2021.01.13大纪元时报》成为亲特朗普的宣传机器

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SHADOWLAND
MAGA-LAND’S FAVORITE NEWSPAPER
How The Epoch Times became a pro-Trump propaganda machine in an age of plague and insurrection ​​​​​

By Simon van Zuylen-Wood
JANUARY 13, 2021
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Photo-illustrations by Kibele Yarman*


The rural hamlet of Cuddebackville, New York, is home to a guru named Li Hongzhi, who calls his 427-acre compound Dragon Springs. At the center of the compound—a kind of timber frame Shangri-la—stands a massive replica of a Tang Dynasty temple. On March 19, 2020, Li wrote a message to his disciples titled “Rationality.” The message was about COVID-19, which was by then crippling New York City, 80 miles to the southeast. “Plagues and pestilence, by their very nature, are arranged by the Gods,” Li began. “When humans become corrupt in their hearts, they will generate karma, fall sick, and suffer calamities.”


Li gradually worked up to his point, referring to the Chinese Communist Party by its initials: The pandemic “has come with a purpose and with a target. It has come to eliminate the followers of the evil Party and those who go along with the evil CCP.” As a remedy, Li suggested a kind of social distancing: “At present, the hardest-hit countries are those that associate closely with the evil CCP, and the same goes for individuals. So, what can be done? Stay away from the evil CCP and don’t align with the evil Party.”

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A few months later, in July, I was clicking around on YouTube when something predictable happened: An ad popped up for the weirdly ubiquitous Epoch Times. Equally predictably, the ad starred a thin man with a hint of an Eastern European accent. He was enthusiastically leafing through the print edition of the newspaper, pointing at articles. When people stumble upon The Epoch Times, they usually find it through ads like this one, which in 2019 blanketed Facebook and have now migrated largely to YouTube. The pitchman—his name is Roman Balmakov, he’s 30, he went to high school in Ohio—is more recognizable than any of the publication’s writers.

The ad began with a smiling Balmakov peering out from behind the newspaper. “Hey,” he said, “I just read an unbelievable article in The Epoch Times.” He splayed the paper on a table, showcasing a news story headlined “The Mysterious Origins of the CCP Virus.” It suggested that the pathogen could have emerged, maybe purposefully, from a lab in Wuhan. (Nobody knows for sure, but most scientists believe that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans.) “It’s not just that,” Balmakov said, turning the page. “Look: an investigation into how the countries that have been most affected are the same ones that have been the most deeply infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party.” According to the investigation, Washington State’s early COVID-19 outbreak can be partly explained by the fact that Seattle was the first U.S. port to welcome Communist Chinese cargo ships, in the 1970s.


On the one hand, the paper was underscoring the possibility that China had covered up the true source of the virus, and perhaps even engineered it. This has become a common right-wing claim. On the other hand, it was suggesting that the virus was a divine instrument designed to punish the CCP and its supposed allies. A less common claim. If the assertions are contradictory, Roman Balmakov doesn’t seem to mind. They are, after all, coming from a higher power.

The Epoch Times is unreservedly pro–Donald Trump, and coverage of the newspaper tends to portray it as either a recent entrant into the Trumpist media stable or a case study of Facebook-enabled misinformation. To an extent, it is both. Following Joe Biden’s election as president, the newspaper reconstituted itself into a vehicle for esoteric voter-fraud allegations. In Georgia, heading into the two January special elections  for the U.S. Senate, people affiliated with the newspaper materialized to stick copies under car windshields. Balmakov himself now has his own YouTube channel, Facts Matter, devoted to the notion that the election is not over; in less than two months, the channel has amassed more than 400,000 subscribers.

The newspaper, whose revenues have quadrupled in the Trump years, has used every opportunity to call Biden’s victory into doubt. It has interviewed promoters of election-related falsehoods ad nauseam and eagerly publicized the January 6 Trump rally that turned into an insurrection at the Capitol. Even after the violence of January 6, The Epoch Times has continued to publicize doubts about the outcome of the presidential election. One of its columnists postulated that the riot was a “false flag” operation.


But conventional descriptions of The Epoch Times don’t adequately capture the singular mix of straight news, religious belief, conspiracy-peddling, Sinophobia, science denialism, legitimate grievance, and political expediency at the heart of the institution—a mix that, despite the paper’s mysteries, makes it a strangely fitting poster child for this unsettled moment.

The epoch times was founded in 2000 by John Tang, an Atlanta-based follower of the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, whose members you might have seen doing meditative exercises in parks, and whose living messiah is Li Hongzhi, a cherubic-faced man generally shown wearing dark suits. The movement, which claims to have millions of adherents, encourages believers to abandon lust, greed, alcohol, and other worldly “attachments.” Some of the more unusual characteristics of its outlook include a distrust of medical doctors and a belief in malevolent, Earth-roaming aliens who created impious technology (such as video games). In 1999, the Chinese government concluded that Falun Gong was growing too popular. Beijing labeled the movement a cult and suppressed it. But Falun Gong flourished abroad among the Chinese diaspora, and its teachings took on a fervent anti-Communist bent.

The Epoch Times has sought to maintain a certain distance from Falun Gong, and its right-wing politics come across, at first glance, as no more cultish than those of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s old Washington Times. For  a decade and a half, the paper’s affiliation, like its politics, hardly mattered. Even as it established outposts around the world—now in 36 countries—The Epoch Times occupied a position of near irrelevance. Its name, absurdly redundant, managed to sound dull and bogus at once. I’ve walked by Epoch Times newspaper vending machines on countless occasions, never pausing to grab a copy. Each display was an anti–Pandora’s box, stifling any curiosity to open it.


Recently, though, Balmakov started showing up in everybody’s social-media feeds. The paper had begun supporting Donald Trump, and in 2019 The Epoch Times had launched itself into the higher echelons of conservative media: By the end of that year, according to Facebook, the newspaper, together with a network “linked” to the Epoch Media Group (which publishes The Epoch Times), had spent some $11 million in advertising on the platform. Republican A-listers appeared on its YouTube shows, right-wing pundits in its print pages. Its web traffic spiked. The Epoch Times can currently claim the most popular Apple newspaper app in the country (The New York Times is No. 2).

The newspaper was distinguishable from more inflammatory outlets by its staid prose and original reporting, and by offering features such as recipes (“Meet Your New Favorite Pizza Topping: Salad”) and a Goop-ish lifestyle section. The affiliated television network, New Tang Dynasty (NTD), with 30 million Facebook followers, has the sterile look of a satellite-news channel you might find on TV in a European hotel. Watching, I’d sometimes zone out to a human-interest story about synthetic hamburgers, or to the weather report.

But there was no predicting when the content would get weird. Hyper-suspicious of centralized government, it takes the notion of the “deep state” for granted. It has extensively promoted the false claim that the Obama administration spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, which segues neatly into its refusal to accept the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. Doppelgänger sites such as Vision Times and America Daily—reportedly launched by or populated with former Epoch Times figures—have leavened far-right content with gentler offerings (about, say, classical Chinese paintings). A series on the occult, Edge of Wonder, became a firehose of content about QAnon, amplifying its foundational proposition that Washington is run by a pedophile cabal. The show—which was produced by NTD but later claimed to be independent—was recently scrubbed from YouTube. (The Epoch Times has denied any involvement with these sites.) Last summer, I became a print subscriber to The Epoch Times—for $16.90 a month, the paper is delivered to my home every Wednesday. I noticed at the back of each issue a deadly new installment in an 18-part series on the far-reaching tentacles of communism. From installment No. 7: “As expounded previously, sexual chaos is an innate feature of communist ideology. Marx is believed to have raped his maid.”


Beginning in 2020, The Epoch Times gained new resonance. For years, its anti-communism had seemed oddly beside the point. Then a deadly pandemic emerged in China, where the government muzzled whistleblowers and covered up the virus’s early spread. “They’ve been waiting for so long to find some large-scale evidence of the abject villainy of China,” one former NTD employee told me. “Now COVID comes along and checks off all the boxes.” Suddenly, The Epoch Times’ wall-to-wall coverage of the “CCP virus” was being amplified across the American right. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who recently sat for an interview with the paper, pushed the hatched-in-a-lab theory. Trump called the virus “a real bad present” from China.

More broadly, ambitious Republicans like Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton are now among the most prominent China hawks in Washington. And while The Epoch Times’ editorial product can be absurd, the paper is not exactly wrong to home in on President Xi Jinping’s incarceration of ethnic minorities or his crackdown on Hong Kong.

