Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist

¿Quien es mas loco? History wll soon tell. America's figureheads of power meet at the White House on Nov. 13, 2024.

Mark Gruenberg
People's World

Shen Yun is barely disguised anticommunist propaganda, and especially an anti-China op, supported by Western governments and the usual coterie of brainwashed ignorant celebrities. Along with their paper Epoch Times, Shen Yun is Falun Gong's (a bizarre cult proscribed by Beijing) most successful propaganda and recruiting vehicle. The video below shows clearly where its ideology lies. It has even been described as such on its Wikipedia page. 

Shen Yun troupes tour the world, infusing classical Chinese dance with propaganda skits against the Chinese government and socialism. The dance company is particularly active now that we are approaching the big annual holiday season for shows.

Falun Gong is also in legal trouble with both New York state and the federal government. But the advertising for the dance company doesn’t tell you that.

While the temple is the centerpiece of Falun Gong’s sprawling complex near Warwick, the reality is different. The complex includes the Fei Tian Academy of the Arts for training and schooling Shen Yun dancers. But when the dancers go out on tour, they often don’t get paid.

“Fei Tian students aren’t employees and as such cannot be paid salaries,” the dance company told the Epoch Times. Like Shen Yun, that paper is a Falun Gong enterprise. So is New Tang Dynasty TV, a cable channel.

Many former Shen Yun dancers told the New York Times they were not paid at all in their first year on tour. By their early to mid-20s, most were being paid $12,000 a year or less.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 hourly works out to $15,080 for a year of 40-hour weeks. But many of the ex-dancers told the paper’s probers their workweeks were far longer than that—with no overtime pay.

The New York Labor Department is investigating other abuses at the Warwick complex and in the dance company, the Times reported. The prime one is using underage performers—the teenage dancers—without seeking, and receiving, a DOL permit for their employment.

This Friday, March 8, 2019, photo shows the Falun Gong Dragon Springs compound in Otisville, N.Y. After years of additions, the lakeside site features Tang Dynasty-style buildings close by modern, boxy buildings that would fit into a contemporary office park. Dragon Springs said 100 people, mostly students, live there. | Julie Jacobson/AP

Shen Yun finally got one this year, after the paper’s exposé. It mandates the dance company report to the state every month about underage performers and get a new permit every month.

But both the dance company and Falun Gong maintain the dancers are “students” at their academy, not “employees” under labor law. That’s important. Under current National Labor Relations Board rulings, college student workers, such as the Shen Yun dancers are “employees” with the right to unionize and bargain over working conditions, though a Republican-majority board appointed by incoming President Trump could reverse that.

Complaints about lack of pay finally prompted the New York State Labor Department to open an investigation of the dance troupe earlier this year, after a multi-part New York Times expose blew the cover off the secretive Shen Yun and Falun Gong’s abuses.

Abuse for more than a decade

Those abuses have lasted for more than a decade, the Times reported. But, according to a state audit almost ten years ago, the state Labor Department cannot act on its own but only respond to complaints it receives. And it didn’t get any until the Times’s stories hit the pages nationwide.

But some of the abuses the Times revealed aren’t legally covered.

The Times and other sources reported that “an atmosphere of fear” and isolation of the students-turned-dancers are a big abuse. There are also threats that individual dancers would “go to hell” for mistakes they make and there is a lack of proper medical care for on-the-job injuries.

Ben Hurley, an Australian who left Falun Gong after a dozen years as a member, reported four years ago that even then—three years after his initial blog about it—he got reports from once-scared members.

“The stories express a mix of excitement and terror,” Hurley wrote on the Religion and Ethics website after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. ran its own exposé of Falun Gong. “Excitement that they can now listen to pop music, or eat sashimi, or have a beer, or have sex, or take up a hobby, or hang out with non-believers—without feeling filthy and unworthy.

“And lingering terror as they face up to their living god, and attempt to banish him from their minds and out of their lives.”

That living god is Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi. “A number of people labored over the decision to contact me before finally plucking up the courage because they believed that Li could read their minds,” Hurley wrote.

It’s not the only belief Li fosters in Falun Gong.

“The ABC portrays Falun Gong as a threat to public safety due to its dangerous teachings on medicine, and that it is secretive and dishonest. Foreign Correspondent and Background Briefing”—the two Australian programs that ran ABC’s exposes—“both rejected such a characterization of its coverage.”

The two Australian programs said “They simply gave critics an opportunity to be heard and Falun Gong a fair opportunity to respond. But from my perspective, after being a staunch follower for 12 years, such a characterization would be accurate.”

Other Falun Gong beliefs promulgated by its founder are “gay people being disgusting, interracial children have no heaven to go to, and aliens are slowly taking over human bodies—not to mention the less-publicized, but widely-held, belief that Donald Trump is an angel from heaven.”

And that may be a problem for the U.S. Justice Department, especially after Trump takes it over in January when he enters the White House again.

