How the Legacy Media Helped Conceal Mass Killing in China: Levi Browde

Levi Brody, great having you on Crossroads again. Thanks for having me. Well Levi, since the last time we've talked there's been quite a few cases of Chinese spies getting arrested in the United States targeting Falun Gong. Yes. And I mean it's bizarre because you know when people first started hearing about these secret Chinese police stations and you know, Safeguard Defender did their report on it, people were kind of shocked. Oh, there's Chinese secret police stations in New York? How is the CCP running these in New York? That there are Chinese spies trying to export CCP law into America? And now we're actually seeing arrests of some of these people. One just the other day in fact in Los Angeles. What's going on with this? Here's the scary part, I think. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I remember sitting with a State Department official six, seven years ago saying they'd openly admitting they're way beyond, behind the curve on this. They're 10 years behind, 12 years behind. And I think that's really the scary part is that we've known, if you look at the Chinatowns and the big cities across the United States, we've known for 10, 20 years how much infiltration they have in those communities. And we know that the spies are all over the United States. And so seeing just a handful of arrests I think should be shocking for most Americans. But for me the scary thing is this really is just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, well I can say, you know, my audience knows that part of my work going back to 2008, I've been exposing Chinese spy networks in America. And I'd agree with you. This is the tip of the iceberg. This is, I mean, I'm glad it's finally getting exposed, but it's the tip of the iceberg. I want to talk to you first about the case that just came out in Los Angeles, an individual, again, you know, innocent until proven guilty, but arrested. And this individual, an alleged Chinese spy, was trying to get people elected to official office in the United States. This guy was trying to mess with our politics. What do we know about this case? Well, I mean, if you look at the indictment of this stuff, it's always interesting to go through the indictments because they often will articulate sort of the task activities, what people are actually engaged in. And in this case, it looks like he has a connection with someone named John Chen. John Chen, of course, is the Chinese spy, the convicted Chinese spy, who was trying to... The one who pled guilty. Actually, I remember that one in New York, but tell me about that. Pled guilty. So he was, he came to New York trying to spy on Dragon Springs, which is kind of the headquarters where Shen Yun has, the Peruvian Arts Company has their headquarters. There's a college there. There's a, there's an academy there. So it's called Dragon Springs. He was in New York to spy on that facility so that he can try and drum up some lawfare. It's clearly indicated in the letter from the prosecutor that talked about some of the charges, and it clearly indicates that's one of the reasons they were here in New York. But ultimately, what they were trying to do is get an in on the IRS so that they can bribe the IRS to open an investigation on Shen Yun. And this is one of the ways, and this is not the first time it's happened, where they're going after, in a very brazen style, our government. Whether they're trying to influence the government, as in the Los Angeles case, or voting, as in the Los Angeles case, or just outright trying to bribe and influence other government officials, this is something that unfortunately is very common with some of the Chinese spies here. Well, and what's kind of shocking is, for example, you mentioned the Los Angeles case. This individual is being accused of trying to basically influence the government, trying to get CCP narratives into government reports. And then there's an odd overlap with him allegedly trying to export the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong. It's in the, of course, legal documents from the Justice Department. The same thing as you mentioned the guy in New York, and there was a couple of them, targeting again Shen Yun and targeting Falun Gong, meaning trying to export the CCP's human rights abuses to the United States, and then also having all these other weird involvements trying to target our system. And there was the other case just recently in Florida, where another Chinese spy, again accused, Telecommunications. Yeah, was also allegedly collecting information on Chinese dissidents, including many, I believe even like democracy activists, but also targeting Falun Gong. And so it seems that, again, according to what we have just from the Justice Department reports and people being arrested, there's this weird overlap that a lot of these Chinese spies, in addition to infiltrating our government and whatever else they're doing and trying to, you know, spur lawsuits against, you know, their targets, that they're trying to export the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong. How is the CCP trying to export the persecution of Falun Gong? And why is this like such a common trait among the spies that we're seeing? So there was this moment about 15 years ago, where there was a senior level Chinese official in Sydney, Australia, he defected. And one of the things he came out and said is, one of my primary jobs was to suppress and malign Falun Gong in my home country, in this case, Australia. He came to