La Belle Epoch

Arielle Gordon traces the rise of “The Epoch Times” through her grandmother’s text messages.

By Arielle GordonDecember 22, 2024

• Politics

• Memoir & Essay

I USED TO GET dozens of text messages a day from my grandmother. At their best, they were asinine, if plausibly related to my life—a college ranking that included my alma mater, an update on the restoration of Notre-Dame, which we visited together just before it burned down. Most were just links without any context, often shared several times to multiple random assortments of contacts: my sister and me, my dad and me, me and 10 unknown numbers. I inquired about her texting habits once, and she told me that when she came across an article, she’d type the person with whom she wanted to share it into her Messages app and select the first grouping that came up. I’ve received countless extraneous texts about doctor’s appointments and clothing returns this way.

My grandmother had never been comfortable with new technology. When I was 12 years old and created my first email account, she wrote me letters on her typewriter, asked some poor office assistant to scan them onto her work laptop, then sent them as a PDF attachment. Though now mostly retired, she worked five days a week into her early eighties as the manager of a regional produce terminal market and never owned a home computer. But those technical limitations have never stopped her from sharing her opinions on topics like clothing (“I dress like the Brits to some degree,” she texted in 2022. “I never wear sweatpants, baseball caps, yoga attire … That way, I can be an individual and not appear like everyone else”) and cuisine (“In case you don’t whip your own,” she texted recently, which alarmed me until I saw that it came with a link to the best store-bought whipped creams attached). On the whole, I’m glad I can talk to my grandmother easily and frequently. Even though her inclinations have made me wary about sharing an updated mailing address—she reliably forwards the recipe books they give away in grocery store mailers each season—it’s a blessing to hear from her as we both grow older, to know she is thinking of me, or at least thinking of someone who was once in a group text with me.

As long as I’ve known her, my grandmother has been politically conservative. I have a vivid memory of some Jewish holiday, a Passover or Rosh Hashanah dinner, that ended with us passionately debating American immigration policy: I asked her who she thought picked the berries that she sold wholesale at the market; she decried my generation for being “unwilling to put in a bit of elbow grease.” We were in the first Obama administration; I was 15 and captain of the debate team.

These were the good years, when I believed I would be able to change my grandmother’s mind, or at least that the democratic arc of our country would prove her wrong. As I entered college, hints at a deeper poisoning reared their heads from time to time—for every 50 “You MUST see this!!! Dogs and humans: An eternal bond” email chains she sent my way, there would be one or two that were appallingly offensive. On one occasion, we pleaded with our parents to talk some sense into her after she sent our extended family a panicked forwarded email that included a picture of Obama in traditional African clothing and a “leaked” memo that stated he was going to enforce Sharia law in public schools. We still hoped at this point that a basic lesson in reliably sourcing internet news would curb her penchant for sharing misinformation.

By the time I began to notice the small yellow Epoch Times boxes that lined my Brooklyn block, vaguely recognizing the name from the subject line of my grandmother’s emails, I had long been filtering her messages. In 2016, she called me the day after the presidential election to explain why she voted for Donald Trump, citing her own personal charitable donations as ideological justifications. I didn’t think then to push back, as I had so readily seven years prior; there was a sense that she wanted me to absolve her of the consequences of her politics, or to assuage the nagging notion that age makes cynics of us all. In the years since he first took office, her emails and texts have become more frequent and more outraged, though still balanced by articles like “What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Bananas Every Day.” It was a jarring experience, feeling my phone vibrate and not knowing if I was going to see a text about how to best store cooked chicken or a screed about foreign laborers. I felt sad looking through her filtered messages and noticing I had missed one with a photo of my aunt on a carnival ride as a baby, or my grandmother standing proudly in her garage as a young woman, but it became a small psychological price to pay for some distance from her spiral into conspiratorial thinking.

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The Epoch Times wasn’t created with a reader like my grandmother in mind. It was founded around the turn of the millennium as a Chinese-language newspaper, the chief function of which was to share the Falun Gong religious sect’s struggle against the Chinese Communist Party with concerned Chinese Americans. Falun Gong, a religious movement founded in the early 1990s with roots in Buddhist and Taoist principles, on its face seems like a victim of Chinese totalitarianism: by the end of the decade, the movement was banned in China, and its local adherents faced threats of deportation to labor camps.

The teachings of Falun Gong stem entirely from its enigmatic leader, Li Hongzhi, whom followers view as a “God-like figure.” Since settling in the United States in the late 1990s, Li has remained reclusive, but his beliefs shape the core tenets of Falun Gong and its many tendrils: in addition to traditional Buddhist practices like qigong, a type of movement-based meditation, Falun Gong also teaches that homosexuality creates “bad karma” and is “comparable to organized crime.” Interracial marriage, according to its doctrine, is a moral failing, and any children born from such relationships are inherently indicative of a “Dharma-ending Period” of societal degradation.

These beliefs are easy to find if you know what to look for. In the mid-1990s, before he retreated from view, Li stated them plainly in well-documented speeches and seminars. But they’re conspicuously absent from the homepage of The Epoch Times. Instead, they’re laundered into more boilerplate identity politics: a Jewish student talking about why he is suing Harvard for “promoting antisemitism,” or an inflammatory headline about “men in women’s sports.” Across 23 languages and in 36 countries, The Epoch Times slowly gained respect and influence while hiding its most insidious beliefs below the fold.

