ABV10: Unsolicited 'The Epoch Times' paper spreads outlandish COVID-19 claims

 VERIFY: Unsolicited 'The Epoch Times' paper spreads outlandish COVID-19 claims

A free copy of a paper called "The Epoch Times" is landing unsolicited in mailboxes around the United States and the globe. Our team fact checked it.

Author: Brandon Rittiman

Published: 8:05 PM PDT May 20, 2020

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — If you’ve heard of The Epoch Times, you probably know it as a pro-Trump media outlet.

The expanding conservative paper has gotten attention by dabbling in far-right conspiracy theories and paying for ads to promote President Trump.

The one that landed in my Sacramento mailbox came bulk mail from a California address, but people are getting a version of this The Epoch Times “Special Edition” in Canada and Australia, too. That’s because The Epoch Times isn’t about American politics as much as it’s about as China’s politics, which we’ll explain further below.

But first let’s seek to Verify what this paper says: that the coronavirus is part of a Chinese government cover-up with potentially sinister origins.

The claims the paper makes to support that are a mixed bag that range from factual to ludicrous.

CLAIM: China silenced doctors who warned of the new virus

VERDICT: TRUE

You will find grains of truth in the 8-page paper that solicits new subscribers. For instance, it contains a timeline that prominently features the story of Dr. Li Wenliang, who got in trouble with Chinese authorities for sounding the alarm about the virus in Wuhan.

The government apologized for cracking down on Li... posthumously. Li died of the disease in February.

As you can see in the independent sources we link to, this story is verifiably true. But the paper also has articles that go out into left field.

CLAIM: A 21-million user drop in Chinese cell phone service could mean millions of deaths went unreported

VERDICT: SPECULATION (also looks highly unlikely)

The free paper has an article promoting the idea that a drop in cell phone subscriptions means millions more Chinese people than reported could have died of Coronavirus.

While the full-page article admits it's not proof of anything, the very idea is pure speculation. Furthermore, a 21-million cell phone user fluctuation in China isn’t unusual.

Since this statistic came out, the next month’s data showed an increase of 10 million users.

More than a billion people live in the country and many use multiple SIM cards.

CLAIM: The novel coronavirus could have emerged from a Chinese lab

VERDICT: UNFOUNDED, disputed by researchers

The paper’s repeated insinuations that the new virus may have come from a Chinese lab is unfounded and generally ruled out by virus researchers around the world, who have a consensus view that the virus spread from animals to humans.

But this paper gets wilder…

CLAIM: For a COVID-19 cure, just sincerely renounce the Chinese Communist Party… out loud

VERDICT: MAKE-BELIEVE

After giving several purported examples, The Epoch Times has this advice if you get COVID-19:

“If someone is infected… we suggest that he or she sincerely says ‘down with the CCP.’ Maybe a miracle will happen.”

This is make-believe. There’s simply no evidence that saying or feeling bad things about the government of China can help you recover from the virus.

That claim makes a lot more sense when you realize that this newspaper is actually part of a spiritual war against the communist party in China.

A BANNED SPIRITUAL MOVEMENT’S COUNTER-PROPAGANDA

The Epoch Times sprung out of Falun Gong… a Chinese spiritual practice that involves body movements and meditation.

China’s government banned Falun Gong in the 1990’s. We’ve seen abuses of these people in public and credible sources believe China’s government did much worse to them in secret.

Falun Gong decided to fight Chinese propaganda with its own: most notably, the dance show Shen Yun.

Ads for Shen Yun sell theatergoing folks on folkloric-looking Chinese dance and orchestra, but leave out that the show also contains skits about the evils of the Chinese government.

One night years ago, it made for a disappointing date for this reporter. I didn’t document those skits, but thankfully Alix Martichoux of SFGate did:

A group of communist cops swarmed the park and beat the Falun Dafa practitioners. A good guy jumps in to defend them, but is jailed along with the rest. In prison, the group was tortured. The man who interfered was blinded. After release, the practitioners headed back to the park. The man went back to standing in the same place with the sign ‘Falun Dafa is good.’ But, of course, the cops came back."

That’s how Falun Gong reaches people who go to the theater.

The Epoch Times is the same movement’s way of reaching a different audience: conservatives in America and elsewhere around the globe.

The ABC completely rejects any claims its reporting on Falun Gong was sourced from or influenced by CCP

The ABC’s reporting on Falun Gong

Posted 24th July 2020

The ABC completely rejects any claims its reporting on Falun Gong was sourced from or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.

The sources of the allegations came from within the Falun Gong movement itself, both from current and former practitioners and Falun Gong’s published literature.

It’s the duty of a public broadcaster to investigate serious claims wherever they may arise, in government, religious or charity groups.

The ABC sought out and broadcast interviews with senior Falun Gong spokespeople and practitioners Jonathon Lee, the Vice President of Dragon Springs; John Deller, spokesperson for the Australian Association; and Dr Lucy Zhao, President of the Australian Association. We also submitted a written interview request with Master Li Hongzhi.

