falun gong NTD TV
see epoch times
see ntd new tang 2
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COP28 Climate Summit Aiming to Redefine Global Economy as 190 Nations Target Fossil ...
NTD News
... Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot and author of “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think.” Marc has been […]
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ntd chris beers
phase out ff unrealistuc ubsci; 80 percent from FF virtue signal, pvt jets uk kerry; shit coal gas oil solar wind magically take over; sovietization central panning net zero netherlands govt shut farm cow fart ? deindustrialize devlopment prosperity best for citrizens lots of pressure sanctions want $ to give to 3rd w; will give to govt best ay lacking ppl in poverty; soalr panel on hut made of dung; virtue signal; UN planning control over energy sys; rationing of food...corps take over, world econ forum; look at 1st 1990's just more emissions
an 8 23 no lnx
BUSTED: ‘Right-wing misinformation’ newspaper gave a GOP presidential candidate up to $5 million in salary
Mark Alesia,Alexandria Jacobsonand Raw StoryAugust 23, 2023
Long-shot Republican presidential candidate Larry Elder made between $1 million and $5 million from The Epoch Times, according to a new financial disclosure submitted three months past a federal deadline.
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The Epoch Times — accused by the New York Times of being “a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation” — spent heavily on Facebook ads for Donald Trump in 2020 and was later banned from the platform for violating political transparency rules. The Epoch Times is associated with the Chinese religious movement Falun Gong.
Elder’s filing, covering the past year and first reported by Raw Story on Monday, characterized his earnings from The Epoch Times as “salary.”
As Politico reporter Kimberly Leonard observed, Elder failed to report the exact amount of the money as required by federal regulators.
“Despite facing numerous challenges and setbacks, we have never lost hope in our mission to report the truth. Our commitment to journalistic integrity has not wavered, even in the face of adversity,” The Epoch Times states on its “about us” page.
Its stated vision: “To be recognized as the ‘paper of record,’ the world’s most trusted and admired media company, and the organization that will restore, by its example, the best practices and highest principles of journalism.”
Neither Elder nor The Epoch Times responded immediately to requests for comment.
ALSO READ: Trump earned $250,000 from gay Republican event: disclosure
Before he announced his run for president in April, Elder had a talk show on EpochTV that promoted far-right political views.
Raw Story reported in July that Elder, a tough-on-crime conservative, missed a May 20 deadline to file the financial disclosure. Elder then asked federal regulators for an extension, saying he didn’t know about the requirement.
The FEC granted an extension to Aug. 18.
Elder revealed multiple additional sources of income on the federal financial disclosure, including salaries each in the $100,001 to $1 million range from Relief Factor, a pain relief supplement,and Old Glory Bank, where he serves as a director alongside 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson, who later became Trump’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Elder also reported salaries from a machining company, CNC Broach Tools, educational consultancy Yrefy and media companies Creators Syndicate, Breaking Battlegrounds andSalem Radio Network.
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His consulting for Elder for America and Baric and Associates earned him up to $1.5 million collectively, according to the disclosure.
ALSO READ:Trump maintains trademarks with Russia, China and numerous other U.S. enemies and frenemies
Elder, who has been a vocal opponent of abortion rights, earned up to $370,000 additional income from honorariums, including from anti-abortion centers like the Crisis Pregnancy Clinic of Southern California and Avenues Pregnancy Clinics.
Elder is not slated to appear in the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate debate on Wednesday in Milwaukee, with the Republican National Committee ruling he didn’t meet pre-set fundraising and polling thresholds.
Elder has disputed the ruling, and on Tuesday, asked his supporters to contribute to a lawsuit against the RNC, accusing it of unfairly sidelining him.
“The RNC told us they would be fair in their qualification for the August debate happening tomorrow night,” an email solicitation said. “They lied. And to prove their lies, we’re going to take them on in court.”
Elder contends he met the RNC’s criteria for participation.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
Burning Man: Paradise for Hipster Guests -- And a Nightmare for Some Workers ›
Atlantic Salmon Is Basically Extinct: You’re Eating a Genetically Eroded Version ›
Harvard astrophysics professor claims he found ET tech inside a meteor: report ›
Trump crams multiple debunked conspiracy theories into two Truth Social fits ›
Radioactive debris from first hydrogen bomb tests mark start of Anthropocene epoch: report ›
Team Trump has a new conspiracy theorist with close ties to far-right newspaper 'the Epoch Times' ›
falun gong
https://www.ntd.com/climate-agenda-trojan-horse-for-socialism-marc-morano_695815.html
ntd?
medieval warming babble
// lockdown punishment for not obeying wearing mask, paul ehrlich pop scare
sov limit treaty; nothing cop26 wd help; ~ greta monbiot overthrow capitalism degrowth movement, GND decimate carbon energy, higher electric rates, make ppl pooer, come up w/ liberal programs, subsidies, gov't give out regular cheecks, so those ppl will vote for liberal gov't, increased reg, regulate all you do, only wealthy can fly and go to beach; fr bans short flights;, control all aspects of life
Marc Morano, a former congressional staffer and publisher of Climate Depot, told NTD that the new climate change policies are are an effort to sell socialism under the guise of saving the planet.
more dep on china slave labor minerals; env impact of rare eaerth?; force enrgy in dirty poor country; cold kills more than heat...china makes solor that us gov't reg to buy, coal pant/wk, energy dominant tno more wars; begging opec and russia, virtue signaling; UK use power only when avail, want more chaos --> more control; fauci, gates/soros $; consp theory > consp reality
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NTD stands for New Tang Dynasty. The name is inspired by the legacy of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), which is considered the golden age of Chinese civilization.
