Wow I did not know they did that Chinese ballet. I will be sure to never attend that now. I had checked the prices before and was amazed at how unexpectedly expensive it was.

Attended one of the shows in France, a few months ago. They politicized it right from the beginning, by having some bozos with English language fluency critize the Chinese government (not that they don't deserve it, but the way it was done sounded like far right American rhetoric). The show itself was vomit inducing, so I left after the first half an hour. As I was waiting outside for someone to exit, at the formal intermezzo mark, I couldn't help noticing lots of other people leaving the avenue. Doesn't surprise me to learn about the relationship with falun gong cult.

In Toronto (probably also everywhere) FG tend to hijack parades by having 100s of marchers, regardless of what the parade itself is celebrating. I find it quite obnoxious, since it makes every parade except for Pride look like it's Falun Gong Day.

They must pay a lot into the parades in order to even be accepted in such large numbers.

>They are apocalyptic/UFO/meditation cult

I didn't see anything like you describe[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#Central_teachings

I read what I think is the Zhuan Falun years ago when the cult was newer and they posted documents online[*]. One of their beliefs that jumped out at me was that they believe that David Copperfield is an actual magician who is only pretending to be a stage magician, and was actually doing magic during his stage shows.

edit: The Falun Gong have three OTA broadcast channels in Chicago, but Iranian official government news is too dangerous for me to be exposed to.

* Looks like they still do at https://en.falundafa.org/falun-dafa-books.html

You don't have to trust them, the organ harvesting is well documented and criticized by human rights organizations. Don't make the mistake of being agnostic about their victimization just because they are an usympathetic right wing person cult.