While John Tang remains chief executive of The Epoch Times and NTD, little else is known about the management of these organizations, and outside journalists are not granted access to the newsroom. (I reached out to numerous Epoch Times staff members, none of whom replied; the publisher declined to be interviewed, but the newspaper provided answers to some questions via email.) The syndicated columnist Salena Zito, whose writing appears regularly in The Epoch Times, told me she hadn’t known that the paper ran her columns at all. “How do you pronounce that place anyways?” she asked. (Balmakov says “epic” but others say “e-pock.”)


Reporters, poking around, have unearthed intriguing connections: a documentary co-­produced with Steve Bannon; a donor who worked at the secretive hedge fund run by the Breitbart benefactor Robert Mercer. It’s probably best, though, to understand the publication through a spiritual lens. Along with Falun Gong’s anti-­CCP dance troupe Shen Yun, whose gauzy, beguiling subway advertisements have become an inescapable part of urban life, The Epoch Times is a key component of a soft-power portfolio, one whose product, if you buy in, promises to save your soul.

Two years ago, Balmakov addressed a crowd of thousands at Capital One Arena, in Washington, D.C. Falun Gong was holding its annual conference, headlined by Li. Balmakov had been invited to the podium for an “experience sharing.” Every day, he told the crowd, he woke up at 3:30 a.m. to deliver a 60-pound haul of The Epoch Times around Manhattan. One day, he had an out-of-body experience, seeming to float 40 miles above the pavement. “I saw good meet with good,” he said, “and evil meet evil. I also saw that our newspaper was a shining golden light.”

Li hongzhi was born 68 years ago in Jilin, a province in northeastern China. His early years were undistinguished, if intriguingly varied. He is said to have worked as a grain clerk, a hotel attendant, and a trumpet player for a kind of forestry-police band. (Li’s biographical details tend to come from his followers or the Chinese government, so it’s hard to know what to believe.) In the 1980s, he became deeply invested in the then-booming Chinese exercise practice known as qigong, and he later quit his job at a cereal company to devote himself to it.


In 1992, he founded Falun Gong, a mash-up of qigong and his personal philosophy: L. Ron Hubbard by way of Daoism. The movement’s motto is “Truthfulness, compassion, forbearance”—innocent enough, although Li’s forbearance does not extend to homosexuality, premarital sex, or, as noted, modern medicine. The path to salvation involves Li planting karmic “wheels” into the abdomens of his followers; the extra-devout can accrue powers such as telepathy.

The Chinese government tolerated Falun Gong for a while, even as state media occasionally published critiques of its anti-medicine dogma. In response to official criticism, Li’s disciples staged peaceful protests—culminating in a fateful 1999 sit-in in Beijing, attended by 10,000 disciples.

Within months, the party banned Falun Gong outright. It also published anti–Falun Gong comic books, ran bulldozers over the group’s instructional videos, and called for the arrest of Li, who was by then living in New York. Reports began to emerge from China about the imprisonment and torture of Falun Gong members, and about the widespread harvesting of their organs for transplantation. In the West, many observers found the persecution baffling, and Falun Gong became a bipartisan cause célèbre. So what if Li Hongzhi believed that David Copperfield could truly levitate? His peaceful followers surely didn’t deserve to suffer.


When The Epoch Times appeared on the scene, in 2000, the newspaper carried more anti-Communist and organ-harvesting content than your typical right-of-center publication. (Human-rights advocates have found some organ-harvesting claims credible, though it’s also true that Li has instructed his followers to emphasize their persecution to elicit sympathy.) But in general, Falun Gong’s efforts at broader influence were mostly welcomed. Among other things, the group won acclaim for developing two technologies, Ultrasurf and Freegate, designed to help mainland Chinese bust through the Great Firewall.

Meanwhile, Li sought to make a mark in the realm of high culture, turning his Dragon Springs compound into a dance academy for the children of Falun Gong followers. (An accredited prep school and college came later.) The dancers would go on to perform with Shen Yun, whose shows offer a pastiche of “traditional” dancing, puritanical tut-tutting, and anti-Communist admonition, along with torture pantomimes—performances strikingly reminiscent of the CCP’s own propaganda ballets. A few years ago, Li advised special attention to the rich in its marketing of Shen Yun. As he told one group, “You put up ads in poor communities, and that’s like throwing money out the window.” When Shen Yun made its Lincoln Center debut, in 2011, the New York Observer was there for the boldfaced names: Salman Rushdie, Donna Karan, Ric Ocasek.


In 2016 came a promising new opportunity for Falun Gong, in the form of Donald Trump. For the first time in decades, a major party’s presidential nominee was running an overtly protectionist campaign, with China in his crosshairs. Falun Gong came to see Trump as a kind of killer angel, summoned from heaven to smite the Chinese government. The Epoch Times ramped up its spending on Facebook ads and hitched its wagon to the 45th president. In 2018, it hired a Texas-based GOP consultant, Brendan Steinhauser, who helped arrange for appearances at high-profile right-wing conferences and booked otherwise ungettable interviews.

In short order, the newspaper lost the liberal goodwill it had accumulated in the post-crackdown period. But it gained a new cohort of conservative readers with a reflexive suspicion of China. The timing couldn’t have been better.

A significant share of Falun Gong practitioners in the U.S. are Chinese Americans. But the most prominent faces on Epoch-affiliated outlets are young or middle-aged white men. I once wrote an article on the Russian-backed media outlet RT and found it to be populated with naive reporters who didn’t realize what they’d signed up for, or who couldn’t find jobs elsewhere. Was that the case here?

In early July, I called the main phone number listed on The Epoch Times’ website. The newspaper had not responded to emails. I got an automated message saying that, because of an increase in subscriptions, the paper was experiencing unusually high call volume, and nobody was available to answer the phone. I biked to West 28th Street in Manhattan, where The Epoch Times and NTD share part of a building. The pandemic-stricken city was ghostly, but I figured workaholic editor types might be coming into the office anyway. The Epoch Times often includes pictures of its editor in chief, Jasper Fakkert, and its publisher, Stephen Gregory, so I knew what they looked like. I parked myself across the street and sat on a curb, watching the door.


I didn’t see Fakkert or Gregory, but I did see a steady stream of 20- and 30-somethings coming in and out of the building, as if COVID-19 had never happened. I didn’t know for sure whether they were Epoch Times employees, so I climbed the stairs to find the office. I arrived at a foyer to see two women gaping at me. Behind them, through a glass partition, was a humming newsroom, like nothing I’d seen since shutdowns began, several months earlier. The two women told me I wasn’t allowed to be there. I didn’t want to be there myself: Neither woman was wearing a mask. I went back down the stairs.

I managed to get in touch with a lapsed Falun Gong member in her mid-20s who had worked for The Epoch Times in pre-Trump days. She requested anonymity because she still has family in Falun Gong. The most important thing to know about the paper, this source told me, was that virtually all of its staffers were Falun Gong adherents. Her mother, who is of Chinese descent, joined Falun Gong more than a decade ago, after seeing Shen Yun, and soon started selling ads for The Epoch Times. My source began interning for the paper in high school. A few years later, she dropped out of an elite liberal-arts college and returned to work there full-time. Commuting from her home in an outer borough, she would arrive at the office around 7:30 a.m. As they would outside the office, staffers were encouraged to close their eyes for 15 minutes every six hours and “send forth righteous thoughts.” The Epoch Times’ coverage was ecumenical; my source mostly covered apolitical stories. But ultimately the paper’s mission was to grow. Promoting Falun Gong was central. I was recently forwarded an email sent in 2016 by an editor named Cindy Drukier, urging her colleagues to promote the paper’s exclusive tell-all by a drummer and Falun Gong practitioner named Sterling Campbell, who had played with David Bowie. “This is one of our highest-potential articles ever,” Drukier wrote. (Bowie had recently died.) “Perhaps Bowie’s entire career and superstardom was all for this moment.”


I had read that the paper, in its fledgling days, was staffed by volunteers. My source, who worked unpaid for several years, eventually received a salary of about $20,000 a year. (The Epoch Times says all staff are paid.) To save on rent, some staffers worked other jobs, lived with their parents, or shared cramped apartments. Ben Hurley, an ex-believer and a former Epoch Times staffer in Australia, wrote in a Medium post several years ago that he and his colleagues were paid in “virtue,” a “white substance in another dimension that you gain when you do good things.”