We stand by the accuracy and integrity of the reports.

Media contact

Sally Jackson | ABC NEWS Communications Lead

China, a Cult, and the Alt-Right The bizarre story of The Epoch Times, the far-right’s richest conspiracy machine

Ifyou’ve had the absolute displeasure of arguing with conspiracy theorists online, you might have been sent videos like this:

These interviews can be insanely long, sometimes up to four hours, and usually feature an obscure journalist combing through video footage, searching for any frame where they can chant “See, Antifa!”

In the clip pictured above, military blogger Michael Yon cites his evidence of secret far-left forces organizing the Capitol attack as everything from participants handing out water bottles to protestors wearing black. Y’know, things that you see at every protest.

The channel trying to pass these rambles as journalism, Crossroads with Joshua Philipp, is just a small piece of the Epoch Times media group. Though the format of their shows is similar to InfoWars and OAN, their promotion of conspiracy theories, anti-vax propaganda, and pandemic denialism is both more subtle and promoted through a highly funded advertising machine.

The Epoch Times is bigger than many realize, but the Times itself and Joshua Philipp’s show aren’t their only media. They formerly ran a massive Facebook network, whose $9.5 million ad budget paid almost entirely for pro-Trump, anti-China, and Antifa scare ads. Seeing the writing on the wall when the news media began exposing their origins and propaganda, they created more than 600 fake pages to promote their content. Some had names like “Pure American Journalism,” and some even posed as journalists with AI-generated profile pictures. This led to their ban from advertising on the network, but they’re back at it again funding similarly veiled campaigns on YouTube.

So, how does a news outlet with almost no following before 2016 and an appetite for fringe conspiracies get this kind of budget, and who’s behind their bizarre operations?

Buckle up, this gets weird.

Falun Gong, the Scientology of China

Epoch Media Group is closely tied with Falun Gong, also known by the name Falun Dafa. They’re a religious group built in the early 90s around a Qigong-like practice who claim to center their beliefs around the principles of “truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.” In reality, none of these are at their core, and Falun Gong instead has all the classic markings of a cult.

Megalomaniac leader? Check. The group’s founder Li Hongzhi, known as Master Li, claims to be able to levitate and followers are taught he can read their thoughts. Though it’s hard to tell his exact corporate role in Epoch, he’s promoted the paper as “our news” and his views on politics clearly influence it heavily.

Isolate compound? Check. They operate a 430-acre facility called Dragon Springs in rural New York, complete with hundreds of permanent residents, schools, and high-dollar performance facilities. They keep a full staff of security on deck 24/7 and steer media and onlookers far away. The place is reminiscent of Scientology’s “Gold Base,” but with the visual stylings of Chinese paganism rather than science fiction. We’ll come back to this one.

Like many cults, Falun Gong places a heavy emphasis on physical health and views its practices as an alternative to medical treatment, sometimes even pitching a cure to cancer. They rail against science, medicine, Western philosophy, and above all else, communism. This stems very largely from their segregationist views; Master Li teaches that races come from different gods, that mixed-race people are spiritually incomplete, and that communism was created by aliens, given to Europeans, and intentionally spread to China to separate it from Heaven.

They claim to be persecuted by the Communist Party of China, and this is true. The party banned the religion in 1999, and a few thousand practitioners have undergone harsh treatment in re-education camps, much like many Chinese Muslims and Christians. In return, Falun Gong has scaled up its claims of this persecution and used it as a PR stunt. Across the world in New York City, they regularly stage protests alleging that the party is rounding them up specifically for live organ harvest, and while China has been known to harvest organs from executed prisoners, little suggests the targeting of the Falun Dafa for this purpose, especially to the gruesome extent they suggest.

While a spiritual group financing thousands of pro-Trump pieces seems weird on the surface, given the beliefs of the Falun Dafa, it makes a lot of sense. Trump’s speeches demonize the Chinese government heavily, he has a pension for legitimizing conspiracy theories, and he regularly attacks political enemies as “radical communists”. In a strange way, the two are a match made in heaven. Not only did Falun Gong seize on an opportunity to promote its anti-CCP agenda, but it also built a mutually beneficial relationship with a political campaign supported by millions. Epoch gets a huge platform of viewers who already distrust China to preach propaganda to. Trump gets a credible-looking source to spread false headlines through, complete with White House reporters and free ads.

Trump expanded the market for conspiracy theories massively, but because The Epoch Times was only making about $3 million a year for most of his presidency, they couldn’t have paid for that Facebook advertising on their own. That’s where the cult’s free labor comes in, as well as its even stranger second business.

Shen Yun, Ballet with a Dark Side

Before the pandemic hit, you’d likely at some point encountered a brightly colored billboard featuring beautiful Chinese dancers, its headline reading: “Shen Yun- 5,000 Years of Civilization Reborn”.