Charged in money-laundering crypto scheme

Dancers with the troupe work in virtual slave labor conditions causing injury to the young workers according to investigators. | Instagram/Shen Yun Performing Arts

“Just days after Trump was found guilty” in a New York courtroom of multiple counts of violating state campaign finance laws, the Justice Department “arrested and charged the CFO of the far-right newspaper Epoch Times in a $67 million money-laundering crypto scam,” SFist reported.

“The Epoch Times, of course, promotes and helps fund the ubiquitously advertised propaganda dance show Shen Yun.”

The dance company’s ads are ubiquitous at bus stops, on media, and on billboards in major U.S. cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., promoting its performances.

The dance company, technically a non-profit organization, got a tax break from New York State years ago to construct the Warwick complex. But it doesn’t pay for the ads, even though the New York Times revealed its annual revenue totaled $265 million last year.

Instead, the ad money comes from the Epoch Times plus local chapters of Falun Gong scattered around the U.S. The Epoch Times itself doesn’t want to pay full freight for its ads, according to one newspaper advertising rep who, under a pseudonym, posted her experience with the paper’s ad buyer on Reddit.

The buyer claimed that as a non-profit organization, Shen Yun should get a 50% discount. After an increasingly testy hour-long discussion, the paper’s ad rep walked away from the sale.

Propaganda against the People’s Republic of China infiltrates the Shen Yun dance itself, Gia Tolentino reported in a long expose in The New Yorker. Many audience members seemed to realize it, a survey of postings on Reddit and other social media shows, and discounted it. Nevertheless, it looms.

“A man came onstage to sing a song in Chinese, which was translated on the screen behind him. ‘We follow Dafa, the Great Way,’ he began, singing about a Creator who saved mankind and made the world anew,” the New Yorker story said.

“Atheism and evolution are deadly ideas. Modern trends destroy what makes us human,” he sang. “In the final dance number, a group of followers, who wore blue and yellow and clutched books of religious teachings, battled for space in a public square with corrupt youth.

“Their corruption was evident because they were wearing black, looking at their cell phones, and, in the case of two men, holding hands,” wrote Tolentino.

“Chairman Mao appeared, and the sky turned black. The city in the digital backdrop was obliterated by an earthquake and then finished off by a Communist tsunami. A red hammer and sickle glowed in the center of the wave. Dazed, I rubbed my eyes and saw a huge, bearded face disappearing in the water.

“’Was that…?’ I said to my brother, wondering if I needed to go to the hospital.

“’Karl Marx?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I think that was a tsunami with the face of Karl Marx.’”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Gruenberg
Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.

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Rainer Shea
Rainer's Newsletter

A sinister picture of the White House, perhaps entirely fitting considering what it usually harbours.

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Whether it happens around the inauguration or at a different time, the three-letter agencies are going to create a new January 6 event in left-wing form. Except this event is going to play a different role than that first provocation; the original January 6 was about creating an excuse to build an official domestic front for the War on Terror, while this new provocation will be about letting the state activate this repressive tool. The Capitol Hill riot let Biden create the “Countering Domestic Terrorism” program, in which activists of essentially all kinds are placed under suspicion of violent extremism. The riot also let tech companies increase their censorship of Palestinians, which is something they now have a greater desire for than ever. 

 

The next step will be to mobilize the types of leftists who view themselves as “antifa” warriors fighting the new Hitler. Like how the feds turned MAGA activists into FBI assets and then orchestrated a break-in, they’ll manipulate these left elements into pursuing other adventurist activities, potentially of a more violent nature.

This new false flag will need to be more spectacular than the last one, because for it to succeed, it will have to create real fear. January 6 was in large part a circus, where people were taking selfies in the Capitol and dressing up in goofy costumes. No cops died in the line of duty, making it harder to believe that this was a serious threat to democracy. When the feds activate the ultra-violent elements of the left, they’ll have to create the sense that wokeness really does pose an imminent danger towards national security; they’ll need images that stick with people. Only a crime that tops January 6 can accomplish what the deep state wants to accomplish, which is the proliferation of massive national paranoia and outrage. 

The next war maneuvers, and the effort to purge dissent, require the perception that Palestine supporters are “radical Islamist” assets; this is how Trump’s future Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has described the Gaza protesters, and it’s how our government wants the conservative base to see these Americans. So the feds will orchestrate shocking acts of violence, associate them with pro-Palestine people, and say that China is behind the whole conspiracy.

That’s how a domestic false flag can assist Washington both in its purge against dissent, and in its effort to start a direct war with the PRC. Our ruling class is anxious to go on a multi-front offensive; time is running out for the imperial order, so monopoly capital seeks to steer Trump’s White House towards pursuing major escalations. These operations will come with a cost, though. Because the MAGA base is heavily disillusioned with the war machine, and with the neoliberal economic order it perpetuates. The feds can spread confusion and division; they can turn China into a scapegoat, or deflect the conversation towards culture war issues. But they can’t stop communists from intervening; not if we navigate our situation correctly.