For a brief period in 2016, a half-dozen nonpractitioners—a category also referred to as “sentient beings”—were hired as reporters. But for the most part, the newspaper appears to bring in Falun Gong practitioners to do the work. (The Epoch Times disputed this, without elaborating.) “A lot of these guys are kind of hippies,” my source said. “They just picked up a pamphlet like anyone else.” Once inside either The Epoch Times or NTD, they have tended to shuffle from one to the other and from job to job. Ben Chasteen, a co-host of Edge of Wonder, had studied massage therapy at the American Institute of Alternative Medicine. Before hosting his own show, he was a staff photographer. Jan Jekielek hosts the marquee interview program American Thought Leaders, but I have also seen him identified as the newspaper’s PR contact.


Because Falun Gong adherents spend countless hours of personal time delivering newspapers or handing out flyers for Shen Yun, working for The Epoch Times or NTD is as much spiritual practice as it is a career choice. I spoke with another lapsed Falun Gong member, in her 20s, whose immigrant East Asian parents joined when she was a toddler (and remain practitioners). This second source, who also requested anonymity because of her family, told me that she spent virtually every weekend of her childhood demonstrating against the CCP or handing out Falun Gong literature. One winter, she was stationed outside a “Bodies” museum exhibit in Philadelphia, which believers suspected was filled with Falun Gong remains. Another time, she helped stage torture scenes in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, using cages and fake blood.

In her late teens, she went to work for NTD. She told me she had been taught that nonbelievers’ souls were shrouded by an evil aura, which could be lifted when a practitioner “clarified the truth” about the righteousness of Falun Gong or the sins of the Communist Party. (Communists go to hell.) “It’s explained like an actual battle,” she told me. “Arrows are coming out of your mouth,” shooting at the evil inside nonbelievers. The best way to do this, she went on, is at scale—by producing a YouTube segment or bringing friends to see Shen Yun.

The paper’s roster of op-ed writers appears to be made up of non–Falun Gong and features prominent conservatives, such as the New Criterion editor Roger Kimball. One opinion writer, Mark Hendrickson, a retired economics professor at Grove City College, in Pennsylvania, told me he was under no illusions about the paper’s objectives. “They’ve probably done some research into, well, what do Americans want to read?” he said. “Instead of just being anti-Communist, they’re a paper that tries to be well rounded.” It seems noteworthy that few of its Asian journalists are given a prominent showcase. For years, the publisher, Stephen Gregory, has insisted that The Epoch Times “doesn’t speak for” or “represent” Falun Gong, but merely covers Falun Gong persecution. That seems hard to believe. This summer, I came across a trove of Li’s speeches, translated and transcribed on one of Falun Gong’s English-language websites. Li speaks at length about the newspaper’s role in exposing the “wicked CCP,” then fields questions about various Falun Gong—or “Falun Dafa”—activities, including the management of “our media.”

Which project would be best suited for saving the sentient beings of Africa? Shen Yun? New Tang Dynasty TV? Or Epoch Times?
Master: (Laughing) Use whichever one has matured.

In some areas, the person in charge of the Dafa Association is in charge of many things at the same time, such as The Epoch Times, NTDTV, the Dafa Association, and truth-clarification project groups.
Master: Indeed, that’s the way some areas are. If it really is due to lack of manpower, then there is nothing to criticize. With some areas, it is really problematic, though. Even I’m thinking: if someone could take my place, I wouldn’t work on Shen Yun.

I found another kind of testimonial on Falun Gong websites, too: cathartic accounts in which adherents testified to the brutally long hours they put in at The Epoch Times. Presented in the third person, they convey the Job-like doubt and sacrifice of their subjects. One of these accounts reported on the experience of a believer named Ivan Pentchoukov, whose byline I recognized from the print edition of The Epoch Times. Pentchoukov had been working off and on at the paper for eight years, but frequently grew discouraged. “One time he successfully sold many Shen Yun tickets,” the article said, which motivated him to return to The Epoch Times. “He decided to give up working on his PhD degree, and, despite his parents’ strong opposition, went back to work for” the paper. Later, needing money, he found work as a taxi driver. “Again he realized he couldn’t save people effectively that way. ‘Many times I couldn’t lift my hand and give the passenger a flier.’ ” He returned to the paper. After that, “miraculously, all his troubles were resolved.”


O

n january 25, 2020, seven months before his indictment for defrauding investors in a private border-wall scheme—to which he has pleaded not guilty—the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon started broadcasting a podcast from his rowhouse on Capitol Hill. Bannon called it War Room: Pandemic. The U.S. had only a couple recorded cases of COVID-19 at that moment, and Europe had hardly any. Nobody in authority was paying much attention, and Bannon recognized that this was a mistake. “You may not have an interest in the pandemic,” he warned, “but the pandemic has an interest in you.”


The first outside reporter Bannon summoned for the podcast was Simone Gao, a writer for The Epoch Times and the host of Zooming In, an NTD show. Gao said she had been watching clip after clip on Chinese social media of doctors and ordinary citizens testifying to the gravity of the situation. Meanwhile, Gao said, state media were running saccharine coverage of Chinese New Year festivities. Two weeks later, Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who issued some of the world’s earliest warnings about the pandemic—and whom Chinese authorities forced to confess to “making false comments”—died of the coronavirus.

Bannon had an existing relationship with The Epoch Times. In 2019, NTD co-produced and aired his docudrama, Claws of the Red Dragon, loosely based on the Chinese telecom company Huawei, which has been accused of stealing intellectual property (charges that it has denied). While Trump himself, amid trade negotiations, was still praising Xi’s COVID-19 response and minimizing the virus, Bannon saw the pandemic through the lens of the Trumpian nationalism he had helped to mold. From his perspective, the same country that was siphoning U.S. jobs and threatening U.S. economic dominance had produced a deadly virus that globalization was inevitably bringing to American shores. The Epoch Times, for reasons of its own, shared Bannon’s alarm.


Joshua Philipp, a melancholic 30-something with a thatch of thick black hair, is an Epoch Times star. The range of the stodgy print newspaper can be limited; YouTube is another story. Philipp hosts a YouTube show mostly about China called Crossroads. In early April, Philipp hosted a 54-minute documentary, Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus, that cast doubt on the narrative that COVID-19 first jumped from animals to humans in a Wuhan wet market. Well-produced, the documentary features moody B-roll video of Philipp researching late into the night and riding the subway around Manhattan.

The film is typical of The Epoch Times, which sometimes asks valid questions—are we 100 percent sure about the provenance of the virus?—before derailing. Most of the film’s commentators are China hawks, not medical experts. The first half of the documentary explores whether the virus’s genome sequence suggests that it leaked out of a lab. By minute 40, it’s running footage of gas masks on assembly lines and citing a 2015 study about Beijing’s bio­weapons capability. By minute 50, one of its talking heads says, “The real disease here is communism.” At the end of the film, Philipp is at the Lincoln Memorial, channeling Falun Gong sentiments: “I believe that viruses can’t survive where hearts have compassion.” The movie, which has racked up some 9 million views, was the first major entrant in the coronavirus-truther genre that took off last spring.


China coverage has been The Epoch Times’ most prominent calling card, but under-the-radar measures may have spurred the paper’s growth. A few months ago, one of the lapsed Falun Gong women I spoke with sent me a link to a YouTube skin-care channel with more than 2 million subscribers—Beauty Within, hosted by a pair of influencers named Rowena Tsai and Felicia Lee.

The channel had nothing to do with politics or China, and bore no outward connection to The Epoch Times. Eventually, though, I discovered an NTD page promoting it, and after wading through a lot of beauty tips, found my way to an episode in which Tsai detailed her commitment to Falun Gong. (Lee, Tsai, and NTD did not respond to requests for comment.)

Diversification has become a hallmark of The Epoch Times’ promotional strategy. In 2019, after its heavy Facebook spending was revealed, The Epoch Times shifted tactics, spending roughly half a million dollars in a single month on ads from “sock puppet” pages like “Honest Paper” and “Patriots of America.” By the end of the summer, numerous accounts associated with the paper had been banned from advertising on Facebook. Meanwhile, the website Snopes had started reporting on an outlet called TheBL.com (BL stands for “Beauty of Life”), which had created hundreds of accounts, groups, and pages to promote pro-Trump, anti-CCP content. TheBL.com was created in 2016 by Trung Vu, then the CEO of the Vietnamese edition of The Epoch Times; its editor is the former editor of the English-language edition of The Epoch Times. In late 2019, Facebook banned the BL for using fake accounts. By then, Facebook said, the group had spent close to $9.5 million promoting itself, accruing 55 million followers worldwide. (The Epoch Times maintains that it only began advertising under different pages after Facebook, without explanation, prevented it from advertising under its own name. It denies any affiliation with the BL.)


