalaya Exchange. Recall the story about the “Himalayan Embassy” located in New York City in the mansion of Argentine billionaire Eduardo Eurnekian, where Guo’s Rule of Law Foundation also resided. “Himalayan” appears to be a Guo branding theme.
Importantly, Guo has an agreement with the Himalaya Exchange allowing his business clients to buy products from firms linked to Guo using the Himalaya Dollar. So this Himalaya Exchange sounds like basically the GTV Media scheme for which Guo was already busted but now operating under a new entity.And, thus far, no word of this new enterprise being under investigation. So it appears they’ve managed to at least get this cryptocurrency pyramid scheme set up despite all the fines and investigations:
“Guo and Bannon have waged a public campaign against the Chinese government for years, and comments last week from Bannon indicate this is the latest front in that battle. Himalaya Coin’s debut this month also stands out because, in September, China widened its crackdown on the use of cryptocurrencies.”
Guo Wengui certainly has a knack for opportunism: soon after China cracks down on cryptocurrencies, Guo jumps on board the Himalaya Coin. Steve Bannon touted the coin as “monumental” in the context of the fight against the Chinese government:
But here’s the aspect of the Himalaya Coin that makes this stand out from the myriad of other cryptocurrencies out there: the Himalaya Coin appears to only trade on the Himalaya Exchange and isn’t listed on any other coin exchanges. It’s also not available to people in the US, Canada, or Japan yet. It’s primarily a Chinese market, which makes sense given that it’s being branded to Guo’s audience as a financial weapon against the Chinese government. The price of this coin jumped 270-fold jump in just the first couple of weeks of November. You have to wonder what kind of extra control over the price of the Himalaya Coin this exclusive control gives to the Guo and his partners.
In addition, there’s a separate Himalaya Dollar “stable coin” also tradable on this exchange and tied to the dollar. Guo, in turn, has an agreement with the exchange allows his business clients to buy products from firms linked to Guo using the Himalaya Dollar stablecoin. It’s kind of an innovative scam: you lure people in with the temptation of wild gains in the value of the Himalaya Coin, but temper their worries about the wild price fluctuations by offering a parallel stable coin. So it’s a platform set up for both highly speculative cryptocurrency plays while also catering to people looking to protect the value of their wealth from the threat of currency depreciation. It’s like pair of intertwined pyramid schemes set up to interact with Guo’s business empire.
Notably, that model of having a cryptocoin paired with a crypto-stable coin is the same concept that Guo and Bannon already had in mind with the G‑Coin/G‑Dollar cryptocurrencies that they were peddling to Guo’s followers as both a highly profitable speculative investment and also a hedge against the collapse of the Chinese currency. Recall, Guo proceeded to take a large portion of the proceeds raised from the sale of stock in GTV that was going to run this scheme, and proceeded to give $100 million to Kyle Bass’s Hayman Capital to make major bets on the destabilization of the Hong Kong dollar (while simultaneously lobbying the Trump administration to take steps to trigger that destabilization). That fiasco is what led to the $539 million in SEC fines to resolve the case. So it’s rather fascinating that in the wake of the collapse of that criminal scheme we find a new ‘Himalaya’ platform that more or less operates under the exact same model but isn’t technically part of Guo’s business empire:
Who knows how profitable this will end up being for Guo. To a large extent that will depend on how many people he can seduce into joining the cult of Guo. But there’s the other obvious major risk: the risk of future fines and legal action. So keep in mind that the value of this new Himalaya Coin was already around $27 billion at the time that article was published almost two months ago. That’s compared to the $539 million in fines over setting up more or less the same scheme. So while we don’t really know how much Guo will ultimately make from this, we can reasonable conclude that it will be more than enough to make those $539 million in fines just the cost of doing business.
Here’s a somewhat random and bizarre story about Steve Bannon that could end up being a more relevant as the story of Bannon’s adventures with Guo Wengui plays out. The story is about a loan application the Daily Beast just came across filed by Bannon back in early December 2021. It’s a $1.5 million stone estate in the plush suburb of Wilton, CT. It’s not known how large the loan was that he applied for or whether or not it eventually went through. What we do know is that the bank had questions about the ownership of the assets that the loan was predicated on. Assets that Bannon doesn’t appear to have any take in. That’s the start of the mystery here: Steve Bannon just filed for a loan against a property he has no apparent ties with.
