The exiled cult leader, the MAGA mastermind, the Chinese con-artist billionaire, and the CCP. Insatiable dragons, all. Each claims to be at war with evil, as their fiery propaganda melts the minds of far-right media consumers. Julian connects the dots on these overlapping stories of life in the “Dharma-ending times.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hi everyone, Julian here today with a story about how blurred the lines between villains and heroes become when the competing, devouring dragons of apocalyptic cults, charismatic scams, opportunistic ideologues, and state-sponsored propaganda wage their fiery battles to redraw the borders between good and evil, truth and lies. | |
| Whatever the Americans are claiming is a lie. | |
| We are in an uncomfortable position because we have an extradition treaty with the Americans. | |
| It's faster, easier, and ultimately cheaper to achieve power through cyber technology than it is to build traditional military weapons. | |
| In short, Washington is a Trojan horse. | |
| On a Saturday night in October of 2019, a new film debuted on One America News. | |
| That's one of those pro-Trump networks currently in hot water over their false Dominion voting machine allegations. | |
| They also lost an anti-slap countersuit from MSNBC for claiming Rachel Maddow defamed them. | |
| And then they settled out of court with the Georgia election officials they falsely accused of creating illegal ballots to favor Joe Biden in the 2020 election and had to issue an on-air statement that the allegations were in fact false. | |
| That's pretty impressive for an outfit that's only existed since 2013. | |
| But where was I? | |
| Oh yeah, that Saturday night in October of 2019, when the between 150,000 and 500,000 | |
| strong audience of OAN got to watch the debut of a film called Claws of the Red Dragon. | |
| Wait, did I say perhaps as high as half a million people? | |
| Sorry. | |
| That's just what OAN officially claims, and perhaps predictably, that's false. | |
| Nielsen's data says they average around 14,000 viewers. | |
| But, like, that's just their opinion, man. | |
| Anyway, Claws of the Red Dragon's executive producer credit goes to Steve Bannon. | |
| You remember him. | |
| Now it's a film ripped from the headlines, goes the promo, about the Chinese multinational technology company Huawei. | |
| Their CFO was arrested by Canadian mounted police in 2018 on fraud and conspiracy charges related to Huawei trying to circumvent US sanctions against Iran. | |
| Now this is all true. | |
| In fact, in the years that followed that 2018 arrest, Huawei products would either be partially or completely banned in the US, the UK, Australia, Sweden, Japan, India, and Canada. | |
| They've been accused of everything from intellectual property theft, to enabling backdoor espionage by the Chinese government, to illegally sharing American technology with Iran, to being party to surveillance and mass detentions of the Uyghur minority group in China. | |
| On that last point, Huawei is alleged to have developed facial recognition software that identifies the specific ethnic features of those Turkic Muslims. | |
| The treatment of the Uyghurs is referred to by some as a genocide, or at the very least, an ethnocide, as at least a million are estimated to have been imprisoned without any charges or trial. | |
| Government policies for those internment camps include forced labor, forced abortion and sterilization, religious suppression, and thought-reform-style indoctrination. | |
| So yes, Huawei bad. | |
| CCP, bad. | |
| But as we all know, that doesn't mean Steve Bannon, good. |