Where is NTD headquartered?
NTD is an international television network that is headquartered in New York City.
What is NTD’s history?
NTD was founded in 2001 by Chinese-born Americans who fled communist repression in their homeland. They saw how the media there was used as a weapon against the people, and conversely how crucial independent media was to a free society. They created NTD as an antidote to that censorship, as well as to be an independent voice in a media landscape controlled by corporate interests.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/white-house-plants-pro-trump-conspiracy-theorists-among-reporters-briefing-room/
IN AN APPARENT effort to make his daily news conferences even more like campaign events than they already are, the White House press office has been packing the briefing room with supporters of President Donald Trump from far-right media outlets who can be relied on to toss him softball questions and initiate attacks on his political rivals.
Clearly in on the plot, Trump solicited a question each day this week from one of the guests invited by his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to stand at the back of the room — where representatives of One America News, The Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit compromised the health of reporters by violating social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.
On Monday, Trump called on Chanel Rion, a far-right Republican operative and conspiracy theorist now working as a correspondent for One America News,a San Diego cable channel dedicated to spreading lies about Joe Biden and elderly protesters battered by the police.
Rion gave Trump the opportunity to unleash a familiar riff from his pre-pandemic rallies by suggesting to him that Biden might have been considering President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, as his running mate because, “she can best cover up a lot of the Obamagate surveillance crimes that have taken place during your campaign.” Trump responded by accusing Obama and Biden of “probably treason.”
The next day, Rion triggered another familiar Trump diatribe by asking for his take on the resignation of Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead Seattle’s police force, after the city council voted to cut her department’s budget. “What does this say about our country?” Rion asked Trump. “And what does this say about the Defund Police movement?” The president replied by repeating the lie that Seattle’s Democratic mayor had let “a radical left group, Antifa and others, take over a big portion of the city.”
On Wednesday, Rion drew Trump’s attention to what looked like a fairly lame conservative prank — the fact that the obscure website antifa.com was suddenly redirecting traffic to Biden’s campaign site. Suggesting that this stunt might somehow indicate support for Biden from the loose network of antifascist groups Trump has falsely portrayed as a shadow army, Rion asked if the president thought Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, should “publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?”
[twt]
They should,” Trump replied. “I think they’re afraid to. In my book, it’s virtually a part of their campaign: Antifa.” There was nothing remotely surprising in Trump making the absurd argument that Biden, a centrist Democrat, is secretly part of an antifascist subculture, but Rion’s play-acting as a White House correspondent is not intended to elicit any new information from the president. The point of these exchanges is to shield Trump from what tough questions about his failure to lead a coordinated federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to give him an opportunity to repeat lines he has already rehearsed, delivered as if they were answers to questions of vital importance.
Rion, who has been attending briefings as a guest of the White House press secretary since April, previously traveled to Ukraine with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote false accusations about Biden spread by the pro-Russian lawmaker Andriy Derkach. An American intelligence assessment released last week concluded that Derkach was involved in a Russian plot to undermine Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party by “spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls” from 2016 between the former vice president and Ukraine’s president.
On Thursday, shortly after Trump praised the crackpot legal scholar who invented a racist conspiracy theory that Harris was not eligible to be vice president, even though she was born to immigrant parents in Oakland, he turned again to Rion. This time, however, she asked if he would, instead, take a question from Emel Akan of The Epoch Times, another of his press secretary’s guests from an equally rabid pro-Trump media outlet.
When Trump agreed, Akan asked him how the U.S. would respond to “the recent attack on press freedom in Hong Kong,” specifically the arrest of the publisher of the popular Apple Daily tabloid news site, Jimmy Lai, who has been an outspoken critic of the pro-Beijing leadership in the semiautonomous Chinese city. Lai could be charged with “collusion” with the United States for meeting Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington last summer to discuss Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement.
Although Trump began by saying, “Well, I think it’s a terrible thing,” he appeared to have little familiarity or interest in the subject of press freedom, or democracy in Hong Kong, pivoting quickly into his stock complaints about China’s trade policies. He even seemed to gloat a bit when he said that, as a result of the U.S. withdrawing the “tremendous financial incentives” for businesses based in Hong Kong, American companies might profit from the crackdown on the territory.
“We’ve now withdrawn all of those incentives. It’s going to be very hard for Hong Kong to compete,” Trump said. “And I will tell you that the United States… will end up making a lot more money because of it, because we lost a lot of business to Hong Kong,” he added. “We made it very convenient for people to go there, for companies to go there. We’ve withdrawn all of that and the United States will be a big beneficiary from an economic standpoint.”
