The Falun Gong show

Most people in the English-speaking world who try to pay attention to what's going on on their native planet have heard of Falun Gong, a religious group originating in China that is severely persecuted by the Chinese government. That's about all most of us in the West know. Especially since the Xi regime is inherently so... well, evil... anyway, we tend to feel a great deal of sympathy toward the Falun Gong, if only for that very reason.

Well, nobody should be persecuted because of their religious beliefs. That said, Falun Gong is not what we usually think of when we hear the term "religion." The fact is that it's a straight-up, classic cult, based on adoration of a basically "divine" human leader, Master Li Hongzhi. Li presents himself as a superhuman, interdimensional entity who lives in luxury in an estate in the Catskills in New York, served and adored by members of the cult. The fact that the group is persecuted by an evil regime that is threatened by its popularity in China doesn't automatically turn Falun Gong into "good guys."

Falun Gong teaches, among other things, a kind of eternal racial segregation. It claims that the races were each created by separate gods and that each race has its own separate heaven. That Communism is a white, Western philosophy is one of the things that makes it so hateful to Li.

Finding negative information about Falun Gong on the web is harder than one might think.  Its growing popularity in China is undeniably a threat to the Communist government, a fact that can be used both to explain and to explain away the government's fear and hostility toward it. But like Scientology and other such groups (and also the Chinese government), Falun Gong is quite good at manipulating public opinion through the media, and especially through adept use of the Internet.

The thing is, Falun Gong is a great deal better at public relations than, say, Scientology, which tends to rely on threats of lawsuits to suppress bad publicity. Falun Gong goes to the heart of the matter and seeks to influence rather than only inhibit the kind of publicity it receives. Among Master Li's public relations organizations, staffed largely through unpaid labor provided by cult members as a religious obligation, are

• The Shen Yun ballet troop;
• The Epoch Times, a "news" outlet whose advertisements ironically heralding its "objectivity" are familiar to most users of YouTube these days, whose pages are heavy with conspiracy theories, light on documentation of those theories, and vocally supportive of the anti-scientific and downright murderous anti-vaccination movement and the zany pro-Trump conspiracy-mongering movement QAnon. 
• Various YouTube and social media outlets which do not advertise their connection to Falun Gong (Facebook has since banned ads from the Epoch Times over its lack of transparency)

The status of Falun Gong as a religion (which it somehow denies being despite a rather elaborate theology) being persecuted by the single most murderous regime in the history of the human race causes it to be viewed by default with sympathy by outsiders, including journalists, who often are not disposed to go out of their way looking for reasons to suspect the group. As a result, articles on the cult tend to paint it in neutral if not positive terms.

It's status as an inherently racist philosophy with all the earmarks of a cult exploiting its adherents in the usual manner for the benefit of a semi-divine leader while using its resources to advocate bizarre and slanderous conspiracy theories and an extremist political ideology as well as viciously destructive ideologies like the anti-vax movement, though, is as much a part of Falun Gong as the notion of Master Li implanting something in one's abdomen that spins in such a way as to bring one into harmony with the universe, or the elements of simplified but ancient Eastern meditative and religious practice it incorporates. It seeks to influence the political life of the United States and the West in general in specific and dangerous ways and is considerably less than forthcoming or transparent about that fact.

Of course, the Communist Chinese persecution of Falun Gong is wrong and needs to be opposed. But that does make the Falun Gong the "good guys." There aren't any "good guys" in this particular argument.