This past spring, veteran religious right activist Kelly Kullberg was busted for operating one of the most massive social media astroturfing campaigns ever uncovered. She operated a network of 24 Facebook pages with names like “Christians for Trump,” “Blacks for Trump,” “Catholics for Trump” and “Teachers for Trump.” They made it appear that their diet of right-wing bile had massive support among the American people. But in truth, they were all “projects” of organizations run by Kullberg.
Two weeks after Snopes unmasked Kullberg’s deceit, all 24 pages vanished. Additionally, the Websites for three Kullberg organizations went down for “maintenance” and have never returned. From the looks of it, Kullberg felt the walls closing in and decided to cut and run.
Well, it looks like another right-wing fake news peddler may need the same treatment. Namely, The Epoch Times, the rabidly pro-Trump “news” site.
In case you missed it, on Thursday, religious right activist Jim Garlow took to Facebook to confirm what a lot of people suspected—the most rabid fundies believe rolling back abortion and marriage equality are so important that they must go all-in for Trump.
Garlow took part in a gathering of Trumpvangelicals at the White House on Tuesday, and included a link to coverage of that gathering from an outfit known as “The BL.” I took a peek, and it looked like an especially rabid pro-Trump news site.
I figured this was one outfit to watch, so I decided to get more information on what made them tick. But a search turned up a Snopes investigation from October that revealed some too-close-for-comfort ties between BL and Epoch Times.
For one, the BL uses at least one server that is registered to the Epoch Times’ Vietnam subsidiary—a server registered long after BL’s holding company was incorporated. Moreover, Trung Van, a director of BL’s holding company, includes on his contact information an email address for NTD TV, a television station that, like Epoch Times, has close ties to the Falun Gong movement. Van was also the CEO of Epoch Times’ Vietnam unit.
BL is registered to an address in Middletown, New York, west of Poughkeepsie. That same address is owned by Falun Gong’s Sound of Hope Radio Network. A significant number of BL writers are either former or current Epoch Times writers.
Now why does this matter? Well, Epoch Times was banned from advertising on Facebook earlier this year for repeatedly doing end runs around Facebook’s rules on political transparency. The BL has built up a pretty large social media presence. Between them, 22 BL-associated Facebook pages have some 28 million followers. One has to wonder, at the very least, if BL is an Epoch Times sockpuppet. Indeed, Snopes concluded that, at the very least, BL was being “less than forthright” about its links to Epoch Times.
Even without the links to Epoch Times, BL and its personalities have displayed some pretty problematic behavior. Several BL personalities run Facebook pages and groups under the BL umbrella, in many cases without proper disclosure. That’s almost the same blueprint that Kullberg used.
Sadly, it looks like we may be seeing more of this as the 2020 cycle ramps up.