Although his firm was hired to build the brand and boost print subscriptions, the consultant Brendan Steinhauser says he was not involved in the social-media carpet-bombing that has come to define The Epoch Times, and never got a solid picture of the paper’s finances. In 2019, the Epoch Times Association, the nonprofit under which the newspaper is lodged, brought in more than $15 million in revenue (compared with about $4 million in 2016), about half of which came from subscriptions. Whatever The Epoch Times’ financial situation, the publication’s bottom line pales in comparison to that of the more glamorous Shen Yun. In 2018, the most recent year for which tax forms are available, Shen Yun reported a profit of $26 million and net assets of $122 million.

In May 2020, the Daily Beast discovered a benefactor named Huayi Zhang on the IRS form of Universal Communications Network, the nonprofit that operates NTD. Zhang, who for several years in the 2000s served as chair of the network’s board, was a principal at Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund run by Robert Mercer. The link was suggestive, given that Bannon, a onetime Mercer ally, has a connection to NTD. (“I’d give them a number,” Bannon told The New York Times in late 2020, about his film budget. “And they’d come back and say, ‘We’re good for that number.’ ”) But the existence of a secret pot of Mercer money seems unlikely. According to the IRS document, Zhang and his wife donated $909,500 from 2012 to 2016—almost all of it in the years before Trump ran for president. Zhang also served on the board of another Falun Gong–linked organization, which perhaps points to a spiritual, rather than political, interest.


The zealotry of the labor force is also a key component of the business model. Falun Gong followers often donate not only their time but their cash; unsold Shen Yun tickets are bought by followers, who see the performances over and over. Ming Xia, a political scientist at CUNY Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island who studies Falun Gong, compares the group to a multilevel-marketing scheme, in which members recruit other members ad infinitum.

Eager for more insight, I tried again to infiltrate The Epoch Times. Falun Gong exercise sessions take place every day all over New York City. Most are outside, so the coronavirus was no real impediment. One day I checked out the 7 p.m. session closest to the newspaper’s offices, in Madison Square Park, figuring I might run into some familiar faces. No dice: There were three men and one woman, none of whom I recognized. I sat on a bench and watched the four of them for a while as they stood in place and moved their limbs around slowly. Tranquil music played from a speaker on the ground. Eventually I got up and walked over to grab a pamphlet. The woman, Asian, wearing ripped black jeans and gladiator sandals, was evidently the recruiter of the bunch. She broke off to intercept me. She told me her name and made it her mission to get me to join her. I demurred, asking if I could just watch from the bench. She responded that that would be very boring. I gave in.


The woman had me stand opposite her and mirror her motions. At first it was hard to concentrate, because a Black Lives Matter demonstration started marching through the park as soon as we began. I was being told to make a little bubble with my hands as protesters chanted “No justice, no peace, fuck these racist-ass police” behind us. Eventually the protesters passed through, and I spent 10 minutes learning qigong. “Dive into the water,” my instructor told me. “Your body should be like a mountain.” Placebo effect or real, I don’t know, but I did feel some tension lifting. My instructor told me I’d feel even more relaxed if I stopped chewing gum.

I was wearing a face mask. Nobody else was. I asked why. “We understand the virus very well,” my instructor explained. I wouldn’t quite comprehend this, she said, but she was protected by an energy field that activated once she began practicing.

I asked if the protective energy field extended to other people, such as me standing nearby. I didn’t get an answer. Instead my instructor asked, “Did you know the virus started in China?” I thanked her and returned to my bench.

According to Li’s central text, Zhuan Falun, ill health is a sign of insufficient “cultivation.” For a period of weeks this summer, I had seen news splashed across Falun Gong media about a jeweler in the Hamptons who developed COVID-19 symptoms in March and became very ill. A friend of the jeweler’s in Falun Gong urged her to repeat the phrase truthfulness, compassion, forbearance over and over. Miraculously, all her troubles were resolved. This case aside, the internet is full of alarming accounts of Falun Gong refusing medical care and succumbing to illness, and even dying. The ex-NTD source I spoke with told me that she decided to leave Falun Gong two years ago when, after she shunned medical attention, a ruptured ovarian cyst led to internal bleeding.


In late july, at the Trump International Hotel, in Washington, D.C., a rare COVID-19-era indoor political conference took place. It was called the Freedom Summit, and it featured a number of prominent Republicans, including Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton. Steve Bannon broadcast War Room: Pandemic live from the event.

One of the few journalists there was The Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek, wearing a navy suit and an orange polka-dotted pocket square. He must have been delighted by what he heard. Despite the bland name, it was really a forum for the China hawkery that has emerged as a staple of the Trump years. For American Thought Leaders, Jekielek sat down with former Representative Dave Brat, now the dean of the business school at Liberty University. Rather than merely repeating “Wuhan virus” talking points, Brat spoke at length about a litany of Chinese transgressions, including the militarization of the South China Sea, TikTok’s surveillance capabilities, and, yes, organ harvesting. Brat said that his outrage at China had compelled him to rethink his commitment to free trade.

Maybe belonging to one faith-based community makes you predisposed to the magical thinking of another. Listening to the interview, it struck me that while Trump has been of use to The Epoch Times in recent years, it may not need him going forward. The Republican Party has in many ways moved in The Epoch Times’ direction. To the fixation on China, add the distrust of medical expertise, the belligerent nationalism, the taste for conspiracy theories, and the hysterical outcry at the specter of socialism. The difference is that the same issues that many in the GOP exploit opportunistically, The Epoch Times embraces earnestly. The newspaper tends to regard its penalization by tech platforms, or critiques of its journalism, as predictable extensions of the actual censorship it faces in China. (“You seem to have decided to assist the CCP,” a representative from the paper emailed me.) Flirtations with QAnon by pro–Falun Gong media make a kind of sense, too: The group is already receptive to the idea that powerful people in government might target the innocent in order to make use of their bodies.


Not long ago, I remembered that I was still paying for The Epoch Times. When I tried to cancel my subscription, the website put me through a gantlet, before presenting me with a last hurdle, like a final boss in a video game, in the person of Roman Balmakov himself. Before I could bail on the paper, there he was, wearing a brown vest and a red tie, in a short video I was urged to watch.

“Hey, you’re here to cancel, and that’s A-okay,” Balmakov announced. But he had a message for me first. “You’ve probably looked at the state of our nation, and you might not be feeling that optimistic,” he said. “I know the feeling as well.” Footage of what looked to be an antifa demonstration flashed on the screen. Balmakov ticked off a lengthening roster of ills—“worst of all, possibly the culprit behind everything else, the increasing dominance of socialist and communist factors within our society. We are a nation that is quickly becoming free in name only …That’s what pushes me to work harder, every single day.”

The day after Biden’s victory over Trump was announced, a Falun Gong website posted a brief poem by Li Hongzhi, titled “On the General Election.” His first public statement in months, it was reprinted on the front page of the next edition of The Epoch Times. “In this majestic universe, the communist devil is making trouble,” the poem began. “Fraud and corruption are harming a great nation.” Via email, practitioners were urged to help sway the results of the election by sending forth an extra 30 minutes’ worth of righteous thoughts a day.


