The Trump Insanity Claws: psychology or machine?

 

Morlocks herd Eloi into cattle pens for cannibalisation. The Time Machine (1960)

There’s method in the madness of the relentless pursuit of profit in late capitalism but it’s not for your benefit

By Anna Chen. First published at Substack as Psychology or Machine? Are our leaders insane? 25 October 2026

This is a response to Nel Bonilla, who has written another insightful analysis. This time, she develops BettBeat Media’s critique of psychologism wherein we clutch our pearls at the horror of leaders rocking the Titanic as we get turfed out of steerage and into the briny deep.

Are our leaders mad? Or are they pursuing the relentless logic of the system?

Here we have both what appears at first glance to be madness, and then there’s method. But one serves the other, following a malign logic. To use another of my astro-political metaphors, the mad decision-making we are witnessing is like the speed of light and gravity embedded in the space-time structure of the universe. This insanity is not something separate that can be measured against the structure: it is a feature of the structure itself. It is determined by it. Changing the drivers of the clown-car-to-oblivion and hoping their good graces win out might offer a swerve. Perhaps even a slow-down in the way that light passing through the medium of water can be bent, interrupted by interacting with atoms. But it still retains its speed between atoms.(Perhaps sensing this is what, in earlier times, was known as fate or destiny. Or karma.)  

A respite buys us time — for Palestinians being wiped out in the Gaza genocide, that’s urgently needed and must be fought for. But the cycle still has its inherent quality, so said respite offers no place to stop and relax because the cycle always revs up. Our challenge, should we wish to take the red pill, is to realise we cannot delineate which is madness and which is method. And hopefully, realise in (space) time to do something about it. Oh, that’ll be root and branch revolution. 

The system is a machine, ultimately a war machine: a juggernaut that exists to expand and hold on to power. This is how my late father used to define imperialism, which he drummed into me from toddlerhood. Everything it does feeds that objective, like a great white shark forever moving forward or it dies. Different wings of the political class dress it up differently to render it palatable, but it always moves with the same relentless underlying ruthlessness. Sometimes that ruthlessness is disguised as soft power. Sometimes, when necessary, teeth are bared and jaws snap away. As we are seeing now. (Actually, there’s alwayssomeone outside our pampered delusional west who’s seeing it directly.) It’s Very Late Capitalism. 

At core is the dynamic of the board game of Risk, as anyone who plays it knows. I love that game and recommend you make it your game of choice during power cuts as we await the Apocalypse. That is, if you’re not already actively involved in juggernaut stoppage.

The presidential managers of the cycle line up

The start of the current wave of American imperial expansion can be located in 1992 with the fall of the USSR and the Paul Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guide, which identified China as the next rival to be preemptively contained. Asserting military dominance over China, and keeping check on a resurgent Russia, Germany and Japan and a unified Europe (see Brexit), would justify continuing massive investment in the Pentagon war machine now that the Cold War was officially over. You could actually take it all the way back to the 19th century Opium Wars, which capitalised western industrial revolutions and created a slew of banks and East Coast dynasties, but let’s start with the cycle rising in a crescendo towards a climax right now.  

We knew President George Dubbya Bush and his neocon flying monkeys were Patriot Act-level awful but if you’re looking back nostalgically at the cuddly Clintons and Obama, ask how sane were their actions? Yes, Clinton brought China into the WTO. But this was less from the goodness of his heart and more about having its huge scales of production function as the West’s factory of cheap goods, placating domestic populations being steadily stripped of their post-WWII gains. Clinton also dismembered former USSR ally Yugoslavia within Europe, launching the round of box-ticking as the serial-killer state scythed its way through its rivals now that the Soviet Union no longer stood in the way. The 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade served to remind them who was boss despite flattery as a “strategic partner”.  

Then we were given sophisticated, charming Barack Obama. His muted response to his fellow black people struggling in resistance was shown up in sharp relief when he crumbled over the grand jury’s failure to indict the police for killing unarmed youth Michael Brown in the troubled community of Ferguson, in 2014. However, African American solidarity was not his purpose, no matter what hopes had been pinned on the first Black president. He was more eager to be seen as “America’s first Pacific president,” as he grandiosely called himself, foreshadowing the line of destruction to come. Following Bush’s demand at the Bucharest conference in 2008 for Ukraine and Georgia to be drawn into NATO, Obama did most to kick off current conflicts: his Pivot to Asia to “contain” China and setting up Ukraine for the “proxy” war against Russia. Such sanity!

Smite and spite – sanity, insanity or something structural?

Which brings us to Trump, who is indeed unhinged. He’s the best wrecking ball the state ever had. The world waits on tenterhooks for his attempted destruction of a 5,000-year-old civilisation of 90 million Iranian people, even if he takes down the global economy with it. But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. There’s a tiny elite that will do very well, whether from the Military Industrial Complex, fossil fuels or the massive pile of assets they’ve accumulated. The top one percent own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, but even they are poor by comparison with the apex billionaire oligarchs and their ambitions to carve up the planet.  

Why so little pushback from a Congress packed with tools? How on earth did Biden do so badly that he ushered in Trump’s second term? Maybe it’s because our orange overlord does the elite’s dirty work so fast and furiously, easily manipulated by Deep State when he gets out of line. And he’s rewarded with his cut, billions to date. 

I’ve been yelling warnings that there are trajectories and objectives at work, but dearest friends have had two replies: it’s only “sabre-rattling” and “they’re stupid”. Head. Meet brick wall.

