During a trip to Hong Kong in December, independent U.S. Senate candidate Max Linn called the United States “a dying country.”

“We’re heading toward a total socialist-communist country and it’s speeding up every day,” Linn said.

Speaking to a reporter shortly after attending a protest that drew 800,000 people into the streets of Hong Kong, Linn hailed the demonstrators for their “energy and enthusiasm” in standing up to the Chinese government.

“I just wish we saw more of this in America,” Linn added in a video of the interview posted online by The Epoch Times, a conspiracy-spewing magazine started by practitioners of Falun Gong, a religious group at odds with the Chinese government.

Linn said in the interview that he flew to Hong Kong, where he has business interests, “specifically for the protests.”

Several people close to the retired Bar Harbor financial analyst said he visited the former British colony and toured at least one business in China where he has investments before returning to Maine to lead the effort to collect the required signatures to earn a spot on the November general election ballot.

Linn, who is an unenrolled voter, filed about 4,400 signatures last Friday with the secretary of state. He needs 4,000 valid ones to get on the ballot in one of the most closely watched races in the country as Democrats and Republicans battle over a potential fifth term for Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins.

The Democrats will pick a candidate from among three waging a primary campaign: House Speaker Sara Gideon of Freeport, Hallowell activist Betsy Sweet and Saco lawyer Bre Kidman. Lisa Savage, a Solon educator with ties to the Maine Green Independent Party, is also on the ballot as an independent.

Linn, who declined to comment until his petitions have been accepted by the state, said in the video that Americans need to stand up against big corporations and the government in the same way that he witnessed firsthand in Hong Kong.

“Unfortunately, I don’t see that kind of protest” in the U.S., Linn said, despite a growing invasion of citizens’ privacy and liberty.

“We’re losing our freedom. We’re losing our Constitution. We’re losing our Bill of Rights,” Linn said.

A flier that was handed out by Linn’s campaign in January urged Mainers “to get active and involved” with Linn’s bid to “kick the corporate globalists in the ass and out of office.”

It cited an alleged globalist agenda to control health care, create poverty, inflate the currency to make it worthless, seize guns to make it hard for people to defend themselves, nationalize education, remove God from government and schools, promote class warfare and spur ever more welfare.

“Let’s not worry about the Middle East,” Linn’s campaign flier said, because “it’s happening from within!!”

Linn said in the video from Hong Kong that politicians only give lip service to the principles at stake.

“The American people need to wake up,” Linn said, and follow the lead of the protesters in Hong Kong who are refusing to cave in to Chinese demands.

“America is dying. It’s a dying country,” Linn said, on its way to “becoming a socialist mess.”

“I just wish America had this much vigor and fight,” Linn said. “The only one standing up for freedom is Hong Kong.”

Linn said the U.S. is “asleep at the wheel” while “Europe is gone,” already won over by socialists.

“The whole world is becoming a big globalist, communist country,” Linn said.

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