This is perhaps where the story of Epoch and Falun Gong gets darkest. Shen Yun is a band of six production companies founded by Master Li that tours the world, using song and dance to portray a fabricated history of China, rebranding the barely 30-year-old “Dafa” as China’s historic religion. The show itself has plenty of its own oddities; neon lights over traditional Chinese sets, a tsunami with the face of Karl Marx, and a song beginning with “Atheism and evolution are deadly ideas” are some of the less subtle ones. The most unsettling thing about Shen Yun, however, is the cast itself.

Devout practitioners from Master Li’s circle are expected to do volunteer service for the religion. Some of these volunteers write for their ever-expanding media arms, many of which reach far beyond the official Epoch Times brand, but many more perform for Shen Yun, working morning to night performing meditation rituals and rehearsing without pay at the Dragon Springs compound. A short documentary by ABC features a defector, who was forced into the production as a teenager. Though only working on the show for a short time, she was publicly shamed so harshly by its director about her weight that she became severely anorexic. Worse yet, she was denied proper medical treatment.

It’s unclear exactly how much money Shen Yun makes for Falun Gong, but performers largely work for free and tickets sell for prices that compare to Broadway. I’d be willing to bet that this is how Epoch financed its advertising, as well as how Hongzhi has purchased his numerous homes and the compound itself.

Epoch’s New Plan

I mentioned earlier that Facebook banned The Epoch Times from paid promotion when they deleted its web of fake sites. Though their main page is still public and has more likes than Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh combined, most of their posts engage poorly these days. Some don’t even break a hundred likes, and in a desperate attempt for algorithm points, many of their new posts are inspirational videos and cute animals.

Still, Facebook is basically a dead medium for Epoch. Their new forte is YouTube, and they’ve gotten smarter about gaming the system. While their main channel only has about 400k subscribers, they directly claim ownership over three: Crossroads with Joshua Philipp, Facts Matter with Roman Balmakov, and American Thought Leaders- The Epoch Times. All are built with aesthetics that mimic more familiar Fox shows, and all three primarily target older men. As with their former Facebook network, Falun Gong hasn’t been transparent with the media they own, and as they did in those days, they’re spending an absurd amount on advertising.

Though each of Epoch’s public channels has garnered at least ten million views, most of these shows are relatively new. Two started in 2019, and Roman Balmakov only joined a week after the election was called for Biden.

Epoch’s shows don’t even account for half of all video media owned by Falun Gong. They run an even bigger YouTube and television network called New Tang Dynasty, which publishes almost entirely pro-Trump and anti-China stories, contrasted against the concoction of real news and conspiratorial content Epoch uses to convey legitimacy.

NTD’s main channel has a quarter-billion views on its own, and it’s also more public than Epoch about its subsidiary channels, nearly all of which are larger than Epoch’s shows. The main difference between the two is NTD only claims to be a news network on their main page. The remainder of their channels are a strange multi-genre mix. The most innocent of these are cooking channels that don’t push religious material on the surface level, and I haven’t found issues with these yet, but even the network’s beauty channel buries meditation guides linking Falun Dafa websites in their descriptions.

They don’t publicize it openly anymore, but the Dafa also produce China Uncensored, a semi-satirical podcast hosted by Chris Chappell who even goes as far as to joke about Falun Gong funding him, implying it’s a comment-section allegation, while the channel pushes the same assertions about Falun Gong’s miracle cures. They’ll then cite The Epoch Times for reference.

It’s clear that Falun Gong is trying to reach a diverse audience with its propaganda. Though NTD’s channel doesn’t try as hard to build trust in itself as a media outlet, it doesn’t need to. They have The Epoch Times to do that.

When the time comes and any of these individual media arms are restricted by the platforms they spread on, all Li Hongzhi has to do is divert resources to another one. There’s a certain marketing genius at play here. Falun Gong takes advantage of American conservatives’ distrust of the media and faith in Trump and uses it to promote its own messages. When Epoch claims in their taglines that their coverage is non-partisan, that there’s no hidden agenda behind it, don’t believe it for a second.

The danger of Falun Gong isn’t that it’s trying to recruit Westerners. Li Hongzhi’s contempt for Western ideas spans far beyond communism; recruitment is not his primary interest. His incentive to create a force in our news media is the discredit and eventual overthrow of the party that exiled him when he abused his followers.

It’s fine, and even essential to criticize the Chinese government. Its record of human rights abuses has been expansive since its inception, but we put ourselves in a very dangerous position when we allow our meter on truth to be regulated by a cult that obscures its dishonest practices and hides its presence in the news.

The degradation of brutal regimes in our media must be dissected by those who are journalists for the sake of journalism, who pursue transparency for the sake of credibility, and who don’t even need to say the word to be truly transparent. Falun Gong’s fake news isn’t about Trump, it’s not about the Republican Party, it’s not even really about China. It all goes back to the agenda of the single sociopath at its head and his strange ideas about how the world should be. They don’t need or want the mainstream media to be the ones to expose China. That same media would also be capable of exposing them.

the Epoch Times, a media outlet backed by the cult Falun Gong

 "Trump Won Two-Thirds of Election Lawsuits Where Merits Considered"

Trump did not win two-thirds of election lawsuits ‘where merits considered’

IF YOUR TIME IS SHORT

• Former President Donald Trump and his allies have won one lawsuit related to the results of the 2020 election. It did not prove that widespread voter fraud contributed to President Joe Biden’s win.

