Front Burner - Grift, Disinfo, Fraud? What happened at The Epoch Times?

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

We dive into the wild story behind The Epoch Times, a fringe conservative newspaper turned right-wing propaganda machine with ties to a mysterious dissident Chinese meditation movement. What are its aims? How did it become one of the biggest pro-Trump ad spenders and a destination for the likes of Candace Owens and Conrad Black?And what will happen now that its CFO is charged in a $67-million money laundering scandal.NBC disinfo reporter Brandy Zadrozny explains.Help us make Front Burner even better by filling out this audience survey.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Today, we're going to tell you the truly wild story of the Epoch Times. If you're not familiar, let me give you some of the highlights.

This is a news organization, and I say that with air quotes, run by a mysterious, quasi-relreligious dissident Chinese meditation movement. In recent years, it has wedged itself into the right-wing media ecosystem as a massive backer of Donald Trump and spread conspiracy theories, including a bunch around the 2020 U.S. election. Think Dominion voting machine, Arizona rigged election stuff. They also peddled a bunch of misinformation about COVID and dipped into QAnon. There's a lot of anti-China stuff thrown in the mix too. Their content has huge reach. I am talking billions of views. The New York Times has called it one of America's most powerful digital publishers. has called it one of America's most powerful digital publishers. Now, adding to all of this,

last week, federal prosecutors alleged that the company was also committing financial crimes. Its chief financial officer has been charged in a $67 million money laundering scheme. There is a lot to pull apart here. So I am joined by Brandi Zadrozny. She's with NBC News, and she has been following the Epoch Times for years. We're going to talk about what this company is all about and whether the latest allegations could put an end to it. Hi, Brandi. Thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner. Thanks for having me. Such a pleasure. I am so looking forward to this conversation. Let's start at the very beginning. The Epoch Times is not a new publication of Swert, so maybe you could tell me its origin story and

its connection to the dissident meditation movement, the Falun Gong. Sure. So the Falun Gong were expelled from China. It's, like you said, a sort of dissident religious group. It sort of blended these practices of meditation, Taoism, and put them in an easy package that anybody could follow and learn quickly. You'd see all these people in the park doing these lovely, graceful exercises. Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is an advanced self-cultivation practice. By 1999, with over 100 million practitioners, Falun Dafa had grown to become the largest practice of its kind in China and around the world.

China clamped down on that in the 90s and persecuted a lot of people, put a lot of people in labor camps. It was, you know, not a great thing. Some people fled to America, including Master Li Hongzhu, who is the leader of the Falun Gong movement and lives in upstate New York now with the Shen Yun Dance Tribe. Master Li's promises reach into the supernatural. Followers will see through walls. People who practice his beliefs will develop a third eye.

Practitioners will fly. But when they came to America, they said, you know, okay, we need to start doing something to give ourselves some good PR basically. And so they started this newspaper in Georgia and then in New York that if you were ever in New York or if you've been to New York in the last couple of decades, you would see these bright yellow newspaper boxes with free newspapers in them. And that was the Epic Times. And it would have, you know, pretty blatantly anti-Chinese communist party propaganda in it. And then it would have, you know, your basic, there's a parade in New York City, or just like your basic stuff. And they'd have even like AP

wire stuff. And so it was this newspaper that was really a propaganda arm of this religious movement. And that's how it started. Take me through that trajectory of Major Groke, like essentially how this, you know, newspaper handed out for free on New York street corners came to be where it is now? Sure. Well, part of that was just growing its number of employees. And those employees were mostly volunteers from the Falun Gong movement. So they had this office in Midtown Manhattan, and it was all Falun Gong participants. But around 2015, when they decided they needed to grow, they started employing American journalists. And what they did was they sort of brought them up into their mid-Manhattan offices, and they

seated them in a U-shape, and they had them churn out articles. And these articles were clickbaity, but they were also within the realm of conservative news. So everything was very pro-Trump. Everything was very anti-LGBTQ. that they had to write about the Pulse nightclub shooting without using the word gay, which was a very difficult thing to do. And so they, it was, it was the conservative viewing views of the, this very conservative religious movement, um, wedged in with conservative values and the current modern Republican party. And that meant an alignment with Trump. And with that alignment, they started doing things like going to CPAC and purchasing tables at CPAC where they would interview GOP lawmakers. They started heavily pushing in funds into Facebook where they were the second largest advertiser of pro-Trump ads on Facebook right after Donald Trump himself. So they really

