Happy Science has adopted American far-right ideology for its own gain, just like Falun Gong.
This feature exposed the YouTube disinformation campaign of a far-right religious group called Happy Science (or Kofuku no Kagaku) that had pushed pro-Trump election disinformation to at least hundreds of thousands of Japanese viewers. In addition to a detail reviewed of the group’s social media operations, the story spotlights Happy Science’s longstanding ties to far-right actors in the U.S., including Steven Bannon and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and unpacks its anti-China political agenda. My reporting included an interview with the group’s former political leader, Jay Aeba.
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