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The Chinese spiritual movement Falungong has quickly created a great platform among the far-right American media. This is where the media and hard-core sites in the campaign for President Donald Trump’s reelection are packed.
The Falungong media group is also clearly allied with the QAnon conspiracy theory. The theory describes a conspiracy of Liberal and Democratic pedophiles who feed off children with roles for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as spies against Trump.
What a witch’s concoction is this unlikely combination of East and West with Donald Trump as the savior of the world. It’s all content that is quoted in part on Trump’s favorite channel, Fox News, and on the conservative news site Breitbart.
If the president stays Re-election thanks to Falungong, among others, further complicates relations with China. The Chinese Communist Party and Falungong are arch enemies of each other.
But let me leave the electoral movement in the United States for a moment and tell you about a moment of meditation in a square in western Beijing in 1997. There I met the grassroots of Falungong, the movement that spread throughout China.
Ten retired ladies quietly and with dignity, amid the morning rush, performed the exercises launched by the founder of the movement, Li Hongzhi. They stated that their health had improved a lot thanks to the exercises. These honorable citizens made up the majority of the tens of millions of followers. They experienced a purity that they felt the Communist Party had lost.
Falungong was the largest of several home revival movements in China in the 1990s. It blends Buddhism, Taoism, and meditation in the Chinese tradition. Li Hongzhi also preaches about a doomsday in which his followers survive while all communists perish.
The Communist Party saw a rival group emerged and called Falungong an “evil sect”. Several practitioners were arrested and tortured.
Many fled, including to the United States. Li Hongzhi himself had moved there as early as 1996. He lives in isolation on a large base in rural Deerpark in upstate New York. Many members also live there. The deserters bear witness to the hard reins. From there, Li Hongzhi also remotely controls a growing media empire.
The flagship is the Epoch Times newspaper with an editorial office in Manhattan. Over 20 years, it has gradually dimmed the connection to Falungong and, on the surface, it has become increasingly similar to traditional newspapers.
Over the past two years, Epoch Media Group has stepped up its support for Trump. Periodically, the group has placed more videos and posts on social media than any other organization outside of Trump’s own election campaign, according to NBC television and Tubular, a media analysis institute.
The group’s massive campaign prompted Facebook to stop tens of thousands of ads after uncertainties about the source of the money. Facebook also stopped the fake account group’s posts. Then Epoch moved everything to YouTube. From being a rare bird among ultra-conservative media, Epoch is today, thanks to unconventional methods, an online force field with billions of views every month.
The online campaign generates big new revenue from subscriptions, according to Stephen Gregory, the editor-in-chief of The Epoch Times, otherwise reserved. The task is supported by defecting employees interviewed by the New York Times. They also say that wealthy Falungong practitioners in the United States are behind the large donations.
An example is the $ 909,500 that economist Huayi Zhang donated to the Epoch television channel. He has worked with venture capitalist Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s biggest contributors.
Both Mercer and Zhang have also donated to right-wing populist Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief of strategy. Bannon has extensive media coverage of Epoch, who funded his recent feature film “Claws of the Red Dragon.” It marks a fictitious Chinese telecommunications company working for cyber domination, more or less whitewashed at Huawei.
Donald Trump expresses sometimes admiration for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s appearance as a staunch dictator. But it is the US president’s stubborn trade war against China and his many outbreaks against Beijing over the virus pandemic that has secured the support of the Chinese exile group. Li Hongzhi finally wants to overthrow the Communist Party of China.
In recent years, the movement has also increased its activity in several other countries. The Epoch Times is published worldwide in 25 editions in 21 languages, of which Swedish is one.
The President of the United States and his advisers have fondly shared Epoch Times articles on social media. But will Trump have a cuckoo king in the nest? And how does the apocalyptic sect act if it loses the election?
