Religious group amasses fortune by feeding right-wingers with conspiracies: report

Tax documents reveal that the Epoch Times, a notorious right-wing disinformation newspaper, springboarded into a multi-million dollar empire with wide reach in the United States in the wake of the 2020 presidential election – with its revenue growing almost 800 percent, NBC News reported on Friday.

The group, which has ties to the Chinese religious movement Falun Gong, rose in large part with huge ad buys in support of former President Donald Trump's re-election, a strategy that actually got its adverts banned from Facebook for skirting its rules about advertising transparency, the report states.

It has also broadened its reach by pushing free physical copies on street corners, giving themselves exposure wherever they can. And although the group doesn't have to list its donors under federal law, "It reported $8.4 million in revenue from contributions and grants in 2020 and 2021" — while funneling some of the revenue back to people connected to the Falun Gong movement, NBC wrote.

This strategy has been incredibly effective, said the report, exempting it from many federal taxes as a nonprofit journalism outfit, while allowing the Epoch Times to grow to have the fourth-largest newspaper subscriber base in the country — all as NBC says it peddles conspiracy theories.

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Its message has been delivered, wrote NBC, through "recent reports on how 'Jan. 6 Capitol Hill Security Footage Challenges Key Narratives' and 'Meteorologists, Scientists Explain Why There Is ‘No Climate Emergency,’' as well as a "documentary" series on a supposed epidemic of vaccine death and an exposé of an alleged world government agenda to harm farmers, cull the population and force survivors to eat bugs."

These sorts of apocalyptic conspiracies kicked into high gear during the COVID pandemic, which created a new market for them, NBC reported.

“They take advantage of every opportunity,” said Texas Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser, who previously helped advise the company in 2018. “They studied digital marketing. They learned how to work the system. And they did it. They're smarter than people give them credit for, and they’ve got the money to back it up.”

Falun Gong was labeled a "cult" by the Chinese government, which has been accused by human rights groups of carrying out a brutal crackdown on practitioners.

As of now, the Epoch Times has not endorsed a candidate for 2024.

READ the NBC News report here.