• The database the Epoch Times relied on includes election-related lawsuits dating back to March 2020. Not all of them list the Trump campaign as a complainant, and some aren’t directly related to the general presidential election.

• Experts told us that just because a case is dismissed on procedural grounds does not mean it wasn’t duly considered. The Epoch Times revised its Feb. 7 headline after we reached out.

See the sources for this fact-check

Donald Trump and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in state and federal courts seeking to challenge the results of the 2020 election. Some Trump-friendly websites make it seem like the former president prevailed in the majority of them.

The Feb. 7 headline of an article from the Epoch Times, a media outlet backed by the Falun Gong religious movement, said: "Trump Won Two-Thirds of Election Lawsuits Where Merits Considered."

"Of the 22 cases that have been heard by the courts and decided on their merits, Trump and Republicans have prevailed in 15," the site wrote. "This means Trump has won two-thirds of the cases fully adjudicated by the courts."

The article was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) 

The Epoch Times attributed the tally to John Droz Jr., who it described as a "physicist and environmental advocate in Morehead City, N.C." Droz is a political activist who has denied the science of climate change and advocated against legislation aimed at mitigating sea-level rise.

None of the lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters have proved there was fraud, and judges across the political spectrum have rejected their cases. But we wanted to take a closer look at the claim that the challenges were more successful than they appear.

The Epoch Times’ headline gives the impression that Trump won several election-related lawsuits on their merits. But only one of the cases cited by the article was decided after Nov. 3, many were not exclusively about Trump, and some were not related to the general presidential election at all.

"No one from the Epoch Times spoke to me about their article, so they made their own conclusions," Droz told PolitiFact.

After we reached out to the Epoch Times for a comment, the website changed its headline to read: "In Two-Thirds of Election Lawsuits Where Merits Considered Decisions Are Favorable to Trump."

Trump won one post-election lawsuit

In its article, the Epoch Times cited an analysis of "81 lawsuits that were filed in connection with the Nov. 3, 2020 presidential election."

Droz and a team of volunteers spearheaded that work and published their findings in a public spreadsheet. It includes cases spanning from March to December 2020 and links to copies of lawsuits published by the Healthy Elections Project, an initiative from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Between November and December, Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results. Some cases were rejected because plaintiffs failed to prove widespread voter fraud.

In a statement on his website, Droz conceded that the majority of the cases he logged have nothing to do with allegations of voter fraud. The Epoch Times also included that disclaimer in its article.

"The article (and our former and current headlines) clearly indicate that these are lawsuits related to the election, not about the election results," the Epoch Times’ public relations team wrote in an email. "And the article (and the Droz spreadsheet) indicate the cases involve Trump or the GOP — a lawsuit's outcome can be favorable to Trump even if he is not the plaintiff."

In his spreadsheet, Droz found that "Trump and/or the GOP plaintiff prevailed in 15 out of 21 cases decided on the merits" related to the election. "Decided on merits" a note in the spreadsheet says, means the plaintiff "was able to argue the facts of the case, and, if applicable, given opportunity to present evidence via discovery." 

That’s more or less how the Cornell Legal Information Institute defines the term. The opposite of adjudicating cases on their merits is deciding them on procedural grounds. For example, some lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies were dismissed because they contained errors or faced jurisdictional problems.

Of the 15 cases in Droz’s spreadsheet, three were filed on or after Election Day. None of them involved allegations of voter fraud. 

And of those three, just one case, filed Nov. 4, had to do with the election results. It centered on reducing the amount of time Pennsylvania voters had to fix errors on their mail-in ballots. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee were granted an injunction against the secretary of state to prevent extending the proof of ID period by three days. The matter involved a small number of ballots that didn’t change the outcome.

"Trump won one case in the post-election and lost 64," said Marc Elias, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm who has represented Democrats in the lawsuits.

Trump has not prevailed in any cases that allege voter fraud or seek to overturn the election results.

"The key place to challenge election results is in state court election contests. Trump and his allies brought a few and lost because he did not have evidence of any error or wrongdoing in any state that could have affected the results," said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. "Those cases are hard to win by design, and so Trump and his allies shifted to other suits, such as those in federal court, making legally dubious claims."

Pre-election cases not all about Trump

Trump and his allies have only won one lawsuit since Election Day. But what about those filed prior to Nov. 3?

We looked at each of the lawsuits that Droz noted as a victory for Trump on their merits, dating back to March 2020. Among them are cases like RNC v. Miller and Texas v. Hollins, which blocked election officials from prepopulating mail ballots with voter information and sending applications to all registered voters. Other cases are not directly about Trump or his claims about mail ballots, such as a federal court’s decision to stay an injunction that delayed Arizona’s voter registration deadline by 18 days.