While Trump’s answer was not the kind of stirring endorsement of press freedom Akan might have expected from an American president, inciting an attack on China’s government was probably gratifying to the owners of The Epoch Times. The paper is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement who have spent heavily to promote Trump as a useful battering ram against their ultimate enemy: the Chinese Communist Party that considers the banned sect a cult. An Epoch Times
echoes Trump’s rhetoric that China is to blame for the global pandemic, but urges people to call it not “the China Virus,” as Trump does, but the “CCP Virus.”
The White House press secretary’s invitation to the Epoch Times writer to participate in the briefing alongside reporters and photographers from some of America’s leading news organizations is remarkably brazen given that last year, when The Epoch Times was outside of the president’s own campaign, the site spent heavily to promote the baseless conspiracy theory that Biden had abused his power as vice president in 2016 to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine.
Since then, the site has been banned from advertising on Facebook, after NBC reported that the newspaper had secretly placed Facebook ads promoting President Trump.Last week, Facebook also removed 303 fake accounts linked to The Epoch Times for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about supposedly shadowy figures behind the ongoing racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
On Friday, after Trump twice refused to answer a question from The Associated Press about whether he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory in which he is a central figure,he
from Alicia Powe,
who writes for the far-right Gateway Pundit blog.
Powe, who has claimed that the Clinton Foundation controls the FBI and is stifling investigations of child sex-trafficking rings and the murder of Seth Rich, asked Trump to comment on the accusation that Biden had claimed credit for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
[vid]
powe’s question was based on a blog post by the founder of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, which amplified an attack on Biden from the Kremlin-owned site Russia Today. Hoft’s post also quotes the analysis of Heshmat Alavi, a supporter of a militant Iranian cult called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who, as my colleague Murtaza Hussain revealed last year, is a fictional character.
McEnany did not respond to a question about whether she or someone else in her office invited Powe to the briefing on Friday, but Powe is a former blogger for WorldNetDaily, the far-right website that helped create the racist “birther” conspiracy theory to undermine President Barack Obama. Alyssa Farah, the White House director of strategic communications, is the daughter of Joseph Farah, who founded WorldNetDaily. In the 1990s, Joseph Farah was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that deputy White House counsel Vince Foster might have been murdered.
The presence of Rion, Akan and Powe also infuriated the White House Correspondents Association, whose members have agreed to send only 14 reporters a day during the pandemic, to maintain safe social distance.
The WHCA, which normally decides which accredited journalists are allowed in to the briefing room on a given day, also wants the aisles at the sides and the back of the room to be open for photographers and video crews to operate safely. “It is outrageous that the White House continues to invite ‘guests’ to press briefings, putting the health and safety of everyone in that workspace at greater risk,” the WHCA president, Zeke Miller, said in an email. “The WHCA’s social distancing guidelines were crafted in consultation with the White House based on the recommendations of the CDC and the nation’s leading public health professionals. Trampling on those guidelines endangers the critical work of reporters who have maintained independent press coverage of the presidency throughout the pandemic.”
Until April, OAN was a member of the correspondents’ association but the cable channel was expelled after Rion kept showing up at briefings when it was not her turn. Since then, she has attended press events as a guest of the White House press secretary.
Unlike the original, freewheeling coronavirus task force briefings — which came to a sudden halt in April when Trump mused that doctors should “check” to see if injecting patients suffering from Covid-19 with bleach or isopropyl alcohol, or exposing them to ultraviolet light, might cure them — the president’s current news conferences are much shorter and seem designed mainly to get his lengthy, written opening statements on the air and get him out of the briefing room after taking just a handful of questions.
Trump’s opening statements at the latest briefings are often nakedly political in nature, featuring crude, jarring attacks on Biden and other Democrats. “Today, we saw Joe Biden continue to politicize a pandemic and to show his appalling lack of respect for the American people. That’s what it is,” Trump said at the start of Thursday’s briefing. “At every turn, Biden has been wrong about the virus, ignoring the scientific evidence and putting left-wing politics before facts and evidence.”
After then blatantly lying about Biden’s suggested response to the pandemic in the most idiotic terms — “Sleepy Joe rejects the scientific approach in favor of locking all Americans in their basements for months on end” — Trump concluded, with a stunning lack of self-awareness: “To Joe, I would say: Stop playing politics with a virus. Too serious. Partisan politics has no place here. It’s a shameful situation for anybody to try and score political points while we’re working to save lives and defeat the pandemic.”
Trump’s prepared remarks at these briefings almost always feature highly misleading health and economic statistics intended to convey the false impression that the federal government’s pandemic response is the envy of the world.
At Tuesday’s briefing, for example, Trump said in his opening statement: “Since the end of July, the seven-day average for cases in the United States has fallen by nearly 20 percent, but the virus continues to increase in nations across the globe. Last week, France and Germany both recorded their highest daily number of new cases in three months — not that I want to bring that up, but might as well explain it to the media.” While those statistical measures of the increase by percentage of new cases in Europe and decrease by percentage in the U.S. were accurate, what they hid was the fact that, in raw numbers, the pandemic is obviously far less under control here than there.[shillenberger pat m cherrypick]
The day Trump made those remarks, 53,315 new Covid-19 infections were confirmed by testing in the U.S. Germany’s highest number of daily infections in three months, recorded this week, was 1,445. Cases are down more in the U.S. but from a very high level to a slightly less high level. In much of Europe, cases are rising but from very low baseline. Adjusted for population, the U.S. recorded 154 new cases per million on Friday, while France had 41 and Germany 17.[graf]
While the pandemic is resurgent in many parts of the world, Trump has been unable so far to brow-beat the public into accepting his obviously false claims that things are better in the United States than in Europe or Asia. A new poll released by Monmouth University on Thursday showed that 52 percent of Americans “think the United States’ handling of the pandemic is worse than other countries,” while just 15 percent feel the U.S. is doing a better job than others and 29 percent say it is doing about the same.