*Photo-illustration images: Falun Gong / Miguel Candela / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Samantha Sin / Nicolas Asfouri / AFP / Getty; Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / AP; Flickr; YouTube

阴影之地
马加爵的最爱报纸
大纪元时报》如何在瘟疫和叛乱的时代成为亲特朗普的宣传机器

作者：Simon van Zuylen-Wood
2021年1月13日
分享
照片-插图：Kibele Yarman*。


纽约卡德巴克维尔(Cuddebackville)的农村小村庄是一位名叫李洪志的大师的家，他把自己427英亩的院落称为龙泉。在大院的中心--一种木制框架的香格里拉--矗立着一座巨大的唐代寺庙复制品。2020年3月19日，李克强给他的弟子们写了一份题为 "理性 "的信息。该信息是关于COVID-19的，当时它正在削弱东南方向80英里处的纽约市。"瘟疫和瘟疫，就其本质而言，是由神明安排的，"李开始说。"当人类的内心变得堕落时，他们会产生业力，生病，并遭受灾难。"


李克强逐渐说到他的观点，用中国共产党的首字母来指代它。这场大流行病 "是有目的、有目标的。它是来消灭邪恶党的追随者和那些与邪恶的中共为伍的人。作为一种补救措施，李克强建议进行一种社会疏导。"目前，受打击最严重的国家是那些与邪恶的中共密切联系的国家，个人也是如此。那么，可以做什么呢？远离邪恶的中共，不要与邪恶的党结盟。"

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几个月后的7月，我在YouTube上点击时，发生了一件可以预见的事情。一个奇怪的广告弹出，是无处不在的《大纪元时报》。同样可以预见的是，广告中出现了一个带着东欧口音的瘦弱男子。他兴致勃勃地翻阅着报纸的印刷版，指着文章。当人们偶然发现《大纪元时报》时，他们通常是通过像这样的广告找到它的，这些广告在2019年遍布Facebook，现在大部分已经迁移到了YouTube。广告人--他叫罗曼-巴尔马科夫(Roman Balmakov)，30岁，在俄亥俄州上的高中--比该刊物的任何一位作者都更容易被人认出。

广告开始时，一个微笑的巴尔马科夫从报纸后面探出头来。"嘿，"他说，"我刚刚在《大纪元时报》上看到一篇令人难以置信的文章。" 他把报纸摊在桌子上，展示了一篇标题为 "中共病毒的神秘起源 "的新闻报道。它表明，这种病原体可能已经出现，也许是有目的的，来自武汉的一个实验室。(没有人确切知道，但大多数科学家认为，病毒是自然从动物身上跳到人类身上的。） "不仅仅是这样，"巴尔马科夫说，翻开了这一页。"看：调查受影响最严重的国家是如何被中国共产党渗透得最深的国家。" 根据调查，华盛顿州早期爆发COVID-19的部分原因是，西雅图是美国第一个欢迎中共货船的港口，在1970年代。


一方面，该文件强调了中国掩盖了病毒的真正来源，甚至可能设计了它的可能性。这已经成为一个常见的右翼主张。另一方面，它暗示该病毒是一种神圣的工具，旨在惩罚中国共产党及其所谓的盟友。一个不太常见的主张。如果这些断言是矛盾的，罗曼-巴尔马科夫似乎并不介意。他们毕竟是来自更高的权力。

大纪元时报》毫无保留地支持唐纳德-特朗普，对该报的报道倾向于将其描述为特朗普主义媒体的新成员，或者是脸书支持的错误信息的案例研究。在某种程度上，它既是如此。在乔-拜登当选为总统后，该报将自己改组为深奥的选民欺诈指控的载体。在佐治亚州，在1月份的两次美国参议院特别选举中，与该报有关联的人在汽车挡风玻璃下贴上了报纸。巴尔马科夫本人现在有自己的YouTube频道 "事实真相"(Facts Matter)，专门宣传选举尚未结束的观点；在不到两个月的时间里，该频道已经积累了40多万订阅者。

该报的收入在特朗普时代翻了两番，它利用一切机会对拜登的胜利表示怀疑。它不厌其烦地采访与选举有关的虚假信息的推动者，并热衷于宣传1月6日特朗普的集会，该集会在国会大厦变成了一场暴乱。即使在1月6日的暴力事件发生后，《大纪元时报》也继续宣传对总统选举结果的怀疑。它的一位专栏作家推测，这次骚乱是一次 "假旗 "行动。


但是，对《大纪元时报》的传统描述并没有充分体现出该机构的核心是直接新闻、宗教信仰、阴谋论、恐中症、科学否认主义、合理的不满和政治权宜之计的奇特组合--尽管该报纸有很多神秘之处，但这一组合使其成为这个不稳定时刻的一个奇怪的合适海报。

纪元时报由约翰-唐创立于2000年，他是中国精神运动法轮功的亚特兰大追随者，你可能在公园里看到其成员在做冥想运动，其活着的救世主是李洪志，一个通常穿着深色西装的樱桃脸男子。该运动声称有数百万的信徒，鼓励信徒放弃欲望、贪婪、酒精和其他世俗的 "执着"。其观点的一些更不寻常的特点包括不信任医生，相信有邪恶的、在地球上游荡的外星人创造了不敬的技术（如电子游戏）。1999年，中国政府认为法轮功越来越受欢迎。北京将该运动列为邪教并予以镇压。但法轮功在海外的中国侨民中蓬勃发展，其教义呈现出狂热的反共倾向。

大纪元时报》一直试图与法轮功保持一定的距离，其右翼政治乍看之下并不比孙明月牧师的《华盛顿时报》更具有邪教色彩。十几年来，该报的隶属关系与它的政治一样，几乎不重要。即使它在世界各地建立了前哨站--现在在36个国家--《大纪元时报》也占据了一个几乎不相关的位置。它的名字荒唐而冗长，听起来既沉闷又虚假。我曾无数次路过大纪元时报的自动售货机，但从未停下来拿一份报纸。每一次展示都是一个反潘多拉盒子，扼杀了任何打开它的好奇心。


不过，最近，巴尔马科夫开始出现在每个人的社交媒体上。该报已开始支持唐纳德-特朗普，2019年，《大纪元时报》已将自己推向了保守派媒体的高层。根据Facebook的数据，到该年年底，该报与大纪元传媒集团（出版《大纪元时报》）的一个 "链接 "网络一起，在该平台上花费了约1100万美元的广告。共和党的明星们出现在其YouTube节目中，右翼专家出现在其印刷版上。其网络流量激增。大纪元时报》目前可以说是全国最受欢迎的苹果报纸应用（《纽约时报》排名第二）。

该报因其严谨的散文和原创性的报道，以及提供食谱（"认识你最喜欢的披萨配料：沙拉"）和Goop风格的生活方式栏目而有别于更具煽动性的媒体。其附属的电视网络 "新唐人"（NTD）拥有3000万Facebook追随者，其外观就像你在欧洲酒店的电视上看到的卫星新闻频道一样毫无生气。在观看时，我有时会专注于一个关于合成汉堡包的人类利益故事，或天气报告。

但无法预测内容何时会变得奇怪。它对中央集权政府过度怀疑，认为 "深层国家 "的概念是理所当然的。它广泛宣传奥巴马政府对特朗普2016年竞选活动进行间谍活动的不实之词，这与它拒绝接受拜登胜利的合法性的说法相吻合。二重奏网站，如《视野时报》和《美国日报》--据说是由前《大纪元时报》的人物发起的，或者是由他们组成的--用更温和的内容（比如，关于中国古典绘画）来充实极右派的内容。一个关于神秘学的系列节目 "神奇的边缘"(Edge of Wonder)成了关于QAnon的内容，扩大了它的基本主张，即华盛顿是由一个恋童癖集团掌管的。该节目由NTD制作，但后来声称是独立的，最近被从YouTube上删除。(去年夏天，我成为《大纪元时报》的印刷版订户--每月16.9美元，报纸每周三都会送到我家。我注意到，在每期报纸的后面，都有一个关于共产主义深远触角的18个系列的致命的新篇章。第7期："正如之前所阐述的，性混乱是共产主义意识形态的一个先天特征。马克思被认为强奸了他的女仆。"


从2020年开始，《大纪元时报》获得了新的共鸣。多年来，《大纪元》的反共产主义似乎奇怪地与主题无关。然后，中国出现了一种致命的大流行病，政府压制了举报人并掩盖了病毒的早期传播。"他们已经等了这么久，想找到一些大规模的证据来证明中国的卑鄙无耻，"一位前NTD员工告诉我。"现在COVID出现了，并勾选了所有的方框。" 突然间，《大纪元时报》对 "中共病毒 "的墙体报道在美国右派中被放大了。国务卿蓬佩奥最近接受了该报的采访，他推崇在实验室里孵化的理论。特朗普称这种病毒是来自中国的 "真正的坏礼物"。

更广泛地说，像参议员Marco Rubio、Josh Hawley和Tom Cotton这样雄心勃勃的共和党人现在是华盛顿最突出的中国鹰派人士。虽然《大纪元时报》的编辑产品可能是荒谬的，但该报对习近平主席监禁少数民族或镇压香港的做法并不完全错误。

虽然唐骏仍然是大纪元和新华社的首席执行官，但人们对这些机构的管理情况知之甚少，外部记者也不被允许进入新闻编辑室。 我联系了许多大纪元的工作人员，他们都没有回复；出版商拒绝接受采访，但该报通过电子邮件回答了一些问题）。联合专栏作家萨莱娜-齐托（Salena Zito）的文章经常出现在《大纪元时报》上，她告诉我，她根本不知道该报纸刊登她的专栏。"她问："无论如何，你是怎么念那个地方的？(巴尔马科夫说 "epic"，但其他人说 "e-pock"）。