testify before Congress. And I remember there was this moment where he's testifying before Congress, and I think he's sort of seeing that they're not seeing the gravity of the situation. He kind of stopped and said, look, in Australia, essentially said, in Australia, there's 1000 spies. A thousand. And that's not even nearly the high priority of the United States is, there's got to be much more here. And he was really trying to impress on people that infiltration of Chinese spies is a major, major problem. Now, if you look at the CCP documents, because we often get leaked documents coming out of China, we get sources coming out of China talking about what are their priorities. Silencing and maligning Falun Gong is one of the very top priorities, because not only are they trying to squelch the voice that's speaking out for all the victims of human rights atrocities in China, if you look at the Falun Gong diaspora around the world, whether it's local grassroots communities or companies that they've started, they're one of the most vocal communities calling the CCP out on the world stage about all their crimes. And so they're trying to silence that. I think in their minds, Falun Gong represents almost an existential threat to the narrative of their rule. I remember actually reporting on that former Chinese diplomat, that was Chen Yonglin, if I remember correctly. When he defected, he brought a bunch of documents with him and actually ended up exposing with documents what the CCP was doing, spying on dissident communities. It was one of the more shocking cases, actually. It was one of the bigger cases to come out. And I know since then, there's been a lot of other CCP officials who've defected and brought documents with them as well. But you were mentioning actually that the CCP views Falun Gong as like an existential threat. And this is where I think some people get confused about what Falun Gong is. It's like, well, why does the CCP want to destroy you so bad? Why do they risk basically exposing their spies to the extent, why not just keep their spies and infiltrate our government? Why do they risk exposing themselves to go after a bunch of people meditating? What does Falun Gong do to make them target them like this? I think the reason has evolved. I think when the persecution first started, it was clearly just the numbers. To some extent, the spirituality, right? Communist regimes trying to maintain control of its country. Along comes 70, 100 million people that are now believing in the spiritual practice that would challenge kind of the Marxist ideal of the world. They say, crush it. That was the initial reason. It was very clear. It was led by the top guy of the CCP at the time, Jiang Zemin. As the crimes unfolded and you had horrific torture throughout the country, people dying from torture, forced organ harvesting, it evolved into not just the original reason, but now it's a cover-up. Because now we can't let these crimes be exposed to the world stage. That would be horrific for the regime. And so it started to be a cover-up. And at the same time, now you've got the Falun Gong diaspora in the United States and all over the world being a leading voice on calling out not just the human rights abuses against Falun Gong, but here's the whole history of the CCP. Here's what the CCP is doing. I think what people forget is Falun Gong is heartland Chinese. It's not like some far-flung province or some sort of isolated ethnic group. It is mainland China. It was 100 million people. One out of every 13 people in the country were practicing at the time. High-level officials, military officials, farmers, housewives, university professors. And so the fact that they would do this to Falun Gong, that's a crime they couldn't let on the stage of the world. But also the fact that in Falun Gong you had Chinese people who knew this ins and outs of the CCP very, very well and could expose all their crimes to the world very, very well. And so now the reason Falun Gong remains a top priority in terms of transnational repression is that. They've got to squelch. They've got to make sure their crimes aren't revealed to the world, but they've got to squelch this voice because it's become one of the most effective voices of exposing their dirty laundry to the world. It really comes down to that, I think. You know, I've actually heard some people say this before talking to other experts that, you know, for the Chinese Communist Party, it has a lot of persecutions, but a lot of them are like ethnic persecutions. For example, you know, the Uyghurs, right? The Muslim Uyghurs in East Turkestan or Xinjiang. The Tibetans, right? The people from Inner Mongolia. You know, the house Christians are maybe an exception to that. But, you know, the CCP, I think, kind of dances around that a little bit. They persecute them still, but because they don't want to bring too much pressure from the West, they don't maybe take it as far as they could. But Falun Gong is more like integrated within the whole Chinese system because they came from everywhere. You had government officials, military officials. And as you mentioned, people now who became enemies of the state just because this, or deemed as such, only because they refused to give up their faith when the CCP persecuted it. And so, I mean, it seems like a stupid move for a Communist Party to turn one out of 13 people against the regime by, like, persecuting them. Well, I'm sure the Communist Party always recruits and promotes the sharpest tools in the shed. It was supremely stupid from a standpoint of