‘Keep Your Eyes and Ears Open’
In his introduction, Furman told the audience he was awakened to the danger of the CCP by the Mount Hope Chinese Association.“I met the Mount Hope Chinese Association about eight months ago. It opens your eyes about the things you see on the news.”“It’s scary,” Furman continued. “You might say, well, it’s not just me, I don’t have to worry about it. You do, because this is not just about one area, one town in the United States.” Furman encouraged the audience to “keep your eyes and ears open and learn a lot.”
The seminar asked the question, “How can we protect ourselves against communist infiltration?” The answer, Hensen said, is to “apply some critical thinking about what appears before you, and examine yourselves to see what you should do.”
‘Discover the Truth, Restore Tradition, Restore Faith’
Panelist Simone Gao is an award-winning investigative journalist and commentator. Gao told the audience that 20 years ago, she was an intern at China Central Television and was about to come to the United States for school. Gao was approached by a man who worked at a think tank for the Chinese regime. The man told Gao, “Whether you plan to come back to China or not doesn’t matter, but keeping a good relationship with the communist government can bring you good fortune.”Then the man offered Gao a job at the think tank, at the same time asking her to gather information for the Chinese regime in America.
Gao said, “I was very young and did not know much about the CCP. But his offer made me very uneasy, so I told him I'd think about it and never spoke to him again. Only a decade later, I realized how widespread it is that the CCP recruits ordinary Chinese people to gather information for them.”
Gao believes the CCP has infiltrated every aspect of Americans’ lives, and that “our failure to counter such invasion lies in ourselves. It is the decline of American citizenship, the decline of Christian faith, that has enabled the CCP to infiltrate American society.”
‘We’ve Just Started to Wake Up to It’
Author and filmmaker Kay Rubacek’s grandparents, father, and husband escaped from communism in three different countries, at three different times.Her grandparents escaped to China from Russia. Her father, of Russian descent and born in China before communism, then had to escape China during the great famine under that killed 45 million people under communist rule.
Rubacek’s husband also escaped communism, in what was then Czechoslovakia.
Rubacek talked about the CCP’s police stations outside of China. “We are aware of 54 CCP police stations around the world. There is one in New York City. During the last year, they’ve arrested 230,000 people around the world, who are not following the CCP’s law, and their family members are threatened.”
Lessons From Hong Kong: ‘The CCP Does Not Keep Its Promises’
Chris Chappell hosts the YouTube channel “China Uncensored.” Chappell has a humorous style that has attracted over 1.8 million subscribers since he started the channel 10 years ago.Chappell told the audience about reporting live from Hong Kong during anti-extradition protests there in 2019. “When I started China Uncensored, I never imagined one day getting tear-gassed by Chinese police. Also, I found out the hard way how the beard interferes with the mask,” he joked.
“It’s incredible to look at a city of 7 million people [and see] how much freedom means to them. Two million people came out on the street, marching shoulder to shoulder on an eight-lane highway, some spilling over to the side streets. These are families, pushing babies in strollers.”
“The situation now in Hong Kong is really grim ... Three thousand people are already on trial for their roles in those protests, and you can’t mention the Tiananmen Square massacre in court. It’s a complete destruction of freedom. It shows that the CCP does not keep its promises. They say that the agreement they had with the British does not mean anything now. If this is what they did, how can you trust them with anything?”
‘They Know More About Our Children Than We May Know’
After the seminar, attendee and former NYPD officer Frank Gray told The Epoch Times, “Now I understand what the CCP is. I understand that they have corrupted our politicians, Hollywood, [and] the corporate world.”Gray said, “You name it, the CCP would get involved. TikTok is poison. ByteDance is collecting everything. They know more about our children than we may know. That’s scary. We need to battle back. We need to keep our values.”