Having complained on Wednesday about what he called “a wiseguy question” from a reporter who noted that two top Federal Reserve officials “said that the economy hasn’t recovered strong enough because the country hasn’t contained the virus,” Trump devoted part of his opening remarks at Thursday’s briefing to falsely complaining that Biden, who
, “never takes questions.”
“I take questions; he never takes questions,” Trump continued. “And you sort of wonder what’s going on, because they’re not that difficult. Some can be nasty, but they’re not that difficult.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/why-an-obscure-looney-fringe-new-york-paper-is-trumps-top-online-supporter
no lnx
Why an obscure, looney-fringe New York paper is Trump’s top online supporter
Written by David Crook / DC Report August 27, 2019
Trump’s Secret Chinese Supporters
By the numbers, there is no bigger advocate of President Donald Trump on Facebook than The Epoch Times, reports NBC News. 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.
The Old College Bait-and-Switch
Search “pre-college” on GoFundMe.com and you’ll find dozens of campaigns from hopeful students dazzled by the allure of two weeks on an elite campus. “Going to the Summer @ Brown PreCollege Program would give me a preview of what life would be like if I attend the school of my dreams,” reads a 2018 campaign by Benjina, from Newark, N.J. These posts reflect the growing trend of summer “pre-college” programs at the nation’s most prestigious universities, says The Washington Monthly. Of the top 40 schools ranked in U.S. News & World Report, all but one—Dartmouth—offer some sort of summer program for high school students (and, in some cases, even middle schoolers). These programs can offer precocious teens an enriching, hands-on preview of college life. But they also exploit both the allure of brand-name universities and families’ anxieties about an increasingly cutthroat college admissions process in which “summer experiences” matter.
West Virginia Has Its Own Trump-Like Problem
West Virginia lawmakers are calling for a thorough reexamination of the state’s ethics rules following a Charleston Gazette-Mail and ProPublica investigation of the conflicts of interest created by Gov. Jim Justice’s ownership of the fabled Greenbrier resort.
One central proposal, from state Sen. William Ihlenfeld, would make West Virginia the first state to mandate that governors place all of their assets into a blind trust, something Justice, the wealthiest man in the state, has refused to do. Under such an arrangement, business holdings are placed under the control of an independent manager, shielding the public official from at least the appearance of a conflict.
Justice, a billionaire, has faced questions about how his vast business empire intersects with his job running the state, raising stark similarities to the ethical entanglements of President Donald Trump. Government agencies paid for more than $106,000 in meals and lodging at the luxury resort since Justice became governor. State officials have also sought — and won — special permission to attend conferences at the hotel and to feature the iconic property in a state advertising campaign.
nbc ref 2 BS
https://www.theepochtimes.com/media-attacks-do-little-to-sway-q-supporters_2617778.html
‘Q’ Community Responds to Media Attacks
BY JOSHUA PHILIPP, THE EPOCH TIMES
August 7, 2018 Updated: August 8, 2018
Over the past week, nearly all legacy news outlets have published articles criticizing the growing movement around a mysterious figure or group known as “Q,” which since October 2017 has been publishing alleged leaks on behind-the-scenes actions taken by the Trump administration to uproot alleged global corruption.
The general angle on Q from most news outlets is the same—that it’s a conspiracy theory—and The Washington Post even went so far as to call it a “deranged conspiracy cult.”
The media backlash has done little to dissuade Q supporters, however, who continue to support the movement with billboards and t-shirts at Trump rallies, and in numerous online groups that analyze and discuss recent news and posts from Q.
To gain a better understanding of the movement, and why people believe in it, The Epoch Times spoke with Q fans at recent Trump rallies in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and with Jordan Sather, a prominent figure online who speaks and writes about his analysis of Q.
“Anybody calling it a cult or calling it a conspiracy theory, or calling it names, is doing so from an ignorant standpoint. Everybody attacking it, I find, they’re not even reading it,” said Sather, who runs the “Destroying the Illusion” channel on YouTube, on which he analyzes Q posts.
Q is a series of anonymous posts on the 8chan forum, which includes encryption to protect the identity of users, allowing for free discussion.The Q posts are mainly based on politics and focus on giving context to events both in the past and allegedly still to come. They focus heavily on government corruption and allege that actions are being taken by Trump and his administration to purge this corruption.
Sather described Q as a “laser pointer” that directs people to research chains of open-source information and discuss their findings on the forum.
He said that Q “hopped on the scene at a very pivotal point,” in October 2017. According to Sather, there is a fight between a “deep state” system comprising intelligence agencies and corrupt organizations, and an alliance of military intelligence agencies and patriots fighting this system. This fight, Sather believes, ties to President Donald Trump’s campaign message to “drain the swamp.”
