A newspaper, a religion and a dance troupe producing misinformation

Billboards have sprung up across the nation with a simple message in bright colors: “#1 Trusted News: TheEpochTimes.com.” The text is accompanied by a photo of an unidentified everyman.

Problem is, there’s not a shred of data to back up that bold claim. The Epoch Times hasn’t been rated as the No. 1 trusted news sources by any outside measure. It is pure publicity.

In reality, The Epoch Times traffics in misinformation, partisan politics, lies and propaganda. The media company behind it is associated with the religion Falun Gong and a performing dance troupe, Shen Yun.

What do a newspaper, a religion and a dance troupe have in common?

Epoch Media Group is an international multi-language media company. In addition to the newspaper and news website, Epoch Media Group also operates New Tang Dynasty Television.

The Epoch Times has websites in 35 countries but is blocked in China. The publication was founded in Georgia by John Tang, a Chinese American practitioner of Falun Gong and current president of New Tang Dynasty.

The first print edition of The Epoch Times was published in New York (in Chinese only) in April 2000, and the online edition followed in August 2000. In 2003, The Epoch Times launched an online edition in English, which began printing as a newspaper in New York in 2004. The Epoch Times now wields one of the biggest social media followings of any news outlet — published in 21 languages, in 33 countries and with a huge following among anti-vaxxers and the far right.

The Epoch Times opposes the Chinese Communist Party, supports far-right politicians in Europe and Donald Trump in the United States. A 2019 report by NBC News showed it to be the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign itself.

The rise of The Epoch Times parallels the newspaper’s decision to become an advertising arm of the Trump campaign. Articles frequently feature an array of pro-Trump conspiracy theories.

Promotion from Epoch Times website

During the Trump administration, the company’s revenue increased from $3.9 million to $15.5 million. Catering to MAGA, the media outlet marketed itself primarily through targeted social media advertising. Facebook has been the largest contributing factor to disseminating the pro-Trump messages of The Epoch Times.

For example, the company pushed Trump’s Spygate conspiracy theory. Spygate consists of Trump claiming President Barack Obama planted a spy to conduct espionage on Trump’s presidential campaign. The site’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 planned to take down the Trump presidency.

The Epoch Times managed to fill Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia article with dubious claims about his business dealings in Ukraine and his father Joe Biden’s involvement. The Epoch Times has been a consistent 2020 election denier. The newspaper publicized the January 6 Trump rally in Washington, D.C., that led to the storming of the Capitol. The newspaper also has been a consistent anti-COVID vaccine proponent.

The Epoch Times looks like a newspaper and operates as a newspaper, but this newspaper is not interested in news, facts or truth.

An Oriental religion with uncomfortable ties to American evangelicals

Behind the scenes, the media outlet’s operation is closely tied to Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual community with the stated goal of taking down China’s government. Falun Gong belongs to the new religion movement. It was founded by Li Hongzhi in China in the early 1990s. The religion’s global headquarters is located in Deer Park, N.Y., on a 427-acre compound known as Dragon Springs 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.

Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi in a photo from a group supporting the religion.

Li lives among hundreds of his followers near Dragon Springs.

Former practitioners of Falun Gong told NBC News 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.

Li has ranted against what he called the wickedness of homosexuality, feminism and popular music while teaching he is a god-like figure who can levitate and walk through walls. Li also has 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.

Li’s writings also display an interest in the paranormal, hinting that the pyramids might have been built by Atlanteans, or that there are humanoid populations living on the ocean floors.

While Li denies his movement is a religion, in the definitive study of Falun Gong, The Religion of Falun Gong, by Benjamin Penny, the movement is defined as a religion.

Penny says Falun Gong has a charismatic founder who is believed by his followers to be more than human, whose message will save humanity from the disastrous position in which it finds itself. He has a scripture and a moral code that he demands Falun Gong adherents follow or else their cultivation will not work. He teaches his followers should regularly perform a series of spiritual exercises and that they should meet together to read his scripture and share their experiences in the faith.

If it looks like a religion, talks like a religion and practices religion, it is a religion.

A true odd couple

How is it that Falun Gong and American evangelicalism have become such strange partners? How are two religions — separated by distance, time, culture, meaning and theology — so completely wrapped in opposition to every issue in the American cultural wars? And how are both these religions so completely devoted to Trump?

The Epoch Times and Shen Yun are the equivalent to evangelical television networks and megachurch worship services. Back of the glitter, glamor and beauty lives a dark cult of a false religion.

Oddly, the claims of Li Hongzhi are no more fantastical than those of some evangelical leaders. Paula White, Trump’s spiritual adviser, called on angels from Africa and South America to swoop in and bring victory to Trump in the 2020 election. She preached a fiery, emotional message where she spoke in tongues and repeated over and over: “Angels are being dispatched from Africa: right now, right now. I see victory. Victory. Victory. Victory. From Africa right now. From South America. They’re coming here. They’re coming here.”

The Falun Gong adherents “believe that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.” How is this different from evangelical Lance Wallnau claiming Trump has been anointed by God as the “new Cyrus” to save the nation from destruction?

Evangelicals known as INC prophets believe Jesus will return when Christians have conquered the “seven cultural mountains” — family, government, arts and entertainment, media, business, education, and religion. Even Falun Gong doesn’t go this far.

However, Falun Gong seems more like a cult with commonalities with other apocalyptic religious groups in the West and Japan, such as Aum Shinrikyō, Heaven’s Gate, the Solar Temple, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, and Jim Jones’s People’s Temple.

Falun Gong is a religion; a religious cult tied to Trump and MAGA.

Publicity photo for Shen Yun appearing at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Performances in glittering color: Shen Yun

Falun Gong’s dance troupe performed in 96 U.S. cities in 2019. The Shen Yun Performing Arts organization was founded in 2006, in New York’s Hudson Valley, and put on its first touring show in 2007. By 2009, there were three touring Shen Yun companies. Today, there are six companies, each consisting of 40 or so dancers, all of them trained at the Fei Tian Academy.

Shen Yun means “the beauty of divine beings dancing.” (It can also be translated as “the rhythm of a divine spirit,” or, more simply, “God’s melody.”)

More than a million people have spent good money to watch religious-political propaganda hidden in living color and exquisite dance routines. At its best, Shen Yun is an elaborate commercial for Falun Gong’s spiritual teachings and its persecution by the Chinese Communist regime.

The propaganda of the religious cult goes unnoticed but is recorded in the subconscious minds of attendees.

Likewise, The Epoch Times has moved into a galaxy pushing facts, truth and news out of its normal orbits and inserting millions of new pieces of misinformation to float around disguised as the truth.

The Epoch Times, Shen Yun and Falun Gong have become the “idea” launderers of a world of lies and misinformation. Bad ideas are now laundered by a legitimate-looking media corporation, religion and dance troupe.

A biblical character may seem an odd place to conclude an investigation of a newspaper called The Epoch Times. But I end with Pilate, a cipher for all imperial power, because he asked of Jesus a question that is the most epic question of our age: “What is truth?” Pilate responds the way the world must respond when it is confronted, that is, with worldly cynicism.

If we enable the “post-truth” age to dominate our critical faculties, we will be susceptible to newspapers like The Epoch Times, religions like Falun Gong and political evangelicalism, and entertainment venues like Shen Yun.

Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 10 books, including his latest, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy.