Americans Embrace Their Red Note Epiphany On China

Anna Chen – 27 January 2025, Americans and China

China: “living in the future”

US Citizens Compare America And China

The one positive and profoundly moving sight since Trump’s inauguration is the millions of Americans who saw behind the veil thanks to Red Note. Watching this explosion of raised consciousness feels like an enormous sea-change taking place. Even history in the making.

TikTok refugees flooding to the Chinese Xiaohongshu Red Note app to beat the ban returned on the reopening with tales of marvels they never believed possible. These modern Marco Polos rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and raged.

“We’re third world, they’re living in the future,” is one common refrain heard from people who never knew how badly they’ve been exploited. “We’ve been lied to,” is another. The abrupt realisation that needing two or three jobs just to survive, with no healthcare, their infrastructure and economy crumbling all around them in the world’s richest nation is neither normal not acceptable has stirred a collective sense of injustice. Monstering China’s model only benefits the elites, so that schtick may have lost its potency.

However, the minute Americans saw how Chinese live their lives, state jaws closed like a steel trap. But not before they’d compared the cost of living, affordable homes, healthcare, social cohesion and beautiful infrastructure and seen how badly they’ve been cheated.

Having seen it, they can’t now unsee it. And that means a ticking time-bomb for the ruling class.

Americans In Free Speech Clampdown

TikTok reopened on the day of its proposed ban palpably bowdlerised and changed for the worse. The initial fear that it was moved to Meta servers during the weekend blackout isn’t much assuaged by the discovery that it’s been hosted on Larry Ellison’s Oracle servers since June 2022.

Dissenting