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Sather said, “What 2016 and 2017 brought us was an opportunity with Donald Trump for somebody who is not going to go along with the rogue intelligence agencies anymore, and that’s when Q popped onto the scene as basically the big public warning saying stuff is going to start going down.”
The Q forum has received a large following. On June 28, Time Magazine listed Q as one of “the 25 most influential people on the internet.” Some users follow Q posts directly on 8chan, while many others follow various websites and YouTube channels that republish and analyze the posts.
Francesca Spotts, 38, who works as a bartender, was holding a Q sign at an Aug. 2 Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.“The information is for you to investigate yourself, just like the news,” she said. “If you’re watching CNN, you’re looking at information and it’s up to you to go out and validate that information in other places, and this is the same thing. It’s just a different news outlet.
“Q is basically just a forum for news—tidbits of information that the American public can see for themselves and figure out for themselves. It’s news that we’re not seeing on the mainstream media. So that’s why there’s a big following.”
Jay Domer, 27, who works as a cook, was at the Aug. 4 rally in Lewis Center, Ohio. He said that he has been following the Q posts for several months and that some of the posts point to hypocrisy in legacy news outlets. “[Q posts] a lot of CNN and Washington Post articles, and basically uses their own articles against them,” he said. “So, this is what they posted two years ago, and this is what they’re posting today, and they’re the complete opposite.”
Rachel Reed, 27, who works as a manager at a retail store, was attending the rally with Domer and noted that, from her perspective, the attacks on the Q movement by legacy news outlets “mean we’re doing something right.”
“If we were no threat, they wouldn’t have to waste their resources and time to silence us,” Reed said.
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She also pointed to the more than 45,000 sealed indictments said to be waiting currently at the Justice Department and noted that in a normal year the number is only 2,000 to 3,000. A team of volunteers compiled the number of indictments using the Public Access to Court Electronic Records service of the federal judiciary. Reed believes the sealed indictments are tied to Q claims about the Trump administration clearing out corruption.
According to Sather, many news articles have attempted to analyze who Q is, rather than why the posts exist. In Sather’s analysis, the Q posts are part of an information dissemination project being run with the purpose of informing the public about political events as they take place.
“This is a full disclosure,” he said. “This isn’t just small little pieces of corruption. The amazing thing about this Q operation is it connects the dots over so many connections.”
He said that if the Trump administration were to uphold its promises to “drain the swamp,” it would likely look like what Q is discussing. He also said that it if the alleged events are real, it makes sense that it is done through an alternative channel rather than legacy news outlets or social media that could censor the information.
Sather also believes that the sometimes indirect nature of the posts, which use abbreviations for names and incidents, relying on the community to decode the meaning, is also done in a way that would not violate national security laws.
Part of the belief that Q is a back channel of the Trump administration is also tied to alleged “proofs” the movement has received from Trump tweets that subtly correspond to Q posts, or other actions such as pointing to people with Q shirts and signs at rallies. Sather noted a recent video where the Trump motorcade honked at supporters holding a sign that read “Honk for Q MAGA.”
Sather also noted, “If this was a conspiracy, why hasn’t Trump himself distanced from it? If this would hurt his platform in any way, now or in the future, you’d think he would have said something about it by now. I mean, it’s everywhere.”
==
nbc ref1
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/hayesbrown/epoch-times-trump-administration-falun-gong
In a bizarre twist to the domestic politics of both the United States and China, a Falun Gong–linked newspaper has emerged as one of the staunchest defenders of Donald Trump’s presidency.
In recent weeks, the newspaper — offered for free in most US cities and published around the world — has published articles and graphics that would be a credit to Breitbart, promoting some of the most strident and paranoid claims from the Trump administration and its defenders.
In one tour de force infographic, published last week, the paper laid out in excruciating and sweeping detail the claim that “Spygate”— the claim that the real heart of the Russia investigation is illegal American spying on Trump’s campaign — is “the biggest political scandal in modern history.”
A section devoted entirely to the Trump presidency on the Epoch Times’ website is remarkably free of the scandals that have plagued the administration since before the president was sworn in. Instead, the stories include a photo essay on a recent Trump rally in Montana, an “Angel Mom’s” push for the president to seal the border with Mexico, and Trump’s call for Sen. Elizabeth Warren to apologize after her DNA test last week. Other political stories show a clear nod to Trump’s base, including one with the headline “Democrat Operative for Soros-Funded Group Arrested for Assaulting Republican Campaign Manager.”
The site’s opinion section offers an even clearer stance on Trump’s time in office — often written by authors without much in the way of clout. “Our leftist media describes the Trump presidency as tumultuous — a construct they have manufactured, one that doesn’t exist,” one article claims. Another chides the media’s coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh saga, noting that “[l]ike Trump, Kavanaugh was depicted as the nominee of white male privilege and ‘toxic masculinity,’ a beer-swilling Deplorable and an avatar of creeping authoritarianism.” Even in pieces that don’t directly deal with Trump — like one that argues that theendgame of climate change advocacy is socialism — the administration's line holds.