Subordinate to the uber-objective

There is no debate about any of this in the mainstream. On social media, algo-boosted commentators have been late, for example, only realising this year that China was the ultimate target in a seemingly disparate raft of targets. Another pundit belatedly observes that China is trying to save the world from America’s current excesses. Yes, China has been firefighting all along, providing our cheap stuff when underpaid workers couldn’t possibly afford American-made goods made on decent wages. China floated us out of trouble after the 2008 crash. In doing so, it also recharged American capitalism which can be seen directly in the longest bull-run ever. 

We shouldn’t rule out entirely the psychology that adds grace notes and potential shifts to the dynamic being played out. There is a human, psychological aspect to the subsequent betrayal by the US in that there was a responding period of paralysis when Vice Premier Liu He attempted to negotiate Donald Trump’s trade war in his first term as shock sank in. What an insane move for the new President Trump to make when China had saved the world from US folly and Wall Street was hogging down on a profit bonanza from China’s exploding middle-class: at 550 million, bigger than the entire population of the USA and still growing. Screw domestic sales, we’re gonna need a bigger wallet. The logic of self-interest would prevail — well, that depends on your ultimate aim. 

Illustrating the internecine warfare among American capitalists, Gary Cohn — Trump’s chief economic advisor from Goldman Sachs — wailed, “Peter Navarro ratfucked us into a trade war with China by taking advantage of Trump’s very small brain”. Navarro, with his anagram creation ‘Ron Vara’, had been a much derided China-hating wing-nut on the fringes, but he was soon to be drawn centre-stage by Trump: welcome, the New Normal.  

China then pinned hopes on a “sane” Joe Biden who had promised cooperation in dealing with the existential global threat of climate change. Surely he would see that China was a Good Thing for the US and the world? Once in office, Biden promptly placed a $1.6 billion dollar propaganda bounty on China’s head and continued Obama’s conflict wherever China was heavily invested. Chiefly the Ukraine where Crimea was earmarked to be a key BRICS hub — well, fancy that! We do all realise by now, I trust, that US military pollution is one of the key contributors to environmental damage, not to mention from the destruction of the Russia-Germany Nordstream pipeline as threatened by Biden.  

According to the UN, the Nord Stream pipeline explosions resulted in the largest human-caused release of methane, with up to 485,000 tonnes of methane escaping into the atmosphere, contributing significantly to global warming. This release was nearly five times larger than the previous record holder for methane emissions. 

Oops, there goes the neighbourhood. So much for climate change concerns.

The snake eating its own tail

Insane, desperate and shortsighted. But the war in Ukraine functioned as pursuit of the longer-term goal. Although it stirred up a hornets nest of conflict, it was a major step in trying to defeat Russia, keep the Europe bloc under wraps and halt a peaceful Eurasia prospering. The logic of the machine is that Europe needed a spanking after it began successfully emerging from America’s crash through Russian energy and BRICS trade, and leaving the malfunctioning US on the naughty step. 

That European leaders succumbed to US-induced self-harm just as the Eurasian landmass was consolidating through peaceful trade might undermine my argument and prove that insanity does indeed have its part to play. However, our own slow, clumsy, cloth-eared vassal insanity is not necessarily the same as the hegemon’s overriding drive in the twists and turns of a writhing snake: the machine exists to continue existing. The snake may well be eating its own tail.  

Europe initially resisted America’s proxy war on Russia. Angela Merkel stated that pulling Ukraine into NATO on Russia’s doorstep would be seen as a declaration of war. And she was right. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy resisted and was punished for it when his own crimes of corruption, which would normally be overlooked in someone of such power, sent him to jail: pour encourager les autres, to quote Voltaire. Prime Minister David Cameron was too busy forging a Golden Age with China to embroil us in a return to 19th and 20th century warfare.  

Unfortunately, in 2016, Old Etonian Cameron, none too bright, was manipulated into granting the non-legally binding EU referendum to placate Farage and his own right-wing in the Conservative party. Fending off an intra-party bunfight would have the severest of consequences for the UK and the world.  

The Brexit vote provided the trigger and lit the fuse. 

Whose finger is on the trigger?

Europe, weakened by Britain jumping out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, was soon caught in the increased gravitational pull of a reviving hegemon stripped of all niceties and going for broke. It eventually mounted the bucking serpent only to be thrown off with the next writhing coil of Trump 2’s Ukraine machinations.  

Piling in on a Gaza breakout armed with Kalashnikov rifles by the occupying US-armed Israel on Biden’s watch less than two weeks after Netanyahu threatened Iran at the UN general assembly, opened a second major front in the Middle East. The resulting genocidal wipe-out violates every code of the New Testament, the Enlightenment, the Geneva Convention, and every decency we thought the horrors of World War II had taught us about humanity. Trump fantasises aloud about destroying a 5,000-year-old civilisation with his MOAB bombs and maybe nukes. Israel has its (unacknowledged) nuclear weapons at the ready. The Hormuz Strait, which was open to free passage of the world’s shipping, is now closed, threatening the entire global economy. But actually, it’s America that has its finger on the trigger. And the rest of the world — including perceived US rivals China and Europe — is held to ransom, not just Iran. 

Now, there’s method in that madness. 

Read how this was unfolding in Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China.

The western Left snatches defeat from the jaws of victory

How did we get to this point, as a US-compliant UK, with so little resistance and a depleted consciousness in a country that once had a proto-bourgeoisie powerful enough to remove the head of a king?  