inserted themselves into the conservative movement successfully. Talk to me a little bit more about why Trump was so appealing to them. You know, you talked about conservative values, but would it also have had something to do with his position on China? It's a why not both situation, totally. You know, his tough talk on China, it was music to Li Hongzhu and his followers' ears. We can't continue to allow China to rape our country. They're taking our business. They're taking our jobs. China is wonderful, but they're getting away with murder. And so Li Hongzhu told his followers at the Epoch Times and, you know, at this, the television arm of it, which is new Tang dynasty television. He said that Trump is our guy basically, and we should support someone

whose values on China, but also on culture and on, you know, purity and, you know, conservatism, those all align with us. And so we should back him totally. And that's what they did. Take me through some more alleged that, you know, the Department of Justice and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were all sort of ganging up, trying to unseat Trump. Thanks for tuning in to Epoch News, folks. Thursday's announcement by Joe Biden that he is running for president has raised questions about what he as vice president knew about the spying on the Trump campaign under the Obama administration. And then what happened in 2020 was the world exploded and we got COVID, right? And then when you talk about that alignment again, you really got it

with COVID because suddenly now, you know, you had Trump calling it the China virus, the China flu. Some important developments in our war against the Chinese virus. It's a disease without question, has more names than any disease in history. I can name Kung flu. I can name. And then you had the Epoch Times was parroting that and saying, yes, they were an early, early adopter of the idea that COVID escaped from a Chinese bioweapons lab. And so a lot of the anti-COVID, COVID denial, blaming China for COVID, that originated really with the Epoch Times. My name is Joshua Phillip. I'm an investigative reporter at the Epoch Times in New York,

writing about the Chinese Communist Party's programs of espionage and unconventional warfare for well over a decade. The paper recently produced this documentary about the origin of the virus. It pushed so many debunked theories, Facebook flagged it as false information. As the years went by, even, you know, post the initial COVID, they have also been huge proponents and purveyors of the idea that vaccines are somehow dangerous. Again, that aligns with the conservative, you know, feeling of our body is pure. Falun Gong followers believe that any sickness can be healed from within by believing and meditation and thoughtful prayer. And so you'll have lots of Falun Gong practitioners have fallen ill or died and because they haven't

sought that medical care is a common criticism from ex-devotees. And so with COVID, you just saw an uptick in a lot of that magical thinking or conspiracy theory culture. They also have a wide variety of really interesting, very far-right takes. The coverage is incredibly anti-trans. A lot of anti-LGBTQ culture war articles. This is all coming from the top, the major corporations, governments, politicians. You have a pipeline. It's also in the education system. These kids are just living scientific experiments at this point. It is an experiment. We're sterilizing a generation who will not be able to have their own kids. And we're...

Do those issues also align with their sort of quasi-religious beliefs? Well, they, again, align with Donald Trump. And, you know, it has to be said to just make it very clear that although the Epoch Times and the leaders of the Epoch Times constantly say that they are not associated or affiliated with Falun Gong, this is just a lie. They absolutely are.

Their financial documents show that all of their executives, for instance, are the same across all of these platforms. You see employees are all the same across all of these platforms. platforms. You see employees are all the same across all of these platforms. They're all sister networks between Shen Yun, Epoch Times, and NTDTV, and they all share money. Having said that, you have to remember that the purpose of Falun Gong is that they believe that Master Li is a god. And so this is really, when Master Li says that Trump is going to save the world, he doesn't mean it theoretically. It's not a metaphor. It's literally salvation for them, which might also explain their diehard commitment to Donald Trump and the current Republican Party. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo.

50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I just want to pick up on one thing you said. You talked about Shen Yun and NDT TV and and and how they're kind of like sister arms of epic times and just flesh that out for me what are they?