“Being independent, we investigate issues overlooked — or avoided — by other media outlets,” Jan Jekielek, a senior editor with the Epoch Times, told BuzzFeed News in an emailed response to questions about the paper’s editorial stance. “We do this because we believe journalism must play the role of being truly responsible to society. We aim to highlight solutions and what’s good in society, including in our reporting on the Trump administration, rather than focusing on the conflicts that divide us.”
Part of that mission, it seems, involves including a story praising the new movie from Diamond and Silk, who are Trump supporters and social media stars, among the Editor’s Picks section of the website. (The movie has been almost entirely overlooked by everyone but right-wing press.) The byline of that article is credited to “Epoch Times Staff.” It also includes publishing an article — written by an author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” — claiming that the media has “hidden” a key part of the Jamal Khashoggi disappearance story.
When asked about the infographic, Jekielek said the Epoch Times “stand[s] behind the findings of the infographic and accompanying article, which provide a factual analysis of individuals and events, along with extensive sourcing and references for anyone to independently verify.”
After this article's publication, editor-in-chief Jasper Fakkert published a letter to the Epoch Times' readers to "offer a few thoughts" about the paper's editorial approach.
"Whether one agrees with the policies of the Trump administration or not, there is no denying that President Donald Trump’s presidency is transforming America," Fakkert wrote. "This is something that most Americans genuinely care about."
"We see the Trump administration’s efforts to change socialistpolicies in America, as well as set policies to counter infiltration and subversion by China, as remarkable reversals from past policies, and sincere efforts that, if fully realized, will benefit America and the world as a whole," Fakkert continued.
When viewing the open letter, a feature on the website caused the page to continue to load more content after Fakkert's conclusion, rolling over to a new article: "Never Trumpers Learn: Resistance Is Futile"
The shift at the Epoch Times seems to have flown under the radar. Until recently, it may have been best known for its links to Falun Gong, a movement that China labeled a “cult” in the 1990s following several mass demonstrations — and has been outlawed in the country since 1999. Members have claimed brutal repression by the government, up to and including reports of “organ harvesting,” in the years since.
But the Epoch Times — which is little discussed, despite its ubiquity on New York street corner boxes — appears to have been intensely focused on courting Trump for most of this year. In April, publisher Stephen Gregory and Fakkert co-bylined an interview with an obscure Republican running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The candidate claimed a friend of Trump’s had said “Donald Trump reads [the Epoch Times] every day and it’s the one newspaper that he believes to be a truthful and correct paper. … It’s the only one he trusts.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the president’s reading habits.
The Epoch Times’ owners and management have denied direct links to Falun Gong. "The paper's not owned by Falun Gong. It doesn't speak for Falun Gong. It doesn't represent Falun Gong. It does cover the persecution of Falun Gong in China," Gregory has said in the past.
But during a 2006 incident an Epoch Times–credentialed reporter shouted at then-president George W. Bush during a visit from then-president Hu Jintao. The reporter specifically asked Bush to “stop him from persecuting the Falun Gong."
Gregory has himself written several articles in the last year about Falun Gong events.
The exact logic behind the newspaper’s recent promotion of Trump is unclear, but it may be connected to the administration’s current feud with Beijing over trade. As ties between the Trump administration and China have deteriorated, the Epoch Times has ramped up its rhetoric against Trump’s enemies, foreign and domestic. Founded in 2000 as a way to “provide uncensored news to a people immersed in propaganda and censorship in China,” aligning itself with the Trump White House’s attempts to curtail China’s rise would make sense for the paper.
Fakkert, in his open letter, noted that soon after the paper's founder, John Tang, launched the Epoch Times, several of its reporters inside China were jailed. "We have been committed from the beginning to getting the truth out under difficult circumstances, and this is and will forever be part of our DNA," Fakkert wrote.
"We see the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, and the remarkable and heroic ways in which they have responded to that persecution, as one of the most underreported stories of the last 20 years," Fakkert continued.
Ming Xia, a professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, told the Washington Post that Falun Gong is “eager to win political recognition from high-level officials in the United States eager to win political recognition from high-level officials in the United States.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lately, the paper made it into the headlines again when one of its photographers handed President Trump an envelope during an event at the White House last month. It’s still unclear exactly what the envelope contained.
==
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/08/chinese-news-site-run-in-us-hired-republican-strategist-to-help-them-get-in-good-with-trump-and-his-supporters/
NBC News broke a huge story that detailed the way that the Chinese news website The Epoch Times has turned from their conservative conspiracy theories to promoting President Donald Trump and running ads for him on Facebook. But the reporter revealed in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Tuesday, that the site recently decided to begin running its own political operation.
She described the site like a kind of troll farm where the young “reporters” they hired are forced to churn out many articles each day. They’ve always been a conservative site that opposes things like homosexuality and pop music, but now they’re hoping to capitalize on evangelicals.
“So it makes sense, right, that this moment in which we’re very polarized and evangelicals are very close to Trump why this group, which shares a lot with evangelicals, in terms of their world view, why they would align themselves with Trump in that way,” said NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny. “So they hitched their wagon to Trump’s star and it really paid off."
When Trump was elected they decided to make their move and capitalize off of conservatism.
“I found out today that they hired a Republican strategist and said, ‘We want to be closer to the administration,'” Zadrozny continued. “‘We want to be closer to the government in general. We want to be closer to conservative media.’ And that Republican strategist brought them to CPAC for the first time. Got them interviews. Started wrangling people likeCandace Owens and Diamond and Silk and Mark Meadows.And that kind of put them on the conservative stage as well.”