The Left allowed a 20-year vacuum to suffocate political consciousness since the proletarian classes flexed their muscle in the biggest protest ever seen in the UK, in the anti-Iraq war march of February 2003. Demobilising for the crucial day of Blair’s vote in Parliament the following month, which he had a real possibility of losing, was a Sliding Doors moment that stripped the movement of confidence. Failure to harness the public’s protest power built up over two years and mount a protest on the big day emboldened the hawks and shredded MP’s willingness to follow through with a dissenting vote: the result was 412 to 149. 

Opposition to war within the political establishment had collapsed. British parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq against the public wish shocked the movement. It created a lengthy hiatus in which the Right, largely marginalised throughout the post-war liberal period, has regrouped and consolidated. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, with millions displaced. 

The 2017 general election was our one chance to take some sort of power when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn verged on winning in a landslide. I said at the time we’d better win. If it failed, the forces of reaction who’d been taken by surprise, would power-up and ensure that it never happened again. And they would be vicious and pitiless.  

General Election Sliding Doors, 2017

The Labour Party was the biggest in Europe, with 564,443 full members. The nation was waking up from the non-legally binding referendum with a hangover and a surge of regret that 37 percent of the population was about to destabilise the economy just as we were emerging from America’s Great Crash of 2008 and its recessional austerity. Campaigning in 2016 on his Remain and Reform agenda, Corbyn said, “We, the Labour Party, are overwhelmingly for staying in, because we believe the European Union has brought investment, jobs and protection for workers, consumers and the environment.” But then, in March 2017, he used the three-line whip to get Labour MPs to vote to trigger Article 50, overcoming the final hurdle against leaving. 

Despite massively confusing contradictory messages, a lingering hope remained that, with the Tories ousted, we might not have to complete the Leave process. A second less febrile referendum leading to Remain but Reform from within was mentioned as a possibility and was likely to reverse the result. Pro-Labour voting intention soared in the polls. But then, with 70 percent of Labour voters supporting Remain, along with the majority of youth who saw their future being destroyed, and ethnic minorities far from enamoured of Brexit’s anti-immigration emphasis, Corbyn’s office leaked to the press that our triangulating leader was actually pro-Brexit.  

It was almost as if someone in his office didn’t actually want to take power. Labour canvassers reported support on the doorstep draining rapidly after that. Another hint in the press that Corbyn was listening to Remain halted the outflow for a moment but another pro-Brexit leak set it off again. Attempts to staunch the wound failed and Corbyn lost by a whisker, even though he did manage to deny Theresa May a resounding majority. That was it. That was our chance. As predicted, the state’s vicious blowback saw Corbyn labelled an anti-semite as were Jewish progressives in the party who were critical of Israel. 

The western Left snatches defeat from the jaws of victory

How did we get to this point, as a US-compliant UK, with so little resistance and a depleted consciousness in a country that once had a proto-bourgeoisie powerful enough to remove the head of a king?  

The Left allowed a 20-year vacuum to suffocate political consciousness since the proletarian classes flexed their muscle in the biggest protest ever seen in the UK, in the anti-Iraq war march of February 2003. Demobilising for the crucial day of Blair’s vote in Parliament the following month, which he had a real possibility of losing, was a Sliding Doors moment that stripped the movement of confidence. Failure to harness the public’s protest power built up over two years and mount a protest on the big day emboldened the hawks and shredded MP’s willingness to follow through with a dissenting vote: the result was 412 to 149. 

Opposition to war within the political establishment had collapsed. British parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq against the public wish shocked the movement. It created a lengthy hiatus in which the Right, largely marginalised throughout the post-war liberal period, has regrouped and consolidated. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, with millions displaced. 

The 2017 general election was our one chance to take some sort of power when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn verged on winning in a landslide. I said at the time we’d better win. If it failed, the forces of reaction who’d been taken by surprise, would power-up and ensure that it never happened again. And they would be vicious and pitiless.  

General Election Sliding Doors, 2017

The Labour Party was the biggest in Europe, with 564,443 full members. The nation was waking up from the non-legally binding referendum with a hangover and a surge of regret that 37 percent of the population was about to destabilise the economy just as we were emerging from America’s Great Crash of 2008 and its recessional austerity. Campaigning in 2016 on his Remain and Reform agenda, Corbyn said, “We, the Labour Party, are overwhelmingly for staying in, because we believe the European Union has brought investment, jobs and protection for workers, consumers and the environment.” But then, in March 2017, he used the three-line whip to get Labour MPs to vote to trigger Article 50, overcoming the final hurdle against leaving. 

Despite massively confusing contradictory messages, a lingering hope remained that, with the Tories ousted, we might not have to complete the Leave process. A second less febrile referendum leading to Remain but Reform from within was mentioned as a possibility and was likely to reverse the result. Pro-Labour voting intention soared in the polls. But then, with 70 percent of Labour voters supporting Remain, along with the majority of youth who saw their future being destroyed, and ethnic minorities far from enamoured of Brexit’s anti-immigration emphasis, Corbyn’s office leaked to the press that our triangulating leader was actually pro-Brexit.  

It was almost as if someone in his office didn’t actually want to take power. Labour canvassers reported support on the doorstep draining rapidly after that. Another hint in the press that Corbyn was listening to Remain halted the outflow for a moment but another pro-Brexit leak set it off again. Attempts to staunch the wound failed and Corbyn lost by a whisker, even though he did manage to deny Theresa May a resounding majority. That was it. That was our chance. As predicted, the state’s vicious blowback saw Corbyn labelled an anti-semite as were Jewish progressives in the party who were critical of Israel. 