Falun Gong also operates the inescapable Shen Yun dance company, which has been mind-numbingly successful at spoon-feeding its anticommunist message through elaborate productions in almost every city across the Western world. Founded in 2006, Shen Yun bills itself as an “artistic revival and celebration of China’s rich cultural heritage,” nestling its propaganda in the elegance of traditional Chinese dance, with verdant sets meant to represent China before Mao.

The massively popular shows, vetted by American cultural institutions like New York’s Lincoln Center and the Music Center of Los Angeles, attract a clientele who wouldn’t be caught dead reading about “weapons of mass migration” : in an auditorium named after far-right political cretin David Koch, designer Donna Karan, Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, and novelist Salman Rushdie watched dancers perform a dazzling facsimile of “China Before Communism.” In its ubiquity, Shen Yun diffuses Falun Gong’s homophobia and misogyny—at best, it’s a spectacle; at worst, a meme, extremism hiding in plain sight.

While Shen Yun became seemingly ubiquitous, The Epoch Times failed to launch, reaching a circulation of just about 800 copies a week. In a New York Times report, a former Epoch Times employee remembered, “We weren’t looking more than three weeks down the road.” But around 2015, according to that investigation, the leadership doubled down on social media traffic, pushing writers to pump out clickbait. When natural engagement wasn’t enough, employees opened fake Facebook accounts to generate artificial likes and shares. This set them up well for another pivot for the 2016 election. Falun Gong leadership had a “messianic way of viewing Trump as the anti-Communist leader,” and they increasingly used the website to disseminate far-right conspiracies.

The Epoch Times is not my grandmother’s only highly partisan source for news—she is also fond of Pam Geller’s notorious far-right blog Geller Report (Geller’s daughters Jackie and Claudia Oshry host popular talk podcast The Toast), as well as a mysterious outlet called News Report USA (“NewsReportUSA is brought to you by a small team of American patriots located in Austin, Texas,” their shockingly blank website reads). But The Epoch Times is far and away her favorite place to read the news. For her, it must seem like a paradise of perfect links: articles like “Half a Teaspoon of Olive Oil Daily May Protect Brain Health” sit next to headlines insisting that “95 percent of corpses had received COVID vaccination within 2 weeks of death.”

Compared to Geller’s rag or the thousand-line email threads in every imaginable font size, The Epoch Times at least passes as a real news organization. In addition to news (“Judge Upholds Missouri’s Ban on Transgender Procedures for Children”) and opinion (“Election Results Should Be a Wake-Up Call to Move Away from Identity Politics”), there is a leisure section, where seemingly reputable writers who once graced the pages of The New York Times contribute service journalism on how to choose kitchen knives. Halfway down the online leisure vertical, there is an advertisement for a print magazine published by Epoch Times called American Essence. Mario Lopez graces a recent cover, where a journalist named Kenneth LaFave, a former music critic for The Kansas City Star, asks him about his Mexican American upbringing. “I don’t want to hit people over the head with that,” he tells LaFave.

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The story of the legitimization of The Epoch Times is also a story of journalism’s decline. In the aftermath of the rapid collapse of media, first with the consolidation or shuttering of small-town papers, then with the gutting of online juggernauts, and finally with cuts in legacy newsrooms, a front for a religious sect can launder its reputation on the backs of journalists just looking for a reliable, decently funded freelance gig.

Like The Epoch Times, many online outlets struggled to keep up with the algorithmic whims of digital advertising. Buzzfeed, Vice, Bustle, and other groups faced round after round of painful layoffs after the low interest rates that once powered venture capital–backed media empires began to run dry. But The Epoch Times was more than capable of running on a shoestring staff and aggregated articles. With a little help from an extra $70 million in cash laundered from prepaid debit cards and fraudulent unemployment benefits, the company reported a remarkable 400 percent increase in revenue over one year.

I doubt my grandmother knows the first thing about Falun Gong or their struggle against the Chinese government. I would be shocked if she knew that they were headquartered across the river from her in Deerpark, New York. The Epoch Times leadership wants it that way. Though it was not founded for people like her, Epoch Times built its voice around her and millions of other readers’ blind faith in the accuracy of online information, its banality a cover for its radicalizing project. The less its readers question its motives and funding, the more powerful its authority becomes. Like the one-time aspiring travel journalist who is relegated to writing listicles for a website owned by a religious cult, my grandmother is a victim of the Epoch Times ecosystem as much as a participant in it. She lives in a different world from mine, one where vaccines kill and Kathy Hochul is a “radical Democrat,” and I no longer believe I can communicate across the chasm of our political realities.

My grandmother’s texts have quieted down significantly since the election; perhaps she thought it unbecoming to gloat after such a definitive victory. But the other day, I found myself in a chain with an unknown number who shared a picture of a sign that read, “Young people can run fast / But old people know the way.” Immediately, my grandmother responded in the thread: “Leah, please only send messages to me alone, not everyone in the string of people, thank you.” These are the kinds of texts I want to get from my grandmother: charming technological fumbles, platitudes about our generational divide. In this economy, I guess we both have to learn one cool trick to make bread last for weeks.