Sure so there are three arms to the Falun Gong media empire and it's what master Li Hongzhu calls our media and the first arm of that is Shen Yun, and that is the wildly successful dance performance, dance troupe that tours the United States. Experience art with 5,000 years of history. Inspired by the divine. Experience Shen Yun. It claims to be conservative, classical Chinese culture.

And if you've ever watched it or read about it, what it is, is it's a kind of ballet of the idea, the history of Falun Gong and what they believe. The end of it is Master Li flying across the stage to save the world. And they rake in, you can't ride a New York subway without seeing an advertisement for one. It's very, very popular in part because volunteers are required to buy tickets in their city and it is a religious duty of them to sell those tickets. So, you know, they have very willing and excited promoters in every single city in the U.S. I think people here might also remember seeing those advertisements, you know, maybe posted around Toronto or somewhere else. And then the New Tang Dynasty TV arm is their media production arm. And for a while, that was really related. There was actually a channel that New Yorkers could go to, and it was mostly in Chinese language. And it was for people who were new to the country, new expats, to become assimilated to American culture. That's what the 501c3 documents contend. But what

happened in 2015, 2016 and beyond is that it really became a pretty flashy, well-funded and well-employed, well-staffed group of people who were more like documentary filmmakers, and they made all kinds of films and YouTube series. And my favorite one was one of their correspondents, Roman Balmakov, I believe. He had this series where he, went and talked to farmers all across America to suggest that the United States and the global world powers were executing this big plan to make people eat bugs. The government wants to control the food, so we don't eat meat, but we eat insects or something like that. We can put insects in all bugs. Burgers, pasta, bread, sportage. So it's stuff like that.

So it's stuff like that. That's what the second arm does, the NTD TV arm does. And then the third arm, of course, is the Epoch Times. And for a while, the Epoch Times was sort of the redheaded stepchild in the group. It made the least amount of money. It was, you know, this little piddling free newspaper. But times have really changed in recent years. And, you know, most recently, I think in 2022, they had something like $121 million in revenue. So I remember getting their recent, their recent tax filings.

And I was just like, wow, they have done it. They've answered the question of how to make a newspaper profitable. I don't want to get too far ahead, but up until last week, how did we think that they were making that money? Where was the revenue coming from? Well, there was always a question because we knew a couple of things. We knew that subscriptions had increased because we could tell from internet usage statistics, we could tell through, you know, com score and things like that, that they were getting increased, increased revenue or web traffic, and they were behind a paywall now. So that was sort of new. So benefit of the doubt, like it was a crazy time post-COVID and they just got tons of subscriptions.

They were doing a crazy push for subscriptions using physical newspapers again. So you would see newspapers delivered on your front door from Florida to the Carolinas to California to the UK to Canada. And they were really targeting seniors. So they were saying that it was because of subscriptions that they were getting this huge fundraising, this huge revenue gain. And because the companies work the way they work and, you know, taxes work the way they work, you kind of just have to take them at their word. People might remember here in 2020, there was all this news about people getting sort of unsolicited issues of the Epoch Times just delivered to their homes. And, you know, like we were talking about, the front page would be calling

COVID-19 like the CCP virus, blaming the pandemic on the Chinese Communist Party. This postal union representative was so upset by this front page of the Epoch Times that he filed a special request to ask that postal workers not deliver it. We feel the front cover is promoting xenophobia towards the Asian community. It also could put some of our Asian letter carriers at risk the minister rejected that request so definitely you know um there was a push right to spread its reach in internationally um but of course as you mentioned uh you know that's what we knew about their finances until news came last week and and what do we learn and and how might it fit into you know what we've been

talking about here oh my gosh um if the allegations are true and you know they're just allegations at the moment um it's just such a wild brazen plan um that knowing what I know about the epic times, I'm not, I'm not surprised, I guess, but I'm still like, I impressed. I don't know. There's something that's just like, wow. Um, so apparently, allegedly, um, in the last few years, the, the C Bill Guan, has been running this team through a foreign office. And allegedly, according to the U.S. government, this team is called the Make Money Online team. And what they were doing... You know what? That's good. That's a good thing to call your team. I know. I mean, it's just... Why not like the I don't, why not like the do crimes team? Um, I don't know, but God bless them. So they, Bill Glon and who's the