Parliamentary Brexit advisory referendum briefing document for MPs

Not that I’m advocating a return to the EU. We should never have left the EU bloc, (whatever its faults at the time, of which there were plenty), and destabilised the geopolitical equilibrium that was peacefully uniting the Eurasian landmass through cheap Russian energy and Chinese trade. But the damage has been done and Europe has been yanked rightward by the shock of Brexit. As an entity blatantly fashioning itself into the US elite’s battleship to fight Russia and China using our public money, it does not fill me with hope for a better future.

What now?

Since Corbyn’s chance was lost, there followed as Prime Ministers: New York-born Boris Johnson; lettuce-longevity wassername; US Green Card-carrying Rishi Sunak; Keir Starmer, now working for “international affairs including defence, security, trade, and technology in a fast-changing world,” having boasted of setting up war as “the next generation of good, secure, well-paid jobs”; and Andy Burnham and his Friends of Israel cabinet all pursuing the same goals. Burnham offers headphones and car park power while continuing to drag us into war, poverty and climate warming. He tells us to gather three days-worth of food for the coming storm but no word of what happens after that.  

Any glimmers of hope? An awakening working and middle-class on both sides of the Atlantic in the process of ditching their liberal Democrat managers and realising they have more in common with the global south. Interest in Marxism and hopes for socialism on the rise. America running out of armaments and unable to wreak further mayhem. China declining to provide its rare earths to make the weapons that will be used on them and other nations.  

Last thoughts: it’s a race against time. Sanity is relative and depends on which class you belong to. None of this is mechanistic — there’s still room to stop the maniacs furthering their selfish goals. Don’t succumb to nihilism. Americans and Europeans need to stop oscillating between two malign wings of the same deep state and create a better system that serves humanity, not the bottom-feeding apex predators. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, the choice is between socialism and barbarism. 

We are social animals. Love, peace and understanding are actual things worth fighting for when they come under attack. Like now.

BRICS First China freight train to Barking, east London, UK, 2017

Further reading

How the press was done: The Iraq War protest 2001-3, from race war to 9/11 

How the US wrecked Britain & China’s “Golden Age”: The Brexit trigger 

Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China, Page 1: 1997-2010 — Hong Kong handover & WTO to President Obama’s Pivot to Asia 

Shakedown Timeline, of America’s 21st Century War on China, Page 2: 2010-2020 — Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Donald Trump’s first presidency 

Shakedown Timeline Of America’s 21st Century War On China, Page 3: 2019-2024 — Joe Biden’s presidency, Covid and Ukraine to the rise of BRICS and Donald Trump’s second term 

Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st Century War on China, Page 4: The Opium Wars on steroids. 2024 to the Present — President Trump’s 2nd term turmoil 

How the Covid Pandemic was weaponised: Covid-19 Timeline — the politics, the science and the timing of the pandemic

Guardian - Attack of the Aliens

The Guardian

See the original picture

DRAFT WRITTEN IN 2020
Just found this

I’ve had little trust in the Guardian ever since their part in the shoddy Foot and Mouth Disease affair in 2000-2001, when Tony Blair was failing to get the outbreak under control, the countryside was ravaged by burning pyres of livestock and ruined farmers were taking their own lives. What better solution for failing government policy than to deflect mounting public rage onto a ready made scapegoat: British Chinese. One effect of excluding east Asians from the culture and rendering them invisible is that they are a blank canvas onto which inner demons can be projected, providing a permanent reservoir of scapegoats. If the sleep of reason produces monsters then crises in national and global politics are the perfect occasion for that reservoir's utility.

In early 2001, someone in the Northumberland Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (the now defunct MAFF) briefed Valerie Elliot of the Times that UK Chinese restaurants were responsible for contaminating the pigswill that probably started it, no matter that the Chinese food trade gets its meat from the same places the rest of us do, British butchers. The mainstream press who — apart from the principled Independent newspaper — unquestionably repeated this bit of Goebbels playbook, linking a minority with filth and pestilence, included the cuddly, liberal Guardian.

The Guardian claimed it had been briefed by Downing Street (that is Tony Blair's office) that Nick Brown was about to make a statement to Parliament:

Contaminated meat smuggled into Britain will be highlighted today by the agriculture minister, Nick Brown, as the most likely source of Britain's foot and mouth epidemic. A damning official account of the likely source of the outbreak will claim that pigs were fed meat that was illegally imported for possible use in Chinese restaurants. ... A Downing Street spokeswoman said: "Nick Brown will say that foot and mouth may have entered the country through illegally imported meat fed to pigs as catering waste pigswill."

The Chinese community swiftly formed a delegation (of which I was a member) that presented evidence to the head of MAFF, Nick Brown, of the scientific impossibility of a restaurant doing this, and concerns about the subsequent rising sinophobia and a massive financial dent in the UK Chinese restaurant industry. On Sunday 8th April, it shut down London's Chinatown in protest against this patently absurd and damaging claim and marched to MAFF headquarters.

Brown never did make that statement in Parliament. To our faces, a genuinely shocked Brown, insisting that he was no racist, immediately distanced himself from both the northern MAFF and Downing Street briefings. After another meeting on the day of the Chinatown protest, he vindicated the UK Chinese in front of the world's cameras which were parked outside.

Afterwards, the late Hugo Young, chair of the Guardian's Scott Trust, had to tell his newspaper to cut it out, and their own Readers Editor, Ian Mayes, found evidence of "anti-Asian bias".

Dismally for us, it never really went away. The Guardian refused to apologised or publish the vindication, doubling down in 2007 (after Hugo Young's death) when it tried to revive the smear. It named China as being a source of smuggled meat and yet could only give examples of antelope, "West African delicacies", bush meat and, curiously, beef jerky smuggled in from the US. Nothing from China, unless you think wild antelope roam the serengeti of the provinces.