But digging a little further, we found all sorts of ties between Bannon and the property. Specifically, ties between this property and Guo Wengui’s Rule of Law Society. It turns out the Rule of Law Society briefly owned this same property. And the time of the ownership is highly notable. It was early August of 2020 when the Rule of Law Society purchased the property from controversial right-wing psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover. Recall how Steve Bannon was arrested on August 20, 2020, by US officials while he was being hosted on Guo Wengui’s yacht for his involvement in the “We Build the Wall” fundraising scheme. So the purchase of this Wilton property happened shortly before Bannon faced legal troubles, albeit troubles for something that wasn’t directly related to Guo’s activities. We Build the Wall was one of Bannon’s many other scams. The guy stays busy.
As we’ll see, the Rule of Law Society sent an email to its board informing them that an all cash offer of $1,500,000 for the property was made and they would be going through with it. A month later, the property was indeed purchased by these new mystery owners for $1,437,500, which we are told was about $40k less than what the Rule of Law Society paid a few months earlier.
So the Rule of Law Society ends up selling this property to mystery owners at a relatively small loss three months after the purchase (and roughly two months after Bannon’s arrest). Flash forward to December 2021, and we find Bannon filing for a loan application via a corporation based on out this same property.
So who are the new mystery owners? We aren’t told, but they insist they have nothing to do with Bannon or any loan application, but declined to comment further.
Also of note if the fact that we’ve been told that Bannon himself already left his position at the Rule of Law Society. This was based on a report from August of 2021, which included comments from people familiar with the situation who said Bannon left the group at the end of the previous summer...in other words, August of 2020, right around the time of his arrest. Related to this is the bizarre denials by J. Kyle Bass about his relationship to this network. Recall how, when Bass was the chair of the Rule of Law Foundation in 2020, he told reported that Guo Wengui has no association with the group and it was completely separate from the Rule of Law Fund set up by Bannon and Guo. And then in August of 2021, Bass was emphasizing to reporters how he had no ties to the Rule of Law Foundation and had stepped down over a year ago.
Finally, in terms of the identities of the current mystery owners of this Wilton estate, also recall how we’ve already learned about how the Rule of Law Foundation and Rule of Law Society were both located at “The Himalayan Embassy”, the Manhattan mansion of Argentinian billionaire Eduardo Eurnekian. More recently, we’ve found that Guo’s business empire was able to shirk off the $539 million in SEC fines over the fleecing of investors in a scheme involving the creation of a GTV platform operating as a G‑coin/G‑dollar cryptocurrency exchange. Following that fine, Guo’s empire has teamed up with a mysterious new “Himalayan Exchange” platform that offers proprietary Himalaya Coins and Himalaya Dollar stablecoins in an arrangement that sounds like a copy of what Guo had planned before the SEC fine. So there’s already an ongoing story about mystery investors working with Guo’s businesses.
Are we looking at another Eurnekian property here? We don’t know. That’s all part of the ongoing mystery. But at least we’re getting more clarity on the (largely solved) mystery of whether or not Steve Bannon had actually cut ties with this network:
“The materials, addressed directly to Bannon at the $1.5 million stone estate in the plush suburban town of Wilton, do not reveal the amount of money sought, nor what Bannon sought it for. They do, however, date the loan application to Dec. 2, 2021, roughly three weeks after a grand jury indicted Bannon for refusing to testify before the House committee probing the Jan. 6 riot and around two weeks following his initial appearances in federal court.”