"What we are trying to do is to identify all lawsuits related to the 2020 presidential election," Droz said. "In other words, these are not all directly about Trump. For example, most of them have to do with things like whether modified state election laws were changed legally."But some of the cases Droz counted as wins for Trump and the GOP aren’t directly related to the general presidential election. 

For example, Jefferson v. Dane County, filed in late March, sought to order an election official in Wisconsin to remove a Facebook post about the proper use of "indefinitely confined" status for voters requesting absentee ballots. Ritchie v. Polis, filed in May, had to do with whether a petition to put a measure on the ballot in Colorado had to be signed in the presence of a ballot circulator during the coronavirus pandemic.

Among Droz’s tally of wins for "Trump and/or the GOP plaintiff," the Trump campaign was a complainant on four successful election lawsuits, two of which were filed prior to Nov. 3. 

Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said, numbers aside, the focus on cases decided on their merits paints a misleading picture of the Trump campaign’s election litigation. 

"The procedural dismissals aren’t all small things," Levitt said. "Some of them are bad lawyering. But some of them are dismissals, because Trump supporters tried to challenge laws well over a year after they were passed, well after ballots had gone out to eligible voters who had the right to rely on the fact that the ballots they were receiving were lawful, and well after the election was over." 

Our ruling

The Epoch Times wrote Feb. 7 that Trump won "two-thirds of election lawsuits where merits (were) considered."

That claim is not literally true. The Epoch Times revised its headline after we reached out.

Trump and his allies have won one lawsuit related to the results of the 2020 election, and that case did not prove that widespread voter fraud affected the outcome. Judges across the political spectrum have rejected dozens of other cases filed after Nov. 3 that sought to overturn the election. Just because a case is dismissed on procedural grounds does not mean it wasn’t duly considered.

While the body of the Epoch Times’ story contains some of that nuance, its previous headline did not. We rate it False.

Right Wing Extremism and The Epoch Times in Atlantic Canada

In recent weeks, many residents in Atlantic Canada discovered free copies of The Epoch Times in their mailbox. The Epoch Times is a  newspaper, widely considered to be far-right, based in New York, which publishes articles many consider to be conspiracy theories, often addressing concerns about the Chinese Government.

It is unclear why this American publication is being distributed in Atlantic Canada, though it is evident that right-wing extremism surged in Atlantic Canada following the 2016 American election of Donald Trump. 

According to UNB sociologist David Hofmann, 2016 was a turning point which saw right-wing extremist movements grow around the world. A research team working with Hofmann identified 29 active right-wing extremist groups in Atlantic Canada, including the Proud Boys and the Northern Guard.

Hofmann’s research shows that from 2016 on, right-wing extremist activity increased each year, culminating in 40 incidents in 2019. The research identifies activities including protests, vandalism, and violence. 

According to Hofmann, many of these groups brand themselves as “good old Canadian boys,” yet, “in private circles, they're virulent, hateful and so on, so forth.”

In April 2020, CBC reported that postal carriers were being forced to deliver The Epoch Times paper to Canadians in several provinces, despite the paper containing headlines falsely claiming that COVID-19 was a biological weapon with links to the Chinese Communist Party.

The Epoch Times was created in May 2000 and now publishes in 21 languages. Today it publishes video content catering to a conservative audience, addressing issues regarding Trump, China, the Falun Gong religious movement, and what they see as a rise in socialism in the United States. 

According to a report by NBC News, The Epoch Times has amassed over 3 billion views across a variety of streaming platforms, ranks 11th in views among video creators across major platforms, and outranks all traditional publishers in video content.

The creator of The Epoch Times, John Tang, is a member of Falun Gong, a Chinese new religious movement founded in the early ’90s. The publication has drawn significant media criticism for publishing what has been called “propaganda” for the Falun Gong. 

Falun Gong believes the moral decay of the Chinese Communist Party will culminate in a “Dharma-ending period” akin to a religious judgement day during which those who Falun Gong believes to be “communists” are punished.

In 1999, the Chinese Government initiated a crackdown on Falun Gong, calling it an “evil cult” in the country’s largest official newspaper People’s Daily. This label is disputed and rejected by the Epoch Times, which deems it “slanderous and discriminatory”. Due to perceived persecution from the Chinese Government, many Falun Gong members immigrated to the United States, forming ex-patriot communities. The Epoch Times management has denied direct association with the religious movement. 

“The paper’s not owned by Falun Gong. It doesn’t speak for Falun Gong,” stated the publication. 

In recent years, the paper focused its attention on articles portraying U.S. President Donald Trump in a positive light. The Republican party has shown close interest, and potential connection, to the Epoch Times, with many featured in online videos and frontpage stories. Jasper Fakkert, the Editor-in-Chief of The Epoch Times, stated that Donald Trump frequently reads the paper and believes it to be “a truthful and correct paper.”

“We see the Trump administration’s efforts to change socialist policies in America…[and] if fully realized, will benefit America and the world as a whole,” stated Fakkert. 

