China's Hit List: Shen Yun Performers Targeted

And then they start talking about our kids, and they say, well, we're going to take all the children of Shen Yun performers, the girls, and we're going to throw them off of a building after we gang raped them and mutilate them. And you asked me about my family, and for those who see the movie, I do break down at some point during a press conference, which we had in Washington the next day. I was just reading off, I said, the journalists were there and they said, can you have, do you have examples of the bomb threats? And I said, yeah, I have some of them printed out here. I just started reading them one after the other. And it goes from, we're going to blow up the theater, to we're going to kill the president, to we're going to kill all your supporters and celebrities. And then they start talking about our kids, and they say, well, we're going to take all the children of Shen Yun performers, the girls, and we're going to throw them off of a building after we gang raped them and mutilate them. And for me, as being on the front lines of this, we don't have that many performers with kids and especially ones with young daughters. And I knew this was directly targeting me. And even though you know, it's just, they're trying to scare you. It's just terrorism of fear. It's still, when you read that, it creates an image in your mind. Your brain creates this vision of what that would be, of your daughters being thrown off a building. And I mean, that was really hard for me to go through that. My daughters, I try to shield them from this. My older daughter, who's almost 12 now, came to the screening of Unbroken, which we had in New York City. And that was a lot of fun for her to see. And she could handle, the movie is, for the most part, not scary. It does do an excellent job, and we can get into this, of drawing, connecting the dots of how the CCP is behind so much of what we're seeing. But she got to be there and be around the other dancers there in their beautiful outfits. And it was a very wonderful evening. And they've been multiple screenings since then, I think it's still available online. So it's a really nice movie. And I hope it's the beginning of, it's a wake-up call for America. Because if they can come after Shen Yun Performing Arts, such a successful American company, in this sort of way, they could come after anybody. It's really a blueprint for a foreign regime, specifically the biggest dictatorship in human history, coming after anybody they don't like in America to shut us up. I want to play that clip real quick. I think it's about 49 seconds, just for context. Yes, we'll do that here. This was an email simultaneously sent to Shen Yun headquarters, to Feitian schools. Children of American Falun Gong members under the age of 10 will be kidnapped, taken to high-rise buildings in the United States and pushed down from the top. It's particularly hard for me to read because I have two young daughters at home. It hits close to home. When you read the message, we're going to throw them off a building after they were gang-raped. That creates an image in your mind. You see that image and you think about your daughters. I mean, I've got two daughters, I think younger than yours, mine are two and five. And a lot of what I cover on this show is crimes against children. I interview people that have come out of really, really bad situations, people that work in rescuing child sex trafficking and kidnapping and all kinds of stuff. I oftentimes think with my own little girls, I see these things and it hits you differently when you're a father. Call me a little bit paranoid, but I've got security cameras, I've got a big gate out front. We live in the country and I'm building a small compound. It's like, kids, you can just roam free here. You have everything you need, but I'm going to protect you from this outside world for as long as I can. But when you've got these threats coming directly at you, it's not just from some random crazy person. Right now, it's the world's most powerful dictatorship, the most powerful communist nation in their entire block. That's where these threats are coming from. This is the nation that has a history of killing upwards of 100 million people. I can't imagine those kinds of things, because they're real. This stuff is real. Tell me more about that experience for you. I have security cameras at home as well. I have gotten threats specifically targeting me with my name on them and a picture of a machine gun next to a baby crib and things like that. But you can't let that stop you. We haven't gotten to the point that I feel like there's more that we need to do. Part of it is knowing that I've seen over the years how a lot of what the Chinese Communist Party does is just reliant on empty threats. You don't need to actually sever economic relations with the city. All you need to do is threaten them that you're going to. Listen, if you don't cancel the show, we're not going to bring a performing arts company from China to your theater here in LA or your theater here in Copenhagen. That is often enough. They don't actually need to follow up on anything, because if they just encounter somebody without a spine, that'll work. When people push back, I remember we were in Little Rock, and they were at the Robinson Music Hall there, a really nice venue. And the embassy, it was a consulate from Houston, sent them a letter and told the theater manager, cancel the show. This is going to affect Arkansas-China relations or whatever they were threatening. And the manager went on news media and said, this is America. You're not going to tell us what we can and cannot watch here. Go away. And we performed there. We've performed there ever since. That was 17 years ago. Obviously, I have my family's support. I do keep my wife updated about what we're dealing with. And this is not a secret that we're facing this. But we are in this together, and we believe in a bigger cause. We believe that we're not alone in this. And there's not just the support of kindhearted people everywhere, but there's also greater forces at play. And it's a historical battle. And if you look at our heroes from history, from ancient times to today, if they didn't do what they needed to do because of fear, we would be in much deeper trouble than we are now as a world. So I think that there are moments like that where you have to make that choice. On a day-to-day basis, we don't think about it that much. It's more of, oh, there's a bomb threat. OK, how do we make sure everybody understands what's happening here, that this is not a real threat, this is just a scare tactic? But how, at the same time, do we get the police in and scan the building? We were just in Orlando, Florida about a week ago. And I'm there in the morning setting up, and there's a canine and a police officer, and he's just looking through stuff, like, hey, here's my bag. You want a jacket? That's fine. And that's just part of our reality now. And to think that we go through airport security, we're used to certain things now, sporting events, you have to have the clear backpacks or whatever. But we don't really think of that as being, oh, we have to do this because somebody in Beijing doesn't like what we're saying here. They're trying to censor us here. That's why we have security. And then when you combine that with the modern tools that they have, things like impersonations of people on X and on other social media platforms, using images of our performers, creating fake accounts in their names, using bots to amplify disinformation to target us. They're not even real accounts of people. They have the whole 50-cent army of commentators online doing all these different things. And then you combine that with things that we've experienced, like tire slashing and death threats, you get this sense of what we're really up against here and how this really can come after anybody in America.