A December 2, 2021 loan application for Steve Bannon, roughly three weeks after a grand jury indicted Bannon for his refusal to testify before congress. That’s not the super suspicious part of this story. What’s super suspicious is that Bannon doesn’t actually own this property. In addition, he attempted to borrow the money via a Delaware limited liability company named for the home’s address. So it sounds like Bannon was trying to borrow against the property of this mystery business located at the plush $1.5 million stone estate in Wilton, CT. It’s unclear if the loan ever went through, in part because Bannon doesn’t actually own the home or any stake in it:
Who’s the owner? We don’t know. That’s part of the mystery. We just know that the current mystery owners purchased home from Guo Wengui’s The Rule of Law Foundation. It was a quick turnaround for the foundation, which purchased the property from a right-wing psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover in early August 2020, then announced two months later that it received an all-cash offer of $1,500,000, which went through in November 2020. Although the new owners didn’t pay the full $1,500,000, and ended up paying $1,437,500, almost $40,000 less than the ~$1,477,000 the Foundation paid in August. So in the end, the Rule of Law Foundation conducted some sort of mystery transaction that result in a $40k loss after holding the property for three months. We don’t know the identities of these new owners. Flash forward to lash month, when Steve Bannon attempted to get a loan last month via a company that shared an address with that home. And yet, when asked if they had any involvement with Bannon or any loan application, the new purchasers denied any involvement but declined to comment further. Hmmmm....
Adding to the mystery are the reports from back in August 2021 about Bannon having left the Rule of Law Society. Recall how that report included comments from people familiar with the situation who asserted Bannon had left the Rule of Law Society at the end of the summer of 2020. Bannon was arrested by US officials on Guo’s yacht in August of 2020, so his departure from the Rule of Law Society was presumably around that time:
And recall how early August 2020 was the time of the Rule of Law Society’s purchase of this property. So in early August 2020, the Rule of Law Society buys this property. Bannon is arrested on Guo’s yacht a few weeks later, around the time he allegedly leaves the Rule of Law Society. Then, a couple months later, the Rule of Law Society decides to sell the property for slightly less than it paid for it in an all-cash offer from the current mystery owners. Flash forward to December 2021, and Bannon is applying for loan against a corporation located at that property.
The assertions that Bannon and the Guo’s “Rule of Law” groups always seemed like a questionable, highly convenient narrative. A narrative that’s a lot more questionable now that we’ve learned about this loan. It raises to the question of why Bannon was willing to apply for this loan in the first place. It kind of spoiled the ruse. Granted, the ruse was already kind of spoiled, but still...
With Xi Jinping just elected by the Chinese Communist Party for a third term in office, here’s a pair of articles that underscore how profoundly warped the media coverage is in the mainstream Western press when it comes to issues surrounding China. Because it was just a few weeks ago when some very different predictions of Xi’s future were reverberating across the media. Yes, rumblings about a coup against Xi were percolating across the media in the last week of September. Rumblings that appear to have their origins with the Twitter account of Jennifer Zeng, a news media producer for Falun Gong outlets like the Epoch Times. Zeng’s tweet had a 55 second video of military vehicles moving as the sole proof. And while it did eventually become clear that there was nothing behind the rumor, the tweet nonetheless got a lot of people chattering, including ardent China hawk Gordon Chang who suggested that, even if untrue, there was still some truth to the rumors about turbulence inside the Chinese senior leadership.
So when the media did eventually identify this rumor as unfounded, was there any meaningful followup on the role Zeng and the Epoch Times and other Falun Gong outfits play in fomenting disinformation across the West? Not really. Instead, as we’ll see in the second article excerpt below by UK historian Niall Ferguson, Zeng was identified as the source of the rumor and that was largely the extent of what was revealed about her and her relationship to the broader Falun Gong disinformation network. Instead, Ferguson wrote a column that was almost a response to the let down from learning that the ‘good news’ about a coup wasn’t true. Ferguson’s column laments the growing number of challenges facing civilization that don’t seem to have any solution in sight, like climate change and growing youth despair. And then Ferguson ends the column with a prediction that the governments of Russia, China, and Iran are all going to collapse within his lifetime. Maybe as soon as a couple of years. It was an oddly appropriate column for capturing the relationship between the Western press and the kind of disinformation generated by the Falun Gong network. Even when the disinformation is outed and identified, the broader network is left largely untouched. Because, at the end up the day, the disinformation pumped out by this network, like claims of mass genocide against the Uyghurs, is the kind of disinformation Western governments endorse. In other words, the big problem with Zeng’s disinformation wasn’t that it’s wrong. The problem is that it was easily verifiably wrong:
“With so many horror stories coming out of China, it should no longer come as a surprise that numerous mainstream Western journalists have taken seriously a new China story, as disturbing as it is fictional, about a coup d’état and the arrest of Chinese President Xi Jinping”
Fraudulent coup news. It’s hard to find a more quintessential example of ‘fake news’ than that. So it’s only appropriate that this fake news’s origins appear to be the twitter account of Jennifer Zeng, a news media ‘producer’ for Falun Gong outlets like the Epoch Times:
Zeng’s unsourced rumor even got Zeng was saying what A LOT of people in the West have been wishing to hear for years. Including, historian Niall Ferguson, who wrote a rather interesting Bloomberg column in response to Zeng’s fake news.