Watch the full interview below:
==
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-qanon-impending-judgment-day-behind-facebook-fueled-rise-epoch-n1044121
no lmx many vids
POLITICSU.S. NEWSBUSINESSWORLDTECH & MEDIAOPINIONHEALTHSPORTS
Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times
Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times
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.
Photo illustration of Li Hongzhi and Donald Trump.
The Epoch Times has emerged as one of the biggest advocates of President Donald Trump on Facebook.Joanna Neborsky for NBC News / Getty Images
Aug. 20, 2019, 1:12 AM PDT
By Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins
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.
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“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.
[Facebook ads from The Epoch Times.
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.
How the Epoch Times became one of Trump's biggest supporters
AUG. 20, 201904:51
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 thepublisher, 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.
Pro-Trump news outlet The Epoch Times funded by Chinese spiritual group
AUG. 20, 201905:02
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.
Anti-China group hired GOP strategist in pro-Trump shift
AUG. 20, 201906:14
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.
Pro-Trump conspiracy theories pay off for anti-China group
AUG. 20, 201923:24
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.
Meanwhile The Epoch Times has promoted "Edge of Wonder" content in dozens of Facebook posts, still visible on its official Facebook page. That page is currently topped with a pinned ad for its Trump coverage that reads, “Where can you get real news that doesn't push any hidden agendas?”
Image: Brandy Zadrozny
Brandy Zadrozny
Brandy Zadrozny is an investigative reporter for NBC News.
Ben Collins
Ben Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News.
cf trms from nbc hired gop pol strat who got access to CPAC so interviews with meadows, gaetz, diamond & silk etc
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/08/maddow-reveals-how-chinese-group-falung-gong-went-from-disrupting-events-to-running-a-shadow-campaign-for-trump/
Rachel Maddow on Tuesday detailed the remarkable journey of the group Falun Gong shifting from disrupting White House events to dominating the conversation on Facebook.
Maddow hilariously recounted the “major embarrassment” for the George W. Bush White House when a protester interrupted remarks by President of China Hu Jintao.
The protester was credentialed to cover the event for the Epoch Times, which is controlled by Falun Gong.
"Well, NBC News has a scoop out today about that group, about how that paper, the Epoch Times has transformed itself a lot in the Trump era. It’s a real revelation, this reporting from NBC News,” Maddow said. “I mean, Epoch Times and its media group, they’ve made themselves into a whole new thing entirely and in a very big way.”
“Over the last six months, the single largest organization that has spent money on Facebook ads promoting Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s re-election is as you might expect the Donald Trump re-election campaign. The organization that is second on that list, though, is this Falun Gong newspaper, the Epoch Times.
She read a quote from the report, by Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins.
“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,” the report read.
“So why is this little special interest newspaper becoming the biggest online booster of Donald Trump’s re-election other than Donald Trump’s re-election campaign itself?” Maddow asked. “Well, it’s apparently their new business model.”
Maddow again read from the NBC News report.
“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,” the story reported.
“When it comes to their revenue, what seems to be really driving things are parts of the epoch media group that are producing online-only content under an entity called the New Tang Dynasty,” she continued.
The host read some of the titles of videos appearing on their YouTube account.
- QAnon — Why it’s NOT a Conspiracy Theory
- Tentacles of the Deep State exposed
- WHY DRUG Epidemic Was Engineered by Deep State
- $200 Million Operation: How Deep State Funds CARAVAN and CHAOS in the United States
- Deep State, 13 BLOODLINES & their Diabolical End Game | Tentacles of the Deep State
“So the newspaper that until just recently promoted the interests of the dissident Chinese religious movement is now whole-hog on board both in its newspaper and its related media entities with all of the completely around-the-bend pro-Trump intergalactic conspiracy theory stuff,” she explained.
“Literally about, you know, drinking the blood of sacrificed children and the Illuminati and their persistent terrifying bloodlines,” Maddow continued. “Alongside all the explicitly pro-Trump stuff and this kind of stuff, there is also just, like, traditional Grade-A American paranoia brain rot stuff like how Ted Bundy the serial killer was groomed by the Deep State for politics, but he branched off into being a serial killer? Also how the deep state is hiding the true science of astrology, and as you might expect, naturally, there is the 9/11 stuff.
Watch Part I:etc
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Maddow reveals how Chinese group Falun Gong went from disrupting ...
https://www.rawstory.com/.../maddow-reveals-how-chinese-group-falung-...
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Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind ... - NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com/...news/trump-qanon-impending-judgment-day-...
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Missing: maddow | Must include:
Inside the Secretive Media Outlet That Became One of Trump's ...
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/.../USW-Inside-the-Secretive-Media-Ou...
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Missing: maddow msnbc
5 Revelations From NBC's Deep Dive Into The Epoch Times
https://www.mediaite.com/news/5-craziest-revelations-from-nbcs-expose-of...