Editor’s Note: 

This article has been updating following contact from individuals who felt it was “one sided.” The Epoch Times identifies as “an independent, non-partisan media outlet.” The original article included reference to the Epoch Times Editor-in-Chief as a Republican party candidate, and mention of an Epoch Times headline claiming that COVID-19 was a biological weapon of the Chinese Communist party, both of which were incorrect. The Epoch Times story on COVID-19 did ask "is the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan an accident occasioned by weaponizing the virus at that [Wuhan P4 virology] lab."

Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon Are Flooding the Zone With Hunter Biden Conspiracieshe

Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon Are Flooding the Zone With Hunter Biden Conspiracies

Media properties tied to an exiled Chinese billionaire are behind waves of disinformation in the lead-up to the election.

BY NICK ASPINWALL | NOVEMBER 2, 2020, 1:57 PM

Amedia network linked to Steve Bannon and his billionaire funder Guo Wengui has continued to act as a breeding ground for false stories about Hunter Biden, which have metastasized into wild claims repeated by mainstream commentators and broadened online attacks on a Texas-based Chinese dissident already in hiding after Guo’s followers congregated outside his home.

GNews, an outlet of Guo and Bannon’s GTV Media Group, has published numerous false stories about Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, operating as a nexus for the spread of alleged sex tapes by aggregating content from a popular YouTube streamer with ties to Guo. It was also an early source of unsubstantiated rumors that the Biden family hid business dealings in China—fictions that were eventually repeated by President Donald Trump during the second presidential debate.

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Twitter confirmed that it had suspended Guo-linked accounts that spread the rumors, but the exiled Chinese businessman and his media properties remain a hub for the explosively viral spread of disinformation.

Weeks before the New York Post published its Oct. 14 series of stories on the contents of Hunter Biden’s so-called hard drive, allegations of multiple hard drives that would incriminate Biden were broadcast on Sept. 25 by Lude Media, a YouTube channel run by the dissident streamer and Guo ally Wang Dinggang. They were then shared by Twitter accounts linked to GNews and to Guo and Bannon’s Himalaya movement, according to a story in the Daily Beast, along with Bannon himself, who boasted on Dutch TV in late September that he had Hunter Biden’s hard drive.

Wang is close to Guo and has been photographed with Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, but that’s not the only evidence he was involved in the spread of the Biden rumors. On an Oct. 13 Lude Media livestream, broadcast hours before the Post ran its stories, Wang and a fellow analyst said the Post would likely publish the contents of the hard drives the following day.

Twitter accounts linked to Guo have continued to spread an array of escalating false claims about Biden, including Pizzagate-esque rumors of child abuse that also originated with Wang and Lude Media, along with false stories about the Biden family’s dealings with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “They’re trying to imitate tactics used by QAnon,” inflating conspiracy theories until their evolution becomes unstoppable, said Keenan Chen, a researcher for the misinformation-tracking nonprofit First Draft who has tracked the spread of the Biden rumors.

The release of the alleged sex tapes, which also claim to show Hunter Biden using drugs on a visit to Beijing, were spread by followers of Guo in an Oct. 24 Twitter campaign coordinated in a Himalaya movement Discord chat group. Members of the group tweeted links to the tapes once they were published on GNews and gave each other instructions to tag prominent political influencers throughout the spectrum, according to a source with knowledge of the group’s activities. If a group member was suspended, they were told to immediately use another email to create a new Twitter account, the source said.

Twitter confirmed that it recently suspended numerous accounts linked to Guo, GTV, and Guo and Bannon’s Himalaya movement, including accounts involved in spreading the sex tape rumors, for violating the site’s platform manipulation and spam policy. It declined to say how many accounts it had banned or which tweets triggered the suspensions.

It may have been too late. Discussions of the alleged sex tape, along with baseless claims of child abuse, quickly became “very visible on English-language social media,” Chen said. By the evening of Oct. 24, the actor and far-right influencer James Woods had referenced the story and accused Twitter of censoring it. Many others followed.

The Biden rumors have reached a fever pitch in the days before the election. Many of the most potent claims have roots with anti-CCP and far-right actors, including the Falun Gong-backed Epoch Times. The CCP critic Christopher Balding—who was behind a discredited brief on Hunter Biden’s business dealings commissioned by a far-right editor, Mark Simon, at the Hong Kong-based Apple Daily—appeared on Bannon’s podcast to share his claims. Wang was a key driver of the brief’s virality on Twitter, where it was shared by right-wing influencers including Newt Gingrich.

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Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon (right) greets fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui

Guo Wengui Is Sending Mobs After Chinese Dissidents

Steve Bannon’s billionaire funder claims to be a foe of the Chinese Communist Party, but his targets are fellow exiles.

ARGUMENT | NICK ASPINWALL

“It does seem clear that there is a concerning nexus developing between anti-CCP conspiracy theories and other conspiracy theories like QAnon,” said Elise Thomas, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who independently investigated the Balding report.

Bannon has notoriously said the key to dealing with media is to “flood the zone with shit”—and Guo’s money has given the former Breitbart editor in chief a prime position in a disinformation network that has not only derailed public discourse but has begun to be weaponized by Guo to target other dissidents whom he vowed to “eliminate.”