Our enemies are in place to carry out this repression; though the effort to persecute Uhuru has failed at creating a precedent, this next false flag is still coming. The armed service members, the lower-level entrepreneurs, and the others who may defect towards our side will only do so if we’ve established a structure that’s capable of defeating the state. That has a significant basis within the unions, has members who’ve been trained on a Bolshevik level, and has a serious contingency plan in case it gets forced underground. This is how we must think in a situation where we have no hope of creating a protection racket within the government; where protection will have to come from the dual power structures that we build ourselves.

keep doing this work after repression has intensified. This is the core of solid participants who will need to exist for the rest of the process to unfold; for the people to have a realistic path towards overthrowing the state.

The advancements in surveillance technology have not made this task impossible. The Palestinian resistance has overcome the occupier’s spying panopticon, and people across the Global South are able to organize under anti-democratic U.S. puppet regimes. We will find our own path towards such movement resilience, and then towards victory over the imperial state. It depends on whether we can come to a new strategy for the class struggle’s next stage; a way of operating that lets us overcome the full force of the U.S. government. 

There are weaknesses within our enemy that we can exploit; though this coming false flag will supercharge the anti-woke psyop, the second Trump administration’s imperialist policies are going to alienate and split his supporters. If we can ensure our organizations remain vital amid the coming repression, we’ll be able to fill the political vacuum MAGA leaves. Our enemies will try to smear us as being synonymous with the ultraviolent leftists, but this psyop will fall short if we win the people to our side.

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Second Round

Empire seeks to use anti-woke psyop to purge Palestine supporters, advance genocide & world war

By Rainer Shea
Donald Trump was elected because of a mass desire to combat the liberal establishment; now that establishment seeks to partner with Trump in suppressing dissent. And Trump’s team is glad to collaborate in this task. Because for all the things that the different wings of our ruling class disagree on, their big points of agreement are in maintaining the colonial economic order, and crushing all domestic forces which threaten this order. The bipartisan plan is to increasingly criminalize pro-Palestine sentiment, and to instigate a proxy war with the chief threat towards imperial exploitation: China. The imperialists are desperate to avoid getting kicked out of Asia, so they’re expanding their genocide in west Asia while seeking a new big war in the far east. And the primary narrative tool that they’ll use to justify these crimes is the anti-woke psyop, where Palestine gets portrayed as a “woke” concern that’s stoked by Chinese interference.

voting record showing almost fully consistent support for “Israel.” He’s the type of pro-Zionist who does things like promote Holocaust deniers, and say the Jews killed Jesus; which benefits “Israel” in an indirect way, because Zionism’s “Jews are only safe in Israel” argument has always depended on anti-Jewish bigotry.

idea about the Gaza protesters being radical Islamist puppets makes her inclined to believe false terrorism accusations against Palestine supporters. Gaetz has been picked as Attorney General, meaning he would be in place to shape the law towards further criminalizing dissent. The security state wishes that these figures shared the Atlanticist worldview; but should they get such governmental positions, there will be a plan ready to sway them towards assisting in the domestic purge.

This is the possibility that we need to prepare for: figures on the right who’ve tactically benefited us in the anti-NATO struggle taking on highly damaging roles, and facilitating the persecution of anti-imperialists. They’ll also absolutely advance the war against China. The Palestine question was always going to come to the forefront, and now that it has, it could bring about a major betrayal from those who’ve opposed NATO while still backing “Israel.”

Then there’s the effect that Trump’s loyalty to “Israel” will have on his wider foreign policy. Will Trump’s White House truly de-escalate in Ukraine and Korea, like Trump has said he will? It depends on where the balance of forces will be during his presidency. At this moment, they’re not at a place that’s conducive to peace within these places. The Trump team’s “peace” proposal towards Russia consists of a request for Russia to stop making any further progress in the war, letting the Kiev Banderite regime hold on to territories that Russia would liberate otherwise. This is the kind of plan someone creates when they just want to be able to say “I plan to bring peace.”

My concern is not that Trump will bring fatal destruction upon China, because China is even better prepared to win a proxy war than Russia was. Given China’s overwhelming strength, it even has a good chance of successfully deterring Washington. My primary concern is that the empire will manage to murder hundreds of thousands more Palestinians, and from this comes my second biggest concern: that our imperial state will crush the domestic anti-imperialist movement. To win our fight, and thereby let the Palestinians win their fight faster, we need to account for the reality that extreme repression is imminent. Even as the conflicts within the ruling class intensify, the counterinsurgency is going to turn increasingly aggressive and deadly. We’ll be able to take advantage of these divisions, and the related mass discontent, if we can ensure our organizations survive what’s coming.