CFO of Epic times, allegedly he buys or the team buys tens of thousands of debit cards. And these debit cards are loaded with, um, prepaid amounts of money, which is somehow illegally got. They don't really say in the indictment. It says it gives one example, this unemployment insurance benefits scam. And so all these prepaid cards are loaded with this fraud. And this team takes the fraudulent money on this on the prepaid cards and then um sells it in a cryptocurrency exchange for something like 70 80 cents on the dollar and then takes all that ill-gotten money

and then puts it back into u.s bank accounts belonging to the epic times um and then apparently the banks were like oh this is this is obviously fraudulent money. These are obvious scams. You should stop that. And then Bill Gwan said, no, it's from online donations. We're just very, very popular right now. And it's from our supporters and subscriptions. That explanation just did not work.

It did not fly. The banks flagged them for fraud, and then the government came knocking. And, I mean, we should probably say the Epoch Times is saying that Guan is innocent, right? And that he is suspended until this matter is resolved, but that the company would cooperate with any investigation into the allegations against him. Indeed. Just to put a point on what we were talking before, the accusation here is that this helped to juice up their revenue numbers, right? Right. I think they, like you said, something like 67 million

they brought in. And which, I mean, again, I wrote about this in 2023. And I think the reason that I wrote this story is because I was looking at the tax documents and I was like, this cannot be like, how does a newspaper get a 685% revenue boost in a, in two years? I just, I don't get it. I don't understand. And then, you know, we came to the conclusion that it must be the most powerful newspaper in the country. Um, oh, But this was another way to go. I will say that, I will say that, you know, from what I know of the Epoch Times, they have a documented history of being fast and loose with rules. You know, in 2019, we wrote about how they were making all of these fake accounts to circumnavigate Facebook's

advertising rules because they weren't saying who they were. They were sort of hiding behind these fake accounts. And when Facebook delete stopped their ability, they said, well, you're not going to be able to advertise anymore because you're breaking the rules. The Epic Times was like, okay. And so they just, again, created a whole new set of fake accounts. They used fake faces, fake images for accounts. They started putting Facebook ads for Donald Trump under the name Honest Paper and stuff like pure American journalism, stuff like that. Again, like very just sort of obvious. And, you know, then we'd write about it and Facebook would take them down again. And then they just jumped to YouTube and did the exact same thing. So they do have a real history of doing whatever they want in furtherance of their goals. Right now, how might these charges affect the Epoch Times moving forward? Because it is still kind of, it is currently operating as like a real juggernaut of the American right wing, right?

Like, it is still attracting lots of high profile right-wing figures um who are submitting to interviews you know robert f kennedy is a fan um so so so like what's happening to them right now especially now that we're heading into an election where uh donald trump is uh all but certainly going to be one of the two candidates. Yeah, I interviewed RFK when he said that. I was just like, all of my favorites coming together. It's like a real full circle moment for you, I'm sure. Yeah, the world coming together, full circle.

But it's really important when you think about, you know, what's going to happen. I don't know. And with this beat, it's hard to really predict because whatever I think is going to happen actually sometimes happens worse. So my imagination isn't big enough for this beat sometimes. But I do, I think it's important to think about a couple of things. One is that the Epic Times has spent the last year or so really, really, really spending money, spending money on ads, spending money on a new lease in California. They bought this very expensive new lease for a production studio. They've built up their global offices in Europe and Canada. And they've been on a hiring blitz too. So they've been hiring all these reporters, seeing all these job announcements on job boards.

And that needs money, right? And it will take real money to make that happen. And if the government comes and freezes a bunch of their money and, you know, freezes their assets or whatever it plans on doing that, those things will have to stall. But again, the second thing to realize and to really remember is that, you know, these aren't normal journalists who, you know, went to journalism school and are now, you know, using this job as a job and paying the bills. This is people who are on a spiritual mission. And so whatever happens, I think the mission will continue in some form or another. Brandy, thank you so much for this. It was really, really interesting. Appreciate it. My pleasure. All right, that is all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.