Guo fled China when his patron, Vice Minister of State Security Ma Jian, fell from grace within the CCP in January 2015. He quickly joined forces with Bannon, launching a self-proclaimed government-in-exile before Bannon was arrested by U.S. federal agents on Guo’s yacht off the shores of Connecticut on fraud charges.

In April, the pair launched GTV Media Group, a media company that says it is dedicated to exposing the truth about the CCP. The company is currently being investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for potential misuse of $300 million of funds from investors.

Despite his proclaimed anti-CCP agenda, Guo’s actions have garnered vast speculation about where his loyalties truly lie. A consultancy firm hired in 2018 by a Guo-affiliated company accused him in court filings of being a “dissident-hunter”—claims that a lawyer for Guo has denied. There have even been private questions raised about Guo’s allegiances in conservative political circles themselves, according to the dissident pastor Bob Fu.

Lately, however, Guo has lived up to that moniker. In late September, around the time Guo-linked outlets began disseminating disinformation about Hunter Biden, the businessman launched his own array of attacks, urging his followers to gather outside the homes of Chinese dissidents he branded as “traitors” spying for the CCP. Groups of protesters spread flyers and chanted in the driveways outside the homes of Fu and his fellow dissident Wu Jianmin, causing Fu and his family to leave their Midland, Texas, home under police protection.

Guo’s anti-dissident campaign appeared unrelated at first—he had railed against Fu and the dissident artist Ai Weiwei as early as January—but the Fu and Biden conspiracies have somehow converged within the rabbit hole. On Oct. 27, Lude Media and GNews first shared an alleged screenshot of an email from “Bob Fenet”—said to be a pseudonym for Bob Fu—to James Biden, the nominee’s brother.

The evidence presented is incredibly shaky, but pro-Guo accounts immediately began sharing the alleged email, accumulating thousands of likes and retweets.The evidence presented is incredibly shaky, but pro-Guo accounts immediately began sharing the alleged email, accumulating thousands of likes and retweets. “Breaking news from #LudeMedia,” one tweet from the pro-Guo account @John316_truth read. “Bombshell email!! Bob Fenet is Bob Fu!! The phony pastor, real CCP spy who pretends to be a Republican but in the pants with the #BidenCrimeFamily #LaptopFromHell.”

Twitter removed tweets about the email on Friday morning after an inquiry from Foreign Policy. The company confirmed that it had removed the tweet from @John316_truth for violating its private information policy. Other tweets containing the screenshot and mentioning “Bob Fenet”—whose details have been lifted from social media profiles of a real person apparently residing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—remain on the website.

Fu’s own Twitter posts have been bombarded by Guo followers accusing him of being part of a vast conspiracy to elect Joe Biden. This has come as a surprise to Fu, himself a conservative evangelical and Trump supporter who has close ties to prominent Republican politicians and faith leaders and whose nonprofit organization, which provides legal assistance to Chinese victims of religious repression, is widely respected in Washington. The rumors “show how low and desperate the Guo/Bannon group would go in order to have the CCP interfere in the U.S. election,” said Fu, who told me he is worried by the vitriolic online comments accusing him of being part of a Biden conspiracy.

The rumors may start as typo-filled, radical QAnon-like nonsense. This has not slowed their virality. Unlike QAnon, which started on 8chan and spread for years through the internet’s annals before making its way to Facebook and Twitter, the Guo-backed spread of Hunter Biden conspiracies has gained momentum on mainstream platforms—leaping easily from there to the lips of conservative commentators and House members.

The conspiracies—and their hardcore anti-CCP themes—have proved attractive to some Chinese exiles as well, including well-known figures like the soccer star Hao Haidong, who show up to Guo’s rallies, call in to Bannon’s podcast, and donate to the pair’s myriad ventures. In the paranoid political culture of the CCP, underhanded business dealings and brazen power grabs are ordinary occurrences. It makes wild Biden rumors more believable to Chinese in the United States, who share them in closed WeChat groups that are both incredibly influential and nearly impossible for independent observers to monitor.

Guo and Bannon have also shaken the preelection conversation among the Chinese diaspora and among Chinese-speaking voters, both inside and outside the United States. Hunter Biden rumors have erupted in Taiwan, where Apple Daily has published allegations that a Taiwanese businessman acted as his business broker in both China and Taiwan.

Guo’s campaign against Fu has intensified speculation of the businessman’s true motives, which, according to the pastor, had gradually picked up steam for years among conservative policymakers in Washington.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz accused the CCP of being behind the attacks on Fu. So did Sam Brownback, Trump’s religious ambassador, who said Friday that the CCP was orchestrating the “harassment of US citizen Pastor @BobFu4China, defender of religious freedom, and others on American soil.”

Commentators have speculated that Guo, who has himself been the target of Chinese-backed online harassment campaigns, could be hedging his bets to protect relationships he maintains within China. His true motives, along with Bannon’s knowledge of them, have become their own bottomless well of speculation. The U.S. presidential election is a day away, and, just as it was in 2016, the zone is flooded with shit.