As we can see, Ferguson identifies Zeng as the source of the fake news about a Chinese coup. But he doesn’t go into Zeng’s ties to the Epoch Times or Falun Gong at all. Instead, Ferguson just kind of brushes past the whole episode to go on to lament the series of very real challenges facing civilization. Trends like climate change, declining life expectancies, and growing despair. And nothing really seems to be getting done to address all these seemingly intractable challenges. He then makes some observations about the difficulties in predicting how history will play out. Ferguson ends the column with a prediction: the governments of China, Russia, and Iran are all going to fall within his lifetime (he’s 58). Maybe sooner. Perhaps as soon as the next couple of years, although he acknowledges that’s a very low probability event. Still, Ferguson appears to be convinced that he’ll live to see the collapse of all three of those governments.
Ferguson doesn’t speculate about how long he’s expecting to live, which is obviously kind of an important factor for a prediction of that nature. But it seems reason to suspect we’ll have Niall Ferguson to kick around for at least a couple more decades. And sure, a lot can happen in a couple of decades. Major world-changing events should be expected. But the prediction of the collapse of all three of those governments in the coming decades sure seems exceptionally aspirational as far as predictions go. It’s like every government deemed to be a hostile threat to the West is projected to collapse, with the exception of North Korea. That’s what Ferguson foresees. Along with all the other dire predictions...regime change in Russian, China, and Iran won’t suddenly fix climate change or the capitalist-induced despairs of the West, after all.
So with an Epoch Times producer having successfully managed to fool a series of Western media outlets with fake Chinese coup rumors, it’s hard to find a better example of the kind of relationship the mainstream western media has with the Falun Gong disinformation network than Ferguson’s piece. A piece that identifies Zeng as the source of the disinformation, but doesn’t actually identify who she is in this larger disinformation network focused on anti-China content, and then goes on to more or less endorse those regime change predictions with baseless predictions of his own:
“As for the newer forms of social media, it seems that our demand for “doom scrolling” is so enormous that it cannot be satisfied by the supply of real disasters. Much fake news consists of imaginary calamities.”
Niall Ferguson didn’t fall for Zeng’s fake story. But it clearly caught his attention. And yet, it doesn’t appear that Ferguson was really bothered at all by the fact that this fake story got so much play across the Western media. As he describes it, the “real issue I have has to do with the trends, not the news” and then he proceeds to lament a series of very real issue: rising populations in the face of climate change and eco-collapse. Declining life expectancies and a growing sense of despair. The fact that Zeng is part of the powerful and influential Falun Gong disinformation machine that has been operating as one of the leading purveyors of pro-Trump and anti-China disinformation in recent years is just glossed over like it’s a minor triviality. Which makes this piece a great example of how that giant disinformation machine survives and thrives. Disinformation simply is not taken seriously in the contemporary US media. Because of course not. Much of the modern day media is effectively a platform for dueling disinformation narratives anyway, especially when it comes to narratives about foreign policy:
And after listing off a series of genuinely awful trends that bode poorly for the future, Ferguson goes on to make a point about the difference between trends and events. And then he makes three predictions: the governments of Russia, China, and Iran are all going to collapse. Maybe as seen as the next couple of years. But if not sooner, definitely within his lifetime. It’s a remarkable way to end a column that starts off glossing over Zeng’s disinformation about a collapsing Chinese government:
There’s been a saying for a while that “the first person to live to 150 years has already been born”. Could Niall be that person? If so, we have close to a century left for his predictions to play out. But if not, it sure sounds like Niall Ferguson is predicting the collapse of all three of those governments in the next couple of decades and possibly much sooner. Who knows what’s going to happen. But one thing that this story makes clear is that the stuff Falun Gong is peddling has as very big market in the West. We want to believe. And we’re not going to let episodes like this coup rumor fiasco get in the way of those needs.