“See the screenshots, you are done,” the thugs wrote.
The Epoch Times, a newspaper dedicated to “providing truthful and accurate news out of heavily censored China” that is published by practitioners of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, reports on the latest in a long string of harassments of Falun Gong and its organizations by good buddies of the Chinese Communist Party. For years, Falun Gong has been one of many groups especially targeted by the CCP for deviating from the Party line and posing a threat to its rule.
This time, the troublemakers pretended to be associated with The Epoch Times as they submitted fake threats to the White House, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the DC police. Eager to gloat, they then emailed proof of their prowess to the folks at The Epoch Times (September 12, 2025).
Three screenshots of the threats were attached to the email; one showed the “Contact Us” form on the White House website, with The Epoch Times’s phone number and email filled in. In a comment littered with exclamation marks, the sender claimed to represent practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual community persecuted in China, and threatened violence against the White House.
“We will throw incendiary bombs and explosives! If anyone tries to stop us, we will open fire!” the message states. It then threatened to “simultaneously broadcast this magnificent feat live” on a variety of platforms, including YouTube, The Epoch Times, and its sister media outlet, NTD.
The message claimed that the acts were to be in retaliation for “your failure to help us address the Communist Party’s transnational repression.”
The Epoch Times does not say anything about having gotten into any hot water, even briefly, with the White House or other organizations because of the fake threats.
It seems, then, that the fake-threat campaign cannot claim the success achieved by efforts last year to dupe The New York Times into publishing a series of “investigative” reports about the Shen Yun dance troupe that amount to little more than a collection of Chinese Communist Party lies. Lies supplemented by such revelations as the fact that talented young people are thrilled by a chance to perform for a successful troupe, dancers sometimes get injured, and a major enterprise like Shen Yun sometimes has business problems.
More to come
According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, “malicious impersonations of Falun Gong practitioners” are happening more and more often. Executive director Levi Browde thinks that the party-state or its proxies “may be plotting a more serious incident, even a violent one, using fake Falun Gong practitioners” with the hope of turning public opinion against Falun Gong here and around the world.
“The fact that they would stoop this low in their attempts to malign our faith in the West shows perhaps just how desperate they are.”