Which brings us to the latest manifestation of the filth and pestilence narrative.

Novel coronavirus — the disease is called Covid-19 — is a threat to public health that started in China in the same way that ebola, Aids, swine flu or H1N1 flu originated in different parts of the globe. It was first linked to a wet market in Wuhan but these cases were subsequently thought to be a cluster by scientists who suspected it had already gone round the world and pitched up in Wuhan where it mutated into the B strain. We're still awaiting news of the parent A-strain and where that might have started. There's a much more infectious C-strain (mutated from the D614 clade to D614G, or plain old G614) which took off in Europe and travelled to New York while Trump was banning incomers from China. It is thought to have jumped from bats to humans via an intermediary species. Despite attempts by US Secretary of State and Tony Soprano looky-like Mike Pompeo in concert with Rupert Murdoch to concoct a narrative where evuhl Chinese made the virus in a lab, scientists conclude that it jumped from bats somehow and some when.

In the three years of Donald Trump's trade war, the US has imposed ruinous trade tariffs, prompted the Canadian arrest of the daughter of Huwei's founder, intensified violent NED-backed protests in Hong Kong and seccesionists in Xinjiang province, both pressure points, and engaged in a ferocious character assassination around the globe and in its mainstream media. China has been struck at least three times by a serious virus: 2018 swine flu, leading to a massive pig cull and increased pork imports; 2019 novel coronavirus; and in 2020, bird flu, killing their poultry and necessitating increased chicken imports.

The 1.4 billion people of China have had one tragedy heaped upon another.

I can see why The Washington Post would be particularly nasty about China. It is owned by Jeff Bezos, richest man on the planet, who is furious that China has excluded his Amazon juggernaut from marauding through its domestic economy, so I understand why WaPo wants to smash up the huge Chinese economy for Amazon, Google and Facebook (dear god!). But the Guardian’s antipathy towards people who look like me has never made sense. I just can not understand why a newsparer that presents itself as progressive not only declines to examine the American desire to maintain its status as Number One Superpower to the detriment of the global growth engine — American capitalism in decline — but has been willing for 20 years to whip up anti-China hysteria. All ciriticism where criticism is due, but credit also.

I recently had to argue one of their journalists into changing another vile “bat soup” smear in an article purporting to be defending us from sinophobia. This was the original text:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/01/coronavirus-weaponised-way-to-be-openly-racist

And this was the horror picture it linked to, obliterating any superficial claim to be challenging sinphobia:

No explanation or investigation of the text at this page. And there is no such thing as "Chinese bat soup".

"Bat soup" is not eaten in China, not that you’d know from the article. By the date the Guardian piece was published, the mainstream media and even the Daily Mail were correcting perceptions and clarifying that these pictures and videos were from Indonesia and Palau island in Micronesia, a US territory. But not the Guardian which, under the pretext of challenging sinophobia, perpetuated it.

Which brings me to Hong Kong and the Guardian's biased reporting of it.

You don’t have to like the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) - I could write a list of the things I don’t like about them (for another time when the nation is not under existential threat). But prominent in their plus column is the fact that they have created a middle class larger than the population of the United States, and are tackling their awful pollution problem whereas the US has not only walked out of the Paris Accord, but is actively promoting fossil fuels and denying climate change. China is also close to eliminating absolute poverty, unprecedented in human history, while US and UK life expectancy reverses. Anyone with any basic understanding of geopolitics knows that the trade war and the very real possibility of a hot war with a nuclear power is explained at least in part by the Thucydides Trap, whereby the dominant superpower tries to destroy the upstart rival, as the US is doing now that China’s economy has drawn level with its own.

Last June, I was sympathetic to the Hong Kong protesters. Their living standards are dropping in comparison to the mainlanders who they've always regarded as peasants, and they are losing the superiority they felt under British colonialism. The tycoons have added to this impoverishment by ensuring HK property remains the most expensive in the world which ordinary residents can’t afford. However, seeing their demented violence against ordinary civilians, including headbutting a heavily pregnant woman, savagely beating women and elderly men and even killing and immolating them without any condemnation from the movement’s “leaders", I was disgusted.

Any cops anywhere in the world would have stopped this violence and the destruction of their own infrastructure. It’s a marvel thay they have not killed anyone despite the shrieking claims of Joshua Wong — meanwhile, cops are actually killing protesters in Paris, Chile, Gaza, Baghdad, and so on. The police should of course be subject to laws the same as anywhere else, but they should also be doing their job and closing down bomb factories and protecting the public. As part of their trashing of China, the US establishment have joined in an unholy alliance with assorted exiled Chinese billionaires, the descendents of the 1% ousted by the communists, fascists like Bannon and other far-right elements from Europe, in order to smash up China: all reminiscent of the 19th century Opium Wars carve-up.

It’s no surprise that the Yellow Peril sinophobia this generates is blowing back on us.

All the way through the Hong Kong protests looking for the political argument but there seems to be none short of complete overthrow of the "CCP" which would mean civil war and countless people dying, only three years since they were experiencing their first sustained period of peace, prosperity and stability ever. There has been a notable absence of criticism of the tycoons who actually gain from attacks on the Chinese government; no acknowledgment that at least Hong Kong has elections now — 23 since 1997 instead of just one right at the end of Britain's tenure; no suggestion of how the protesters would build a better society. No intelligent running of the buses and trains, offering free transport to get workers on their side. Instead, just brainless destruction and barbaric attack after attack on bus and taxi drivers, killing a janitor, setting fire to someone who disagrees with them while ingratiating themselves with their former and would-be colonial masters.