running the country effectively and doing the best thing for the people. It was a reflection, I think, of the paranoia of one man, Jiang Zemin. I mean, you have to remember back in that time— Jiang Zemin, former CCP leader, right? Former CCP leader. He was the first leader that didn't go through the revolution. To put it plainly, he had no street cred among the leaders. They thought he was just this transitional guy that they threw in place in the wake of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and that, you know, a few years he'd be gone. So he's desperately trying to build up the cult of personality that Mao Zedong and other leaders had. And right as he's trying to do that, what's taking the country by storm? Balun Gong. And so, it was an extremely stupid move, but it was a very personal move. I mean, I think— I remember Willie Lam, who was the chief reporter of the CNN at the time, he was actually the first guy that got a Chinese official on record to admit this whole thing against Balun Gong. This is very personal for Jiang. This is his thing. Was this during the early days of the persecution? Very early days. That report was really the first one we saw come out that said, you know, because there was all these, you know, geopolitical theories and these kind of things. And he said, no, it's this man. Jiang Zemin. It's this man's jealousy of what Balun Gong is doing. It's this man's uncertainty of his own power. And so, this was going to be his cultural revolution. If you build up Balun Gong as the supreme enemy, public enemy number one, that became the litmus test. If you're with him, you rise in the ranks. If you're against him, you're gone. And this became the blood pact within the Communist Party then. That's a very good way to put it. That's what it became. I mean, and that's also how communism tends to work, right? They tend to basically identify a group to persecute. The people who engage in the persecution, they get blood on their hands. Everybody's equally guilty. And the more blood you get on your hands, the more loyal you are to the party and the higher you rise to the ranks. That's like how these communists have just practiced what they do. So, Balun Gong, of course, becomes one of the biggest targets of persecution in China. I understand that the CCP's persecution has largely failed in China, even though they brutally persecute them. Help me understand this. Like, what is the current state in China with the persecution? Well, I think inside China, it's been... As the persecution has raged, one of the things that emerged out of that is what I would say is clearly the largest peaceful civil disobedience movement in Chinese history, I would say the world. Well, you have a hundred million people. Yeah, you have a hundred million people. And of those hundred million, at least tens and tens of millions that are actively engaged in civil disobedience. As an example, there's a wide range of what they call home print centers where in the back room or in the basement of your house in China, you've got a printer, you print out these homemade grassroots leaflets that not only expose the persecution of Balun Gong, including sometimes stuff very local, just down the labor camp, guess what? This guy that we know in our neighborhood just tortured someone to death. Very local news. So they're exposing the CCP officials engaged in the persecution even locally in their communities. Very local, but also the broader picture. Because again, a lot of the Chinese people, they grew up on the state-run media. Do they have any understanding of Tiananmen Square, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution? Even though they lived through some of that, all that's very, very much been whitewashed. And that's a point too, because even outside of China, a lot of people know that in China, you can't talk about, for example, the Tiananmen Square massacre. People don't know about it, and it's suppressed. And you're saying that there's a lot of movements like that that are suppressed. And so when people are exposing the CCP within China, they're telling them all this history that they're not allowed to hear otherwise. Is that what's happening? Exactly. And so just as an example of this, usually under cover of night, they'll print out masses of amounts of these in the local community of Balun Gong practitioners. Perhaps some of their supporters would go out and hand it out in their village, their town, their city building, their apartment buildings. And so constantly over the last 15 years, people are getting these leaflets telling them stuff they'd never hear on the state-run media. That is a huge threat to the Chinese regime. And so the state of the persecution, while the torture continues, the wrongful detainment, all that stuff has been ongoing as far as we can tell, so is the forced organ harvesting. There's this normal civil disobedience movement going on at the same time that's kind of awakening different parts of China about not just what's happened to Balun Gong, but what's happening really with the Chinese regime. Well, this is incredible because most people have never even heard about this, like what's really happening in China. Some people will question, I mean, why have we not heard much about this in the West? Like, why is this not getting out that there's this quiet movement happening where it's peaceful civil disobedience and people are exposing, you know, the hidden history of the CCP in China? It's probably the most often question. The question we get the most often is why isn't this in the