记者们经过打探，发现了一些耐人寻味的联系：一部与史蒂夫-班农共同制作的纪录片；一位曾在布莱特巴特的资助人罗伯特-默瑟经营的秘密对冲基金工作的捐赠者。不过，最好的办法是通过精神视角来理解该出版物。与法轮功的反中共舞蹈团神韵一样，《大纪元时报》也是软实力组合的一个重要组成部分，如果你买了它，它的产品承诺会拯救你的灵魂。

两年前，巴尔马科夫在华盛顿特区的Capital One体育馆向数千名观众发表演讲，当时法轮功正在举行由李洪志主持的年会。巴尔马科夫被邀请到讲台上进行 "经验分享"。他告诉大家，他每天凌晨3点半起床，把60磅重的《大纪元时报》送到曼哈顿各地。有一天，他有一次灵魂出窍的经历，似乎漂浮在人行道上方40英里处。"他说："我看到善与善相遇，恶与恶相遇。我还看到，我们的报纸是一道闪亮的金光。"

68年前，李洪志出生在中国东北部的吉林省。他的早年生活没有什么特色，但也有耐人寻味的变化。据说他当过粮食员，酒店服务员，还在一个森林警察乐队当过小号手（李鸿章的传记细节往往来自他的追随者或中国政府，所以很难知道该相信什么）。20世纪80年代，他对当时正在蓬勃发展的中国气功练习进行了深入研究，后来他辞去了一家谷物公司的工作，全身心投入到气功中。


1992年，他创立了法轮功，将气功和他的个人哲学混为一谈。L.Ron Hubbard通过道教的方式。该运动的口号是 "真、善、忍"，虽然李洪志的 "忍 "并不包括同性恋、婚前性行为，或者如前所述的现代医学。救赎之路包括李洪志在其追随者的腹部植入业力 "轮子"；特别虔诚的人可以获得心灵感应等能力。

中国政府曾一度容忍法轮功，即使国家媒体偶尔会发表对其反医学教条的批评。为了回应官方的批评，李洪志的弟子们进行了和平抗议，最终于1999年在北京举行了有一万名弟子参加的决定性静坐。

几个月内，中国共产党彻底禁止了法轮功。它还出版了反法轮功的漫画书，用推土机推倒该组织的教学录像，并要求逮捕当时居住在纽约的李洪志。中国开始出现关于法轮功成员被监禁和折磨的报道，以及关于广泛摘取他们的器官进行移植的报道。在西方，许多观察家认为这种迫害令人费解，法轮功成为两党争论的焦点。如果李洪志相信大卫-科波菲尔真的能漂浮起来，那又怎么样呢？他的和平追随者肯定不应该受罪。


2000年，当《大纪元时报》出现在现场时，该报比典型的右派出版物刊登了更多的反共产主义和器官采摘的内容。(人权倡导者认为一些摘取器官的说法是可信的，尽管李洪志指示他的追随者强调他们受到的迫害以引起人们的同情也是事实）。但总的来说，法轮功为扩大影响所做的努力大多受到欢迎。在其他方面，法轮功开发了两项技术，即Ultrasurf和Freegate，旨在帮助中国大陆突破防火长城，从而赢得了赞誉。

同时，李克强还试图在高雅文化领域大展拳脚，将他的龙泉山庄变成了法轮功学员子女的舞蹈学院。(这些舞者后来在神韵演出，神韵的演出是 "传统 "舞蹈、清规戒律和反共训诫的混合体，还有折磨人的哑剧--这些演出让人想起中共自己的宣传芭蕾舞剧。几年前，李克强建议在神韵的营销中特别注意富人。他对一个团体说："你在贫困社区张贴广告，这就像把钱扔到窗外。" 2011年，当神韵在林肯中心首次亮相时，《纽约观察家》在那里看到了那些引人注目的名字。萨尔曼-拉什迪、唐娜-卡兰、里克-奥克塞克。


2016年，法轮功迎来了一个充满希望的新机遇，那就是唐纳德-特朗普的出现。几十年来，一个主要政党的总统提名人首次开展了公开的保护主义运动，并将中国置于他的十字路口。法轮功将特朗普视为一种杀人天使，从天堂召唤出来，打击中国政府。大纪元时报》加大了在Facebook上的广告支出，并与第45任总统搭上了关系。2018年，该报聘请了德克萨斯州的共和党顾问布兰登-斯坦豪斯（Brendan Steinhauser），他帮助安排在高调的右翼会议上露面，并预约了其他令人难忘的采访。

在短时间内，该报失去了它在后打击时期积累的自由派商誉。但它获得了一批新的保守派读者，他们对中国抱有反射性的怀疑态度。这个时机再好不过了。

在美国的法轮功学员中，有相当一部分是美籍华人。但是，大纪元附属机构中最突出的面孔是年轻或中年白人男子。我曾经写过一篇关于俄罗斯支持的媒体RT的文章，发现那里有很多天真的记者，他们没有意识到自己签下了什么，或者在其他地方找不到工作。这里的情况也是如此吗？

7月初，我拨打了《大纪元时报》网站上的主要电话号码。该报没有对电子邮件作出回应。我收到一条自动信息说，由于订阅量增加，报社的电话量异常大，没有人接电话。我骑车来到曼哈顿西28街，大纪元时报和NTD在那里共用一栋大楼。这座被大流行病困扰的城市鬼影幢幢，但我想反正工作狂的编辑们可能会到办公室来。大纪元时报》经常刊登其主编Jasper Fakkert和出版人Stephen Gregory的照片，所以我知道他们的样子。我把车停在街对面，坐在路边，看着门。


我没有看到法克特或格雷戈里，但我看到络绎不绝的20多岁和30多岁的人进出大楼，好像COVID-19从来没有发生过一样。我不确定他们是否是《大纪元时报》的员工，所以我爬上楼梯去找办公室。我来到一个门厅，看到两个女人正瞪着眼睛看着我。在她们身后，透过玻璃隔断，是一个嗡嗡作响的新闻编辑室，这是我在几个月前开始停工后所见过的。这两个女人告诉我，我不能去那里。我自己也不想去那里。两个女人都没有戴面具。我回到了楼梯上。

我设法与一位20多岁的法轮功成员取得了联系，她曾在特朗普之前的日子里为《大纪元时报》工作。她要求匿名，因为她仍有家人在法轮功。这位消息人士告诉我，了解该报最重要的一点是，几乎所有的工作人员都是法轮功的信徒。她的母亲是华裔，十多年前在看过神韵后加入了法轮功，并很快开始为《大纪元时报》卖广告。我的消息来源在高中时就开始为该报实习。几年后，她从一所精英文理学院退学，回到那里全职工作。她从位于外区的家中出发，早上7点半左右到达办公室。正如他们在办公室外一样，工作人员被鼓励每6个小时闭上眼睛15分钟，"发出正义的思想"。大纪元时报》的报道是大公无私的；我的消息来源主要是报道非政治性的故事。但最终该报的使命是发展。推广法轮功是核心。我最近转发了一位名叫辛迪-德鲁基尔（Cindy Drukier）的编辑在2016年发出的电子邮件，敦促她的同事宣传该报的独家报道，作者是一位名叫斯特林-坎贝尔的鼓手和法轮功学员，他曾与大卫-鲍伊一起演奏。"德鲁基尔写道："这是我们有史以来最有潜力的文章之一。(鲍伊最近去世了。）"也许鲍伊的整个职业生涯和超级明星都是为了这一刻。"


我曾读到过，该报纸在刚起步的时候，是由志愿者组成的。我的消息来源，他无偿工作了几年，最终获得了约20,000美元的年薪。(《大纪元时报》称所有工作人员都有工资。)为了节省房租，一些工作人员从事其他工作，与父母同住，或与人合租狭窄的公寓。本-赫利（Ben Hurley）是一名前信徒，也是大纪元时报在澳大利亚的前工作人员，他在几年前的一篇Medium文章中写道，他和他的同事是以 "美德 "作为报酬的，这是一种 "另一个维度的白色物质，当你做好事时就会获得"。

