I rarely like to say I told you so when I’m right because it only makes me look worse when I am not, but this time it’s different. Our regular readers will recall my column, “History of Propaganda,” published April 4, and my follow-up column, “A Cult or Not a Cult,” published April 18, which took on the Shen Yun propagandistic performances and the Falun Gong religious cult. I am told it’s a fabulous show. Now the truth is being exposed, we find out how the whole enterprise of this cult and its Epoch Times newspaper is being funded– money laundering!
On June 2, the chief financial officer of the pro-Donald Trump conspiracy theories pushing publication, Epoch Times, was arrested and charged the following day on money laundering charges.
According to a June 3 released statement by the Justice Department, Weidong “Bill” Guan, the Chief Financial Officer of a multinational media company headquartered in New York City participated in a transnational scheme to launder at least approximately $67 million of illegally obtained funds to benefit himself and the media company.
Federal prosecutors said members of the company’s “Make Money Online” team, which Guan managed, used cryptocurrency to “knowingly purchase tens of millions of dollars in crime proceeds,” including funds from fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits that were loaded onto prepaid debit cards, according to federal prosecutors.
The Epoch Times was not named in the June 3 indictment, but instead was referred to as a “multinational media company.” The news organization, linked to China’s Falun Gong spiritual movement, said it would cooperate with the federal probe.
Prosecutors said the charges are unrelated to the media company’s newsgathering activities. And yet it seems vaguely similar to the scams perpetrated by other cronies of the Orange Felon.
Now I know times have been financially challenging for journalism recently, but the idea of money laundering has never really crossed my mind as a means of sustaining this publication or journalism in general. Perhaps it has something to do with integrity and transparency. Maybe I’m just too honest to partake in this kind of crime. But The Epoch Times and the Falun Gong care little for either, and would effectively steal or rob to support their far-right ideologies and their favorite criminally convicted politician, the Orange Turd, as he was famously called in a New York courtroom that convicted him of 34 counts of fraud.
Will the MAGA Locos now rise and defend the Falun Gong the same way they do their convicted leader? Just how far up the ladder will this indictment go to take down a far-right religious cult?
I’m wondering if some of those fraudulent pandemic California Unemployment payments ended up funding a religious far-right propaganda machine. Just when you think things have gotten too weird, stuff like this happens to rip the mask off the veneer of lies and we are shocked, shocked there’s corruption going on.
The cynics among you will say oh yes the whole system is corrupt but as the resident skeptic, I actually believe that most people are basically well-meaning and honest. I once witnessed the former LA mayor, Jim Hahn, walk half a block to return a five-dollar bill that fell from a patron’s pocket at the San Pedro Brewco. He just picked it up without thinking and caught up to the man. Can you imagine the patron’s surprise at having the mayor do that? The same thing happened to me recently when I pulled money out of my clip to pay for something and a fiver fell out unnoticed and a complete stranger handed it back to me. My point is not everyone’s corrupt but the few who are makes us all look bad. And the Orange Guy is a shining example to the world of what being a greedy SOB looks like.
Rachel Maddow reported Epoch Times has ties to Falun Gong, a religious spiritual movement from China that came to view Trump as a messianic figure who would deliver them from the Chinese Communist Party on Judgment Day. I suppose a biblical word of caution is needed here― beware of false messiahs. However, many of the white Christian nationalists who don’t read anything other than far-right propaganda probably won’t ever hear about a case like this as the story won’t be carried by Fox (so-called ) news.
Just to remind you the real purpose of really good propaganda is not to convince you of something but to bring about confusion about what is true and what is false. By providing a long list of false narratives, and repeating them incessantly, some people become confused and others just tune out because they are conflict-avoidant. Who really wants to argue with the MAGA Loco at the coffee shop spouting irrational lies as if they are God’s truth spoken by the Orange messiah from the pulpit of his latest political rally? I have long since ceased attempting rational conversation with deranged true believers.
The problem with this is that the political discourse becomes siloed within tribal factions – so much so that even the US Congress is divided and dysfunctional because the House Republican leadership cannot separate itself, nor can the Republican Party, from the Orange Prophet of corruption.
https://www.randomlengthsnews.com/archives/2024/06/13/remember-my-falun-gong-article/53602