headlines? And I think it's a sad and sort of tragic story of the relationship between our media and China. And the media here in the United States. Media here in the United States and to a certain extent around the world, but it wasn't always like that. You know, in the first three years of the persecution, there was some really good work being done. The Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize. People mostly forgot about that. And from work, all they did in the year 2000, early 2001, they were the first ones that exposed the world stage, okay, Falun Gong is being tamed en masse. They are being tortured to death in these prisons, in these jails. They won a Pulitzer Prize for that. The Washington Post had some groundbreaking work. They were the first ones actually that got on record that this was not some rogue police officers or some ragtag group of people. This was from Beijing. They must use torture. They must use brainwashing on Falun Gong. So that was early reporting. Right about 2002, 2003, it all went silent. You mean a lot of the media in the West just totally went quiet? Totally went quiet. Even after winning Pulitzers and everything else? Totally went quiet. In other words, they knew the truth and they just went quiet. They went quiet. And also, I think if you look at the pulse of the data they had, which mainly you could look at the annual reports of human rights organizations, year after year after year, it was still there. Torture of Falun Gong, wrongful detainment of Falun Gong, then started to make references of forced organ harvesting. It's in the human rights reports. Now granted, it's very difficult to report on this stuff in China. You risk getting your company kicked out. You risk personal safety if you're a reporter in China trying to cover these third rail issues. But the bottom line is Beijing's tactics, whatever they were, were effective. And the media in the West went silent about 2003. What happened in 2003 that all the media was reporting on it, they were actually exposing it, and then they just did a 180 and just stopped talking about it? What happened? I think since the day the persecution started, the Chinese regime was not really ready for conducting a persecution of this scale on the world stage in the internet age, in a whole different age than they were. They were used to the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, where they were able to do that with relative... There was not a microscope on China. Even Tiananmen Square was just starting to, in terms of the communication ability. This was the first time they tried to do a persecution sort of in the internet age. And I think they were behind the ball a lot of times. When they first launched the persecution, they had no rationale. It took them many, many months to explain to the West what they were doing. The two excuses they came up with is Falun Gong was blocking traffic and disturbing social order. That was it. And for that reason, they're taking hundreds of thousands of people, putting them in stadiums, putting them in prison camps. They had no sort of explanation for this. I think they weren't ready for the media scrutiny, but they adjusted. I'm not in the back rooms of what happened in a lot of the media companies, what happened in Beijing, but you just look at the pattern. News coverage all the way through 2002, 2003, and then silence. The data points we have after that are twofold. In one case, we spoke directly with a media agency, and they said, look, we can't cover Falun Gong, or we can't go in and cover the 2008 Olympics. That was back in the mid-2000s. Clearly, pressure is being put on them there. And then we've just seen, since that time, over and over and over again, someone who tries to cover Falun Gong, and then they get shut down, they get cancelled. For example, the Washington Post tried to do something about 10, 12 years ago, and they were getting ready to go to press. They did the final email to the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., requesting for a comment. Then the whole story was killed. Time magazine was pulled from the shelves all throughout Hong Kong and everywhere when they tried to do a story on Falun Gong. There has been lots of cancellations of reporters that have tried to cover the story and just haven't been able to. And the shocking thing is, is now we've seen some of the media flip to the other side. Not only are they not talking about the live organ harvesting, it's actually when the tribunal happened in the U.K., I think a lot of media did cover that, except for a few of them didn't cover it. In the U.K., mostly. Which, of course, the tribunal proved, in basically a trial, that the Chinese Communist Party is, in fact, killing Falun Gong practitioners and harvesting their organs for sale. I mean, it's shocking stuff. You'd think every media in the world would be talking about that, but only a handful did. But since then, it seems a lot of media have gone the other way. They're actually even just now repeating CCP propaganda, trying to seemingly justify the persecution. And that's a shocking thing. I mean, at least if they're just not talking about the persecution, that's one thing. Especially if their old reporting showed that they acknowledged, even when awards proving this stuff was happening, they do a 180, and they start just reprinting what looks like CCP propaganda, targeting Falun Gong. Yeah, and that's been happening for about seven years, seven, eight years now. And I think the New York Times is illustrative of this. They're not the only