I asked their journalists Emma Graham-Harris and Lily Kuo to correct their biased reporting of Hong Kong, describing the first shot protester as “a teenager shot at point blank range by police” when even American press reported correctly that the 18-year old young man had been in a running battle with police and was trying to beat the cop with a metal bar. The Guardian stopped their video of the second shot protester at the point where he was grabbing for the cop’s gun, denying their readers and viewers the whole context. Compare this with American cops shooting (mostly black) civilians dead for little or no reason. The Guardian also stopped their video of the man burnt with petrol on the bridge before the ignition, and barely mentioned it. Same with the elderly janitor killed with a brick - video shows the cowardly killer take deliberate aim.

Then there’s Lily Kuo’s video in which she's drooling over the petrol bomb factory (barely mentioned in the Guardian reports) where they are adding flour to the petrol to make it stick to human flesh like napalm. In what hellspace is this acceptable?

It’s one thing to support the aims of the protesters, but the lack of balanced reporting in the liberal press, promoting the US agenda, is deeply suspect.

Request to the current Guardian Editor via Twitter went unanswered.

And now Jim Waterson's article trumpets CGTN censured by Ofcom for doing exactly what the Guardian does.

BBC Radio 4 and the World Service are risible with reports labouring to discuss the crisis but without mentioning China in their list of nations that crushed the virus to the point they can open up and stamp out wildfire breakouts.

Professor Jiang and his mysterious media ascension

Social media’s reactionary hierarchy only has itself to blame for the Professor Jiang fiasco

This is an extended version of an article first published at Substack, 5 September 2026

There’s been a thorough post-Gamergate exclusion of women from the debate by pundits who were late to the fight. Mostly male, mostly white. If you were a woman and Chinese, you were doubly stuffed. Putting the ram into ramifications, it goes even wider. Exclusion from discussion of the forces you’d observed lining up against China over decades while the slow children caught up means time lost to any prospect of struggle. And this sorry situation doesn’t appear to disturb anyone’s ethics.  

It’s only this year in 2026 that the penny dropped for the commentators colonising social media: that China is the ultimate target of the hegemon state. As I’ve been pointing out in my contemporaneous Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China, this phase was triggered with Paul Wolfowitz’s 1992 Defence Planning Guide and has progressed ever since in ebbs and flows, which I charted as it happened, and always towards the same end.

Jiang’s Iran War “prediction”

I was permitted to argue these geopolitical tensions in the mainstream media during the brief “Golden Age” of British Chinese relations in which a semblance of balance regarding the sleeping dragon was allowed. Using this window to challenge reactionary narratives about China in the Guardian and on the BBC and elsewhere, I aimed to combat the dehumanisation of Chinese in the culture and show how the Empire’s dynamics of dominance were all working under the hood. 

I helped prevent one alarming anti-Chinese pogrom reach an ugly conclusion under Tony Blair. It was crucial to make sure the vacuum wasn’t total — invisibility renders you vulnerable whether for individuals or communities. In 2009, I was one of the few to go on the BBC to argue against demonisation of China during the Copenhagen COP15 climate change summit when the Danish Text scandal revealed the stitch-up of poorer nations. And then there was trying to head off the Iraq War. 

Of course, once Barack Obama performed his Pivot to Asia seeking to “contain” China, and Trump doubled down in his bid to out do his bete noir, I was silenced and rendered invisible in the media that once tolerated a lone Chinese dissenting voice. Even this was now too much for their objectives. The establishment required a total absence; a big blank canvas on which to project monsters. 

No problem, you might think. Surely there were enough concerned citizens who would have found the situation an undemocratic travesty of free speech and alerted their followers that support was needed. No such luck. I was “strategic competition” stranded on the beachhead, regarded, as I was to discover, a threat to the wave of newcomers now colonising the space. Attacked, marginalised, pillaged and deleted, for a crucial five years: all you saw was wall-to-wall mostly white guys reinventing the wheel and carving out their territory. And essentially nailing old hierarchies into place under cover of sympathy with the communist state.

They had to let one through eventually. It was supposedly Jiang’s “prediction” in 2024 that there would be an Iran war that propelled him into algo-boosted prominence. This was a surprise to those of us who had already been flagging it up with good reason. 

The Cassandra Curse

The curse of Cassandra was that she was always ignored. There are Greeks in that wooden horse, she’d yell, but would they listen? Departing from all common sense, they insisted on dragging their enemy’s gift into the city of Troy with the result that any Trojans who weren’t slaughtered were enslaved. Clever guys! 

Besides tweeting during Trump 1 what was to me the bleedin’ obvious, I was yelling an alert on my 15-year old Madam Miaow Twitter/X account two days after 7 October 2023 that Benjamin Netanyahu had just addressed the UN General Assembly two weeks earlier to call for joint “nuclear” action against Iran. (This was later changed to “military” in the record.) IRAN! The assembly’s collective response was luke warm. Oh, it’s just Bibi on his 30-year obsession again. 

But this time, something ugly slouched its way towards Bethlehem. What Washington and Israel needed was a build-up and getting the public on board for a major conflict that could lead to World War III levels of conflict. On President Joe Biden’s watch, Gaza looked like a first step and a warm-up for hostilities against a heavily-armed foe. This aspect required attention. Within a year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken would be chucking weapons into Israel’s armoury at pace.