How will Miles Kwok be disposed of after Biden becomes President?

  The new year has passed by like always, but with fewer people celebrating on the street.some people did rejoice outside though, we dared not. After all, life matters. We have to stay at home and have some fun with ourselves. Then a question just popped out of my mind: Now that Biden has sworn in as the President, how will he deal with the Chinese fugitive Miles Kwok(aka Guo Wengui who was active in supporting Trump during the presidential election)? Are there any bystanders like me who are curious about this?

Miles Kwok has done quite a lot of ridiculous things since he fled to the United States to run away from China's arrest. Especially after his entanglement with Bannon, a variety of tricks emerged one after another, such as GTV, Gnews, "Take Down the CCP", "Whistleblower Movement" and "New Federal State of China". For Kwok, it seems that his day is in vain without stirring up any news. 

I can't figure out why Bannon was willing to work with Miles Kwok.Bannon was a successful financier who once worked for Goldman Sachs,an adviser to Trump for election and a former senior official of the Trump administration. More importantly, he was a thorough nationalist who never concealed himself a white supremacist or a far-rightist. However, Kwok was a dishonest and unscrupulous liar, a profit-oriented businessman who failed, a fugitive wanted by Interpol, a yellow race in the eyes of white people, and a minorityin America. Generally speaking, Kwok should be the object of Bannon's disdain and vomiting. But they seem to be good "faithful allies". How can Bannon think so highly of Kwok?

Definitely,the answer lies in the fact that they found the common interest and reached a tacit agreement for mutual benefit. Kwok, who regards Bannon as a supporter of his stay in the United States, is quite loyal to Bannon. There is no doubt about that, while considering Bannon, atypical proud red neck, became a "faithful pal" with Chinese, I have every reason to question the sincerity of their friendship. In the final analysis, Bannon is more likely to treat Miles Kwok as a pawn for his overall anti-China and anti-Communism attempt.

So in recent years, as long as you turn on your mobile phone, computer, or log on Twitter and Facebook, there will always be several tweets related to Kwok and Bannon. In luxury villas and yachts, wearing a suit and leather shoes, facing the camera with fine red wine and champagne, they talked about the so-called "inside scoop" and "black curtain" of China and the Communist Party of China. Nevertheless, time revealed their untruthfulness and tricks at last.

However, Kwok and Bannon are still addicted to their "Whistleblower Movement". In 2020, a new member, Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's lawyer, joined them, and the year 2020 happened to be the year of the presidential election, so it became more heated and noisy. How can we say that? Bannon and Giuliani are both Trump's senior "faithful fans", and it is undoubtedly an outstanding achievement to offer advice for the boss's election campaign and help him get re-elected. Therefore, they would unquestionably seize this opportunity.

Given western people's inflexible way of thinking, we can guess that Kwok, who is smart, flexible and skilled, finally proposed the idea of "whistleblowing to help win the  re-election". Before that, the "Whistleblower Movement" had been adhering to the route of "Whistleblowing China and overturning the Communist Party", then it suddenly switched to the new model of "overturning America, overturning the Democratic Party and overturning Biden".

The tactic is assured already, Kwok and Bannon were familiar with the following action of "whistleblowing". After all, they have been skilled in making fake disclosure since their alliance. In late September, Lude, a core member of Kwok and Bannon's "Whistleblower Movement" team and a celebrity Internet blogger, released the news that there were three hard disks containing astonishing scandals about Biden's son, Hunter Biden. It included evidence of Hunter's secret trade deals in China and Ukraine, as well as the videos of Hunter's drug abuse and sexual abuse, which attracted the attention of many voters. On the eve of the election, Kwok and Bannon published several sexual videos and photos of Hunt through GTV. They also said that Biden and his son shared huge funds from China with Obama to prevent him from speaking about the militarizing in the South China Sea. Then, some media’s follow-up reports triggered a new wave of uproar among voters, which indisputably brought great harm to Biden's election.

Nowadays, it is quite well-known that Kwok and Bannon jointly interfered the US presidential election by fabricating fake news to help Trump's re-election. John Pan, a core member of their "Whistleblower Movement" team, has even publicly defected, exposing to the media that Kwok and Bannon's spreading fake information about Biden and his son was actually an attempt to influence the presidential election.

From Biden's point of view, without Kwok and Bannon's interference or destruction on the eve of the election, his vote rate might have a more significant advantage over Trump's, and might avoid the deadlock which made the 80-year-old man worried about the election situation every day for a long time. If you were Biden, what would you do to Kwok and Bannon after assuming the office?

As to Miles Kwok, he has lost his game in gambling on Trump's re-election to consolidate his living space in the United States, and his wishful thinking utterly vanquished. He would have to face Biden's revenge after he became President. We believe that Biden and his advisers have figured out 100 ways to deal with him. Will he throw Kwok into the US prison through FBI investigation or send him as a gift back to China for trial, or send him back to China to continue jail service after being jailed for some time in the United States?