在2016年的一个短暂时期，有半打非从业人员--一类也被称为 "有生命的人"--被聘为记者。但在大多数情况下，该报似乎是请法轮功学员来做这些工作。(《大纪元时报》对此提出异议，但没有详细说明。) "这些人很多都是嬉皮士，"我的消息来源说。"他们只是像其他人一样拿起一本小册子"。一旦进入《大纪元时报》或NTD，他们往往会从一个地方到另一个地方，从一个工作到另一个工作。Ben Chasteen是《神奇边缘》的共同主持人，曾在美国替代医学研究所学习过按摩疗法。在主持自己的节目之前，他是一名工作人员的摄影师。扬-杰基莱克（Jan Jekielek）主持的是《美国思想领袖》（American Thought Leaders）这一标志性采访节目，但我也看到他被认定为报社的公关联系人。


由于法轮功学员花了无数的个人时间送报纸或为神韵发传单，为《大纪元时报》或新华社工作既是一种精神修炼，也是一种职业选择。我与另一位20多岁的法轮功成员交谈过，她的东亚移民父母在她蹒跚学步时就加入了法轮功（现在仍在修炼）。她告诉我，在她的童年时代，她几乎每个周末都会参加反对中共的示威活动或分发法轮功资料。有一年冬天，她被派驻在费城一个 "尸体 "博物馆展览的外面，信徒们怀疑那里堆满了法轮功的尸体。还有一次，她在曼哈顿的哥伦布广场帮助上演酷刑场景，使用笼子和假血。

十几岁的时候，她去为NTD工作。她告诉我，她被教导说，不信者的灵魂被邪恶的光环所笼罩，当修炼者 "澄清 "法轮功的正义性或共产党的罪恶时，这种光环就会消失。(共产党人要下地狱。）"它的解释就像一场真正的战斗，"她告诉我。"箭从你的嘴里射出，"射向非信徒体内的邪恶。她继续说，最好的方法是在规模上，通过制作一个YouTube片段或带朋友去看神韵来做到这一点。

该报的专栏作家名单似乎是由非法轮功的人组成的，其中有著名的保守派，如《新标准》编辑罗杰-金博尔。宾夕法尼亚州格罗夫城市学院的退休经济学教授马克-亨德里克森告诉我，他对该报的目标不抱幻想。"他说："他们可能已经做了一些研究，了解美国人想看什么？"他们不只是反共，而是一份试图全面发展的报纸。" 值得注意的是，该报的亚洲记者很少得到突出的展示机会。多年来，发行人Stephen Gregory一直坚持认为《大纪元时报》"不为 "或 "代表 "法轮功，而只是报道法轮功的迫害。这似乎很难让人相信。今年夏天，我在法轮功的一个英文网站上看到了李洪志的演讲稿，并进行了翻译和转录。李克强详细介绍了报纸在揭露 "邪恶的中共 "方面的作用，然后回答了关于法轮功或 "法轮大法 "的各种活动的问题，包括 "我们的媒体 "的管理。

哪个项目最适合拯救非洲的众生？神韵？新唐人电视台？还是《大纪元》？
师父：（笑）哪一个成熟了就用哪一个。

有些地区的大法会负责人同时负责很多事情，如《大纪元》、新唐人电视台、大法会、讲真相项目组等。
师父。的确，有些地区就是这样。如果真的是由于人力不足，那就没什么可批评的。但有些领域，确实是有问题的。甚至我在想：如果有人能取代我的位置，我就不会在神韵工作。

我在法轮功网站上还发现了另一种见证：宣泄式的叙述，信徒们见证了他们在《大纪元时报》上的残酷的长时间工作。他们以第三人称的方式，表达了他们对工作的怀疑和牺牲。其中一篇报道了一位名叫伊万-彭楚科夫（Ivan Pentchoukov）的信徒的经历，我从《大纪元时报》的印刷版上认出了他的名字。彭楚科夫在该报社断断续续工作了八年，但经常感到灰心。文章说："有一次，他成功地卖出了许多神韵门票，"这促使他回到《大纪元时报》。"他决定放弃攻读博士学位，并不顾父母的强烈反对，回到报社工作。后来，由于需要钱，他找到了一份出租车司机的工作。"他再次意识到他无法通过这种方式有效地救人。'很多时候，我无法抬手给乘客发传单。 " 他回到了报社。此后，"奇迹般地，他的所有麻烦都解决了"。


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2020年1月25日，在他因在私人边界墙计划中欺诈投资者而被起诉的七个月前，特朗普的前顾问史蒂夫-班农开始在他位于国会山的排屋播放播客。班农称之为 "战争室"。大流行。当时，美国只有几个有记录的COVID-19病例，而欧洲几乎没有。当局没有人关注，班农认识到这是一个错误。"他警告说："你们可能对这一流行病不感兴趣，但这一流行病对你们有兴趣"。


班农为播客召集的第一个外部记者是西蒙娜-高，她是《大纪元时报》的作家，也是NTD节目《Zooming In》的主持人。高晓松说，她一直在看中国社交媒体上一个又一个医生和普通公民证明情况严重性的片段。高晓松说，与此同时，国家媒体对中国新年的庆祝活动进行糖衣炮弹式的报道。两周后，武汉医生李文亮死于冠状病毒，他是世界上最早发出大流行病警告的人，中国当局强迫他承认 "发表虚假言论"。

班农与《大纪元时报》已有关系。2019年，新华社联合制作并播出了他的纪实剧《红龙之爪》，该剧松散地以中国电信公司华为为题材，该公司被指控窃取知识产权（该指控被否认）。当特朗普本人在贸易谈判中仍在赞扬习近平的COVID-19应对措施并将病毒降至最低时，班农通过他帮助塑造的特朗普民族主义的视角看待这一流行病。在他看来，这个吸走美国就业机会、威胁美国经济主导地位的国家产生了一种致命的病毒，全球化不可避免地将其带到美国海岸。大纪元时报》出于自己的原因，与班农一样感到震惊。


约书亚-菲利普(Joshua Philipp)是一位忧郁的30多岁的人，有一头浓密的黑发，是大纪元时报的明星。呆板的印刷报纸的范围可能是有限的；而YouTube则是另一个故事。菲利普在YouTube上主持了一个主要关于中国的节目，名为《十字路口》。4月初，菲利普主持了一部54分钟的纪录片《追踪武汉冠状病毒的起源》，对COVID-19首先在武汉一个湿货市场从动物跳到人类的说法表示怀疑。这部纪录片制作精良，有菲利普研究到深夜和在曼哈顿乘坐地铁的情绪化的B-roll视频。

这部影片是《大纪元时报》的典型作品，它有时会提出一些有效的问题--我们是否百分之百确定病毒的来源--然后再出轨。影片中的大多数评论员都是中国鹰派，而不是医学专家。纪录片的前半部分探讨了该病毒的基因组序列是否表明它是从实验室泄露出来的。到了第40分钟，影片播放了装配线上的防毒面具的镜头，并引用了2015年关于北京生物武器能力的研究报告。到了第50分钟，它的一个谈话人说："这里真正的疾病是共产主义。" 在影片的最后，菲利普在林肯纪念堂，引导法轮功的情绪。"我相信，病毒无法在心怀慈悲的地方生存。" 这部电影已获得约900万次观看，是去年春天兴起的冠状病毒反驳类型的第一个主要参赛者。


对中国的报道一直是《大纪元时报》最突出的名片，但不引人注意的措施可能刺激了该报的发展。几个月前，与我交谈的一位法轮功学员给我发了一个链接，链接到一个拥有200多万订阅者的YouTube护肤频道--Beauty Within，主持人是一对名叫Rowena Tsai和Felicia Lee的影响者。

该频道与政治或中国无关，与《大纪元》没有任何外在联系。但最终，我发现了一个宣传该频道的NTD网页，在浏览了大量的美容建议后，我找到了一集，在这一集中，蔡英文详细介绍了她对法轮功的承诺。(李宗盛、蔡英文和新唐人都没有回应评论请求）。

多样化已经成为《大纪元》宣传策略的一个标志。2019年，在其大量的Facebook支出被曝光后，大纪元时报改变了策略，在一个月内花了大约50万美元在 "诚实的报纸 "和 "美国的爱国者 "等 "袜子傀儡 "网页的广告上。到夏天结束时，许多与该报有关的账户已被禁止在Facebook上投放广告。与此同时，网站Snopes已经开始报道一个名为TheBL.com（BL代表 "生活之美"）的机构，该机构创建了数百个账户、小组和页面，宣传支持特朗普、反对中国共产党的内容。TheBL.com由时任《大纪元时报》越南版首席执行官的Trung Vu于2016年创建；其编辑是《大纪元时报》英文版的前编辑。2019年底，Facebook禁止BL使用虚假账户。脸书称，到那时，该组织已花费近950万美元宣传自己，在全球范围内积累了5500万粉丝。(大纪元时报》坚持认为，它只是在脸书在没有解释的情况下阻止它以自己的名字做广告之后，才开始在不同的页面上做广告。它否认与基本法有任何关系）。