ones guilty of it, but they're the clearest example. Where the New York Times has had a problematic approach to Falun Gong from the beginning. At the very beginning of the persecution, while the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post were doing some of this groundbreaking work, their publisher was sitting down with Jiang Zemin, the head of the CCP, the architect. The New York Times. Sitting down with Jiang Zemin. Jiang Zemin, that's right. So tell me more about that. I think this was about in 2001. Ironically, they just ran another article about this like three or four years ago, bragging about it. But yeah, so we're back in about 2001. The persecution's raging. Wall Street Journal just won a Pulitzer Prize. Washington Post has done some groundbreaking work. And the publisher of the New York Times flies to Beijing, meets with Jiang Zemin, who now is known to be the architect of this ongoing persecution of Falun Gong. And the substance of their meeting from their own reporting appears to be just to get a Chinese language version of the website up and running and just get access to China. That was the reason. So this is a very problematic beginning. Now, if you look at the coverage of New York Times over the last 25 years, it's characterized by a few things that are very troubling. At the very beginning, there were one of the few papers that would just repeat CCP talking points, not even quoting them, just say if the CCP calls Falun Gong a cult, they just call Falun Gong a cult. There was a point in time where all the media, including New York Times, was accurately saying there are 70 million or more than 70 million people practicing Falun Gong in about April of 99. Persecution starts. Beijing gets serious about it. In August or so, suddenly the New York Times says there's 2 million Falun Gong. No explanation on how the number changed, acknowledging their previous reporting, nothing. And so for many, many years after that, they just kind of ignored the persecution and repeated CCP talking points. And that's the way it was for 15, 16 years up until about 2016, 2017, where they turn their focus and now start to report negatively on the Falun Gong diaspora. And that obviously has been escalated in the last four months. They have done, I think at this point, nine or 10 articles on Shen Yun, but largely going after Falun Gong. This is way more time and resources they've ever spent on the Falun Gong issue over the last 25 years. And that's shocking because, you know, it's one thing to help cover up a persecution of this nature. It's one thing to ignore what is, I mean, honestly, just hero stories of people, you know, in China, carrying out this peaceful, non-cooperation movement of exposing the CCP while facing threats of death in order to say this person, you know, killed somebody and harvest their organs with the CCP. You would think that that would be the headline of every newspaper, like incredible stories like this. And instead, they're doing the opposite, where they're even justifying and covering this up and suggesting that the CCP is somehow right, it seems, and carrying out what I think should be called a genocide. And particularly troubling, I think I would agree with all that, particularly troubling this last six months, let's say, because while we've seen some of this from The Times and to be fair, a couple other media outlets over the last six, seven years, this last year was when we first heard that they're at the very highest levels of the CCP. There is an assessment that the effort to silence and malign Falun Gong globally has failed. And so they need to use much more creative measures. And the goal is to finally eliminate Falun Gong globally. And this is a new campaign that has been raging this last year, very much focused in the United States, although it is global in nature. And right as that campaign has taken off and the things that the CCP said they were going to do, they've been doing, right as all that's happening is when The New York Times starts really targeting Shen Yun and Falun Gong. The timing and the substance of the reporting in this case is very, very questionable, given that broader CCP campaign. It's shocking. It's really shocking. At the very least, they're assisting the CCP, whether knowingly or not. Knowingly or not, one thing you could say for sure, they are achieving the CCP's goals. Exactly how that's happening, why that's happening, there are things, different ways to assess that. But what is absolutely clear is they're achieving the CCP's goals at maligning and silencing Shen Yun, Falun Gong, the larger diaspora. And what I find really shocking is that going back to the original topic we were discussing, which is these Chinese spies that are now being arrested in America, is that while you talk about the CCP has this campaign and I mean, I've been reporting it. We're seeing it. It's not like it's some rumor. And the fact that these media organizations don't seem to even be acknowledging this, when the FBI is arresting Chinese spies, and in the actual Justice Department documents, says that they're targeting Falun Gong. Like, at what point is it too hard for them just to ignore the facts and keep doing what they're doing? I mean, this is shocking, I think. It's shocking on a couple of fronts. And one example I'll give you is that in one of the recent New York Times reports, they admit in the report, at least from what they wrote, that they were putting pressure on the Department of Labor to open up an investigation on Shen Yun. You mean the CCP was? The New York