US supreme court ends lawsuit alleging Cisco helped China pursue Falun Gong
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/23/supreme-court-ruling-cisco-china-falun-gongOpen linkView original on lemmy.ziphttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/23/supreme-court-ruling-cisco-china-falun-gongOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip
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I wonder if that's still true.
If you ever read any of the stuff the Epoch Time posts with a critical eye, you'll be 100% convinced that the Falun Gong is a doomsday cult. Both can be true: the Chinese government persecuting them and them being a cult is not mutually exclusive.
The tragedy is that the Falun Gong targets victims and family of the CCP policies (such as parents of the victims from the 6/4 massacre), using their grief to drive them deeper into the cult for monetary purposes. "Divine judgement will punish the CCP soon" is not a productive way forward, especially when the cult is also asking for contributions that drains their wallets dry.
Fun fact: the Falun Gong used to provide free VPNs out of China. The default homepage that opens is the Epoch Time website. Their front page is a mix of real wrongdoings of the CCP, unproven conspiracy theories, and doomsday cult "end is neigh" slogans.
Is this somehow connected to the four horsemen of the apocalyse? I thought that would mostly involve trumpets, not whinnying.
Oh, I absolutely agree that Falun Gong is awful, but I live in the country where Scientology was founded, so I have an unfortunately high bar when it comes to "how horrible can you be and still call it a religion".
Falun Gong are just as scummy, but have less money. Qigong is already overly prone to woo-woo bullshit (with a few notable exceptions) but Falun Gong is way off the deep end, like Moonie Qigong. Completely rabid.
There's a long tradition in China of reactionary, xenophobic martial-arts spinoff groups, for example, the Boxers (the Fists of Righteous Harmony). I suspect that's one reason the CCP has cracked down so hard. The other being the CCP are authoritarian control-freaks who like to boss people around even at the best of times.