X deleted Madam Miaow that December — no violations, six appeals. The response was a big fat nothing from the “China-friendly” accounts. No debate on the topic. Utter silence on the censorship. Not one single, solitary new “China-friendly” account alerted their readers or asked them to follow my back-up account. But they did give the gabbling newcomer houseroom on their podcasts when they saw his algo-boosted numbers the following year. Jiang is described as “the man who predicted the Iran War in 2024” but was in fact much later to the news than those of us alarmed by Netanyahu’s appearance at the UN in New York on 22 September 2023. Even earlier, for many geopolitical analysts.

A bamboozled commentariat of gatekeepers

Jiang’s critics have grown louder as his questionable promotion beyond his abilities has become more apparent and suspicions have been raised. For me, not only was it the sudden inorganic swelling of follower numbers in a couple of years, but the regurgitation of obvious AI hallucinations, many favouring the Donald Trump orbit’s eccentric take on history. 

Such as on The Duran, where Jiang claimed the City of London was making its money from narcotics. Now, this may have been a foundational truth in the 19th century (see the Opium Wars) but to say London’s banking system was still dependent on the sale of drugs for its profits today, appeals to an audience raised on tabloid-level crime-capers. It blunts ability to analyse the world around you. And it chimes with the Trump narrative justifying bombing fishermen’s boats off the coast of Venezuela. Jiang’s statement’s were so increasingly bizarre that the hosts quietly dropped the video off their list. 

It also fits like a glove with Trump allies now going after an injured Britain with accusations of control of Libor exchange rates, and Lloyds shipping insurance that thwarts the president’s attempts to push tankers through the explosive Strait of Hormuz in his fantasy control of the Trump Strait.

America recapitalises in Opium Wars 2.0

“Trump is taking on global deep state, ” states Jiang. “The City of London, Wall Street, who he thinks caused him to lose election 2020. They exercise power by controlling three ways of generating immense profits … debt and gambling, slavery, and drugs. The City of London, it’s still a money laundering operation. If you’re Trump and you want to destroy the deep state, you attack what makes money, their drugs smuggling operations. When Trump says we’re bombing the drug smugglers and everyone’s, like, no, no, they’re fishing vessels, he’s telling the truth in this instance. I think they are actually bombing drug smugglers and so they’re trying to destroy the drug smuggling apparatus of the world. That is the grand play here, to weaken the globalist deep state by destroying their money-making operations.” 

That’s the genius Jiang analysis: that London makes its money from drug-smuggling operations and the human beings in boats bombed by remote actually are “drug smugglers”. Judge, jury and executioner in one robotic package. 

On London, he’s only a century out. The Opium Wars may have capitalised western industrial revolutions in the 19th century and were foundational to the banking system but drugs are not the engine now. London is not a drug-running centre that heroic Trump is trying to fell — it’s actually far worse if you understand how capitalism works. The assertion that Trump is heroically bringing down deep state by attacking “their drug-smuggling operations” is ludicrous. 

If anything, it is America that is now aping the British Empire in its own Opium Wars 2.0: the elite of the declining hegemon seeking to recapitalise using other people’s resources.

Jiang hallucinations

As for Jiang’s famed predictive ability, he says: “I don’t think Trump will actually invade Venezuela, I think that’s all bluster and I think you’ll see continual actions against drug smuggling operations around the world.”

So, that’s aged well. On top of which, where is the proof that the Venezuelan boats were carrying narcotics? Drugs are the new WMD for the not very bright who’ve blown their brains on an excess of Guy Ritchie and Marvel movies. The Sackler family and medical industry have done far more damage to America. Where drug problems do exist, they are a symptom of a failing society and not a cause. And they’re mostly imported into the US by Americans anyway. Why are commentators capitulating to the sensationalist role of drugs in the spotlight but won’t go anywhere near the CIA’s history of narcotics dealing? Doesn’t Jiang know that drug villainy as he tells it serves as the narrative McGuffin, a shiny object deflecting from the overriding dynamics of the declining hegemon’s bid to remain top dog.

Felix Abt and others detect similar eccentricities in the bogus professor’s schtick. Abt writes of Jiang: “He has dismissed subjects including evolution, Roman history and the Holocaust as ‘nonsense,’ while entertaining conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and claims that the Moon landings were faked. These are not minor disagreements among historians. They are enormous claims that require enormous evidence.”

Jiang and the Enlightenment

Both Trump and enablers of his invented reality such as Jiang mount a further assault on the science-based Enlightenment with gaslighting exercises in mass manipulation. In this real world chaos, everything solid melts into the air. Perfect for the monsters grabbing the world by the pussy. If your lips are flapping and you’re not calling it out, like Jiang and his podcast hosts, then you’re part of the machine. 

Why are the pundits so slow? Why so exclusionary and lacking in solidarity or generosity? Why so territorial about the space they’ve occupied like colonials of old from which they’re blocking insights and input?  

In 1870s America during the economic downturn, Chinese were scapegoated. Attitudes towards the men who’d travelled so far from home to help build America — constructing the first transcontinental railroad for Central Pacific — deteriorated to the point that demagogues such as Denis Kearney in California were whipping up anti-Chinese pogroms in an atmosphere where it took ten “Chinamen” to equal the voice of one white male. Not unlike today. Lynchings of the scapegoated minority occurred, culminating in 1882 with the Exclusion Act aimed specifically at the Chinese.

In Britain and the rest of Europe, too. The hideous excesses of the Opium Wars that founded so many financial institutions, funded the British administration in British-ruled India and create the big East Coast dynasties in America, needed rationalisation and justification. Threadbare arguments that abounded then remain today: it was about free trade; they were asking for it; they’re not properly human anyway. 