虽然他的公司被雇来打造品牌和提高印刷品订阅量，但顾问Brendan Steinhauser说，他没有参与定义《大纪元时报》的社交媒体地毯式轰炸，也从未对该报纸的财务状况有一个确切的了解。2019年，大纪元时报协会--该报所属的非营利组织--带来了超过1500万美元的收入（2016年约为400万美元），其中约一半来自订阅费。无论《大纪元时报》的财务状况如何，该出版物的底线与更有魅力的神韵相比相形见绌。在2018年，也就是有税单的最近一年，神韵报告的利润为2600万美元，净资产为1.22亿美元。

2020年5月，《野兽日报》在运营NTD的非营利组织Universal Communications Network的国税局表格上发现了一个名叫张华义的受益人。张在2000年代有几年时间担任该网络的董事会主席，他是罗伯特-默瑟经营的对冲基金 "文艺复兴技术 "的负责人。鉴于曾是默瑟盟友的班农与NTD有联系，这种联系是暗示性的。("我给他们一个数字，"班农在2020年底告诉《纽约时报》，关于他的电影预算。"他们会回来说，'我们对这个数字很满意'。 ") 但是，存在美世的秘密资金似乎不太可能。根据美国国税局的文件，从2012年到2016年，Zhang和他的妻子捐赠了909,500美元--几乎都是在特朗普竞选总统之前的那几年。张某还在另一个与法轮功有关的组织的董事会任职，这也许表明了他的精神利益，而不是政治利益。


劳动力的狂热也是商业模式的一个重要组成部分。法轮功追随者通常不仅捐献他们的时间，还捐献他们的现金；未售出的神韵门票被追随者购买，他们反复观看演出。纽约市立大学研究生中心和斯坦顿岛学院研究法轮功的政治学家夏明将法轮功比作一个多级营销计划，其中成员无限地招募其他成员。

我渴望得到更多的了解，于是再次尝试渗透到《大纪元时报》。法轮功练习班每天都在纽约市内举行。大多数是在室外，所以冠状病毒并不构成真正的障碍。有一天，我去了离报社最近的麦迪逊广场公园晚上7点的练习，我想我可能会遇到一些熟悉的面孔。没有收获。有三个男人和一个女人，我都不认识他们。我坐在一张长椅上，看着他们四个人，他们站在原地，缓慢地移动着四肢。地上的扬声器播放着宁静的音乐。最后我站起来，走过去拿了一本小册子。那个女人是亚洲人，穿着撕裂的黑色牛仔裤和角斗士凉鞋，显然是这群人中的招募者。她中断了对我的拦截。她告诉我她的名字，并把让我加入她的行列作为她的任务。我不同意，问我是否可以只在长椅上观看。她回答说那会很无聊。我屈服了。


这个女人让我站在她对面，照着她的动作做。起初，我很难集中注意力，因为我们一开始就有一个 "黑人生活重要事件 "的示威活动开始在公园里游行了。当抗议者在我们身后高呼 "没有正义，没有和平，操他妈的这些种族主义的混蛋警察 "时，我被告知要用我的手做成一个小泡泡。最终，抗议者通过了，我花了10分钟学习气功。"潜入水中，"我的教练告诉我。"你的身体应该像一座山。" 安慰剂效应还是真实的，我不知道，但我确实感觉到一些紧张情绪在解除。我的教练告诉我，如果我停止咀嚼口香糖，我会感到更加放松。

我戴着面罩。其他人都没有。我问为什么。"我们非常了解这种病毒，"我的教员解释说。她说，我不会完全理解这一点，但她受到一个能量场的保护，一旦她开始练习就会激活。

我问这个保护性的能量场是否延伸到其他人身上，比如站在附近的我。我没有得到答案。相反，我的老师问："你知道病毒是从中国开始的吗？" 我向她表示感谢，然后回到我的长椅上。

根据李洪志的中心文本《转法轮》，健康状况不佳是 "修炼 "不足的表现。在今年夏天的几个星期里，我看到了法轮功媒体上的新闻，汉普顿的一个珠宝商在三月出现了COVID-19的症状，病得很重。这位珠宝商的一位法轮功朋友劝她反复念叨真善忍，慈悲心，忍耐心。神奇的是，她的所有烦恼都得到了解决。抛开这个案例不谈，互联网上有很多关于法轮功拒绝医疗服务和屈服于疾病，甚至死亡的令人震惊的描述。与我交谈的前NTD人士告诉我，两年前她决定离开法轮功，因为在她避开医疗后，卵巢囊肿破裂导致内出血。


7月下旬，在华盛顿特区的特朗普国际酒店，举行了一次罕见的COVID-19时代的室内政治会议。这场会议被称为自由峰会，有许多知名的共和党人参加，包括参议员特德-克鲁兹和汤姆-科顿。史蒂夫-班农（Steve Bannon）播放了《战争室》（War Room）。大流行 "的活动现场。

在场的少数记者之一是《大纪元时报》的Jan Jekielek，他穿着海军服，戴着橙色波尔卡圆点的方巾。他肯定对自己听到的内容感到高兴。尽管名字平淡无奇，但这确实是一个关于中国鹰派的论坛，而这种鹰派已经成为特朗普时代的主打。对于美国思想领袖，Jekielek与前众议员Dave Brat坐下来，他现在是自由大学商学院的院长。布拉特没有仅仅重复 "武汉病毒 "的谈话要点，而是详细讲述了一连串中国的违法行为，包括南海的军事化、TikTok的监视能力，以及，是的，摘取器官。布拉特说，他对中国的愤怒迫使他重新思考他对自由贸易的承诺。

也许属于一个基于信仰的社区使你对另一个社区的神奇思维有倾向性。听了这次采访，我突然觉得，虽然特朗普近年来对《大纪元》有用，但今后可能不需要他了。共和党在很多方面都朝着《大纪元》的方向发展。除了对中国的执着，还加上了对医学专家的不信任，好战的民族主义，对阴谋论的喜好，以及对社会主义幽灵的歇斯底里的呼喊。不同的是，许多美国共和党人投机取巧地利用的问题，《大纪元时报》却认真地接受了。该报倾向于将科技平台对其的惩罚或对其新闻报道的批评视为其在中国所面临的实际审查制度的可预见的延伸。(该报的一位代表给我发来电子邮件说："你似乎已经决定协助中国共产党"）。亲法轮功的媒体与QAnon的调情也有一定的意义。该组织已经接受了这样的观点：政府中的权贵可能会以无辜者为目标，以便利用他们的身体。


不久前，我想起我还在为《大纪元时报》付费。当我试图取消订阅时，该网站让我经历了一个考验，然后给我设置了最后一个障碍，就像电子游戏中的最后一个老板，就是罗曼-巴尔马科夫本人。在我还没来得及放弃报纸的时候，他就出现了，穿着棕色背心，打着红色领带，在一个简短的视频中，我被敦促观看。

"嘿，你是来取消的，这很好，"巴尔马科夫宣布。但他首先要给我一个消息。"你可能已经看了我们国家的状况，你可能感觉不是那么乐观，"他说。"我也知道这种感觉。" 屏幕上闪现了看起来是反法西斯示威的画面。巴尔马科夫列举了一长串的弊病--"最糟糕的是，可能是其他一切的罪魁祸首，社会主义和共产主义因素在我们的社会中越来越占优势。我们是一个正在迅速成为名副其实的自由国家......这就是促使我更加努力工作的原因，每一天都是如此。"

在宣布拜登战胜特朗普的第二天，一个法轮功网站发布了李洪志的一首简短的诗，题为 "论大选"。这是他几个月来的首次公开声明，被转载在下一期《大纪元时报》的头版。"在这个雄伟的宇宙中，共产主义的魔鬼正在制造麻烦，"这首诗开始。"欺诈和腐败正在伤害一个伟大的国家"。通过电子邮件，修炼者们被敦促通过每天多发30分钟的正念来帮助左右选举的结果。


*照片-插图图片。法轮功 / Miguel Candela / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Samantha Sin / Nicolas Asfouri / AFP / Getty; Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / AP; Flickr; YouTube