If you live on this earth, then the odds are pretty good you’ve seen a poster, pamphlet, or flyer for Shen Yun, a live show of traditional Chinese dance and music whose omnipresent advertisements became (and remain) one of 2019’s first big memes. If you’ve attended a performance you may have been entertained but also perhaps confused by some parts, like the “tsunami with the face of Karl Marx.”
So what do these bizarre performances have to do with climate change? We’re getting there, be patient!
As an incredible new investigative report from NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins details, Shen Yun is actually part of a concerted propaganda campaign carried out by Falon Gong, an anti-communist, anti-Chinese, anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-medicine, and anti-pop-music cult. Its leader, Li Hongzhi, lives in a compound in upstate New York with the Shen Yun troupe members, where “internet access is restricted, the use of medicines is discouraged, and arranged relationships are common.” (Disclaimer: Falun Gong maintains that it is not, in fact, a cult.)
The other main arm of their propaganda? The Epoch Times, a (supposed) newspaper that, while always being staunchly conservative, has taken a heavily pro-Trump turn in the past couple years. Lately it's gone even further, pushing a Q-anon lite type conspiracy the paper calls “spygate.” The theory alleges that Deep State efforts “to portray President Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.”
But along with those...unique...views, the Epoch Times has also long been a welcoming place for climate change deniers.
That makes it dangerous. The “paper” spent over a million and a half dollars on 11,000 pro-Trump ads that decry the “Deep State” and “fake news” on Facebook over the past six months alone. Between the Epoch Times and their video arm, New Tang Dynasty, the group has gotten 3 billion views across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, according to NBC, making it “11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher.”
It’s easy to laugh at some Falon Gong beliefs that are reflected in NBC’s story, like an insight from former practitioner Ben Hurley who said people in the group believed that “Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.” (Hurley detailed in a Medium post that he eventually left the group after watching fellow believers die from refusing medical treatment, and that he worked for a while at the Epoch Times, where they were all “paid in ‘virtue’ — a white substance in another dimension that you gain when you do good things.”)
But it's no laughing matter that the Epoch Times is teaming up with climate deniers. The paper produced this nearly 50 minute video with Myron Ebell. A search for “climate” on the website serves 150 pages of results, including uncritical coverage of Heartland’s latest denial conference (one of the few, if only, non-Koch outlets to cover that sad spectacle seriously) and op-eds from Heartland and others.
It seems then that deniers, largely expunged from most reputable media, have found a friend in the ultra-conservative, anti-communist rantings on the Epoch Times. With their ever-sharp skills of scientific skepticism, they don’t appear bothered by appearing in an outlet connected to a cult leader who told TIME in 1999 that “since the beginning of this century, aliens have begun to invade the human mind and its ideology and culture.” These “aliens come from other planets… some are from dimensions that human beings have not yet discovered” and have “introduced modern machinery like computers and airplanes.”
However, their “ultimate purpose” is to use cloning to “replace the human soul and by doing so they will enter earth and become earthlings” who “will act like humans, but they will introduce legislation to stop human reproduction.”
But Li Hongzhi also told TIME, in an impressive segue at the end of the interview, that “the abnormality in the climate today is” because “industry is creating invisible air pollution” and those “microparticles in the air” will “harm human beings.”
The only thing crazier than extra-dimensional aliens using computers, airplanes and human cloning to replace us is a denier’s claim that greenhouse gasses aren’t causing climate change.
Fortunately for deniers, the Epoch Times has no problem publishing crazy!
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