Times. Oh, the New York Times was? In their report, they talked about, they worded it vaguely. It wasn't clear if what they meant is they're the ones who made the call to the Department of Labor or just from their reporting, spurred the Department of Labor, but they seem to be taking credit for it in any case of opening, having the Department of Labor open an investigation on Shen Yun, based largely, it seems, claims that the New York Times has laid up in its hit pieces against Shen Yun. In covering that, there was no mention of the fact that just six months or eight months before that, Chinese spies were caught trying to bribe another government agency to guess what? Open an investigation on Shen Yun. And that isn't even the first instance. There have been other agencies where we've seen sort of Beijing proxies put pressure on those agencies to try and do something to Shen Yun or its headquarters. So clearly, they're arresting spies all over the place. This is a problem. Clearly, there's a history of Chinese spies or Chinese proxies, Beijing proxies, going after government agencies so that they'll turn their microscopes on Shen Yun. And yet here they cover a story once that has happened. There's no mention of any of this. The New York Times readers are left in the dark of all this vital context of how these things come about. So one-sided reporting, what seems to be some kind of at least political action they're taking against this target of the CCP and oddly doing the same thing that Chinese spies are doing. This is a very strange pattern. That's the sad part. I mean, yeah, that, I mean, look, my family's had the New York Times on the kitchen table since probably the Eisenhower administration. There was a time, I believe, when the Times was serving a valuable service to America. Hopefully I wasn't just duped into thinking that. I hope it was true. My big question is what's going on now? What happened? How did we get to this place? And I hope there are some people in the Times that are asking that same question. Regardless of what's actually going on, who's making the decisions and why, how did we get to a place where the New York Times is achieving the goals of the largest totalitarian regime on Earth, targeting an American institutions and Americans on American soil? That should be a cause for a great introspection at the Times. An audit, all kinds of things should be going on to figure out how they got to that place. Shocking stuff. A lot of people are still kind of unfamiliar with what Falun Gong is. And I mean, part of that's because the media has been covering it up for the last, you know, going on two decades or more than two decades. What do you think people misunderstand about Falun Gong? What would you tell people if you were to talk to them? I think the thing that most misunderstand is they think it's something foreign and weird that they're not really used to. And it's actually not true. Most people are very familiar with Buddhism and Buddhist style meditation. And they don't realize that Falun Gong actually comes from the same tradition. It's very, in Chinese, actually, it's called a Buddhist practice, a Buddhist style practice. It is not Buddhism, but it shares a lot of the aesthetics. It shares similar types of ways of practicing. And so I think that's one of the things when people start to learn Falun Gong, because it's a foreign name. And they're like, you know, there's weird stuff in the media. And they get to Falun Gong and they go, oh, they see someone who sits down and meditates, who talks about compassion, who studies books that tell them to be more truthful, more compassionate, more resilient. And sort of, I guess, what you call in the West, mindfulness, of reading those principles and trying to adopt it in your life. That's what Falun Gong is. So I think when people start to learn about it, they're like, these concepts, first of all, are very universal in terms of their values, but also the practices are not so foreign. So I think that's the thing that most people miss. It's not some weird Chinese foreign thing. It's actually something we're very, very familiar with. I guess just last question. It does seem that the persecution is getting exposed. Chinese spies are getting arrested. The CCP is, and honestly, at least in my analysis, the CCP looks like it's going to collapse. And in my personal views, I actually think that when it does collapse, we will probably see the truth of these persecutions come out. What is that going to look like when the world realizes what has been happening in China this entire time? I think there's going to be a fairly large reckoning. And I say that because, you know, again, before the persecution, Falun Gong was everywhere. And honestly, after the persecution, even up to the day, Falun Gong was everywhere in China. There are, I'm sure, many high-level officials, military leaders, professors that still practice Falun Gong. And I think once all this is exposed, all those people are now going to be free to come forward and say, this is what I saw. This is what the Chinese regime did. This is what happened. And there's going to be a very clear account just because there's so many people who still practice, who witness things day in and day out for the last 25 years. I think that's all going to come out to the light of day. And people are going to see very clearly when the dust settles what exactly happened. And I think the world's going to be pretty shocked. I think so as well. Levi, thank you so much. Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Josh.