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Missing: maddow msnbc
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-biggest-facebook-supporter-is-a-chinese-cult-hoping-for-the-apocalypse/
no lnx
Trump’s biggest Facebook supporter is a Chinese cult hoping for the apocalypse
Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos August 20, 2019
This is not the death cult you expected. While Donald Trump may regularly count on the support of people who believe that supporting Israel means making sure that every Jewish citizen of that state is handy to be either converted or slaughtered in the any-day-now End Times, this is another group of religious fanatics counting on Trump to fulfill their world (and atheist) -destroying dreams. Until recently, the contents of website The Epoch Times have been so out there, so beyond the pizzagate conspiracy theories of Gateway Pundit and the black helicopter lizard men of Infowars, that it’s been regarded as too odd to be considered part of the right-wing “mainstream.” No more. Under Trump, all bets are off. And a group that’s willing to top the online spending of Democratic candidates to express its support for Trump is definitely welcome in the fold … even if they do want him for his finger on the nuclear trigger.
It’s easy to understand why any group looking for an apocalypse might look to Trump as just the man for the job. But not every cult manages to spend more on Facebook than presidential campaigns. The leaders of the group that is counting on Trump to begin the “Last Havoc” have now spent more than $1.5 million to buy 11,000 pro-Trump spots on social media.In April alone, those ads netted 3 billion views, making this foreign-backed group one of the top video creators on the Internet and a major player in American politics.
As NBC News reports, The Epoch Times may look like just another online conspiracy site belonging to another small cult of slavish Trump followers itchin’ for some good old-fashioned smiting from above. But this “small New York-based nonprofit” is actually controlled by Falun Gong, a Chinese religious group aiming to both bring down Beijing and democracy while cheering for the end of all things. If on the surface they look like another fundamentalist site attacking science, reason, and “humanists,” it’s because they are.
Falun Gong members have been subject to some genuinely terrible oppression and abuse by the Chinese government, so it’s easy to understand why members of the group would pull for anything that might bring down Chairman Xi and his totalitarian regime. What’s less understandable is how that translates into support for Trump, considering his refusal to call out the Chinese government on anything related to human rights, and his expressed willingness to allow Xi to have his way with Hong Kong and anyone else that is “his problem.”
The connection seems to be that group members believe Trump is the guy who is ready to hate the people that they hate and maybe push the not-a-Coke button on the Resolute Desk. Their core beliefs include an upcoming judgement day in which all the Chinese officials who directed punishment their way get sent to a very special communist hell. Of course, American unbelievers, liberals, and scientists will go with them.
The level of spending and the number of views generated by The Epoch Times’ ads has turned it into a Trump favorite. They’ve been frequently retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. and by Donald Trump’s Facebook page. And “at least half a dozen times this year,” stories have been written for this fringiest of fringe sites by members of the Trump campaign.
That’s not all. The Epoch Times earned an interview with daughter-in-law Lara Trump in Trump Tower. They’ve been rewarded with interviews of Trump cabinet members. They even took the stage at CPAC and interviewed Republican members of Congress including Mark Meadows, along with “conservative stars” like new Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell.
The religious group still runs the occasional ad or YouTube video on religious freedom in China, but by far the majority of its work is dedicated to defending everything Trump. That means freedom-love of this group from China hasn’t stopped them from screaming about the horrors of immigration, or joining in theattacks on the religious beliefs of Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. And it hasn’t kept them from running thousands of ads about “spy gate” and calling for indictments against the usual list of Trump targets.
There’s little doubt about why Falun Gong is hanging tight with the Trump campaign. Beyond cheering for Trump to bring it all down during what’s known as “the final period of the Last Havoc,” their beliefs mingle pseudo-ancient mysticism with “extremely conservative cultural worldviews.” That includes a belief that all atheists are bound for a properly evangelical level of eternal torture, that evolution is “a deadly idea born of the Red Specter,” and that homosexuality is a crime equivalent to international terrorism. In a strong parallel with Trump, the group teaches about “the blind arrogance of the world scientific community” and the “limits of the scientific paradigm” and attacks both archaeology and geology to defend a kind of creationism akin to that expressed by the most fundamentalist churches in the United States. The leadership emphatically does not believe in climate change, and supports climate change deniers. They support racial “purity” including miscegenation laws. Falun Gong also has no fondness for the basic idea of democracy, which is seen as too “individualistic.”
Other highlights include a belief in shape-shifting aliens who once inhabited the Earth and that Falun Gong’s leaders can both levitate and walk through walls. How that fits in with a support for Trump is unclear … but it certainly sounds like a story that would work well on Infowars. And they run a dance troop that sings about the evils of evolution, feminism, and race-mixing. If all this sounds like someone sat down in 1990 to gather up the worst of fundamentalism and Scientology then lightly covered the whole thing with a veneer of “rediscovered” ancient beliefs that never existed … you got it in one.
The persecution that Falun Gong has received in China is more than regrettable, it’s criminal. Tens of thousands of its practitioners were arrested at Tiananmen Square, and the group was deeply involved in efforts to end the rule of the totalitarian Chinese leadership … even if they were less than interested in replacing them with a secular democracy. The abuse of Falun Gong within China represents exactly the kind of human rights abuse that Trump should be fighting.
But actions in the United States show that a group ostensibly founded to defend religious freedom in another country can become a major player in the politics of the United States … so long as it puts aside those original goals and concentrates on hating the right people. And buying enough media.