At one point I’d hoped this a thing of the past. That we were all far too sophisticated to fall for something so crude. But when you press certain weaknesses and contradictions, you realise it’s all still punted up to and including Julia Lovell’s Opium War revisionist love-note to British Empire and the ignoble men who made their fortunes from opium. Despite a thorough debunking from me in 2012, Lovell’s book, The Opium War, enjoys pride of place in the British Museum shop. The author is invited to curate their Asia events. Quite fitting, really, to be so beloved by the kleptocratic institution. This stuff has deep roots in service to western empire.

On that “no original thought” cliché

The stereotype has always been that Chinese are incapable of original thought. That we can only copy. That our thinking is a pale shadow of the dominant group’s excellence. However, the group hates it when we display a capacity for imagination and ingenuity but will tolerate a simulacrum if it’s in an institutional form whose fortune they can ride. Such as Jiang and his algo-boosted numbers. When Mike Marqusee congratulated me on my “flair and imagination” in bringing media skills into the Left during several campaigns in 2001, my supposed comrades kicked up a storm. 

You must forever be the Green Hornet’s sidekick, even if you are Bruce Lee. 

In fact, I’ve watched aghast over many years as the dominant group has played catch-up, only getting on board when something was up for grabs. Or, amusingly, when it was safe. I was inadvertently something of the canary down the mine. The creature sent into the minefield, only to look back once the terrain was tested, to see the barbarian horde of prospectors bearing down to carve out their newly safe turf. 

One core fear of theirs is, if a Chinese person can articulate and fight for their situation, what need of the army of white saviours? The prospect of Chinese able to see events coming down the pike well in advance terrifies the Masters (and Mistresses) of the Universe who can’t. The same malign dynamic as observed in Western ruling-class resistance to China’s rapid progress runs through its petit bourgeois gatekeepers who haven’t shaken off their class position: as above, so below. Given a fractal reading, what China the country can do, so can individual Chinese in a big geopolitical Mandelbrot set of consciousness. The horror, the horror!

Our commentators, some of whom were actually opposed to China when it was struggling, had a turning on the Road to Damascus when the odds changed. But at base, the dynamic is the same. A classic Yellowface attempt at replacement. The fundamental progressive, socialist principle of linking arms in struggle with the target group is utterly alien to them.

A McCarthyite climate

I would add, in case some have forgotten, that when the latecomers arrived in numbers after the Hong Kong riots, I welcomed them, using the heft of Madam Miaow to amplify and publicise them. There had been an almost complete vacuum. The deputy ambassador in London had been so wounded by the silence of people who had received friendship and embassy hospitality that he contacted me and even asked me to address one of their events.  

It was a chilling McCarthyite atmosphere in which no-one in Britain was speaking up. I can only recall Martin Jacques, one financial journalist and a couple of Labour MPs who were rapidly put under heavy manners. 

Once it looked safe and the dam started to break, George Galloway asked me for help. I was pleased to orientate him around the Twitter China debate, recommending speakers for his talk show. Other newcomers said they were so alarmed by the Chinese media’s failure to engage in the battle shaping up that they suggested a comradely approach to authorities in China.  

Then, suddenly, they clammed up. In a decidedly unheroic grasping of the chance to dominate, no-one engaged with me. Some attacked me. When I pointed out to one who’d been painting diaspora Chinese as treacherous, that we weren’t all Vickies and Gordons, he blocked me. The hugely algo-boosted French guy gloated that he was ignoring me and would continue to do so. Others used struggles in which I’d personally been involved, such as Yellowface exclusion, as content but wouldn’t interview me about the events. Another used the insight I’d given him, about the opium being destroyed by seawater and lime and not burnt, a point which was emblematic of my years-long challenge to British academia who had insisted it was so, as if it was his own when it would have made an interesting podcast chat. Galloway just turned nasty — no explanation, no discussion, no comradeship. It goes on and on.

Jiang verbiage vs social practice

White guys ganging up on the Chinese woman who’d been fighting on this front for so long did remind me of the eight-nation invasion of China at the dawn of the 20th century. The dynamic of white saviourship and exploitation by Empire’s little pashas are still here. Throw in the clown professor for entertainment and tokenism but keep out the Chinese woman with praxis and political chops. There has been no raised consciousness, just information used as currency. And data exchange is a far cry from analysis.  

Algo-boosted latecomers took full advantage of the inbuilt anti-Chinese bias in the system’s cultural codes while they built careers and reinforced their own class position. They effectively did the state’s work for it, attacking and rendering invisible the Chinese who’d fought not only the media awareness battles, but was active in political defence of Chinese: against efforts to build a pogrom at home as well as a war abroad.  

Chinese readers should note that many of these belated China-friendly accounts generally do not actually like Chinese but they like the high status that vestigial colonialised brains afford them. We used to call them FILTH: Failed In London, Try Hong Kong. My dad who, among other things, was in the delegation that negotiated the end of the British embargo on China in the 1950s and ‘60s, taught me the words, “adventurers,” “opportunists” and “careerists” at an early age. So I should have expected it.  

And we know from South African apartheid and American slavery that intimate relations with non-whites does not make you a non-racist.  

So all Jiang did was make the most out of an opportunity that was set up for him. Don’t blame him when so many constructed the conditions that made it possible.

Further reading

Read Felix Abt’s article on Professor Jiang: The “Chinese Professor” Who Fooled the Internet’s Biggest Gatekeepers

The Raft of the Medusa: how the eff did we get here?

Anna Chen on the pitiful state of the discourse: Stopping the Iraq War 2001-3 20th anniversary: How the press was done.

Anna Chen's China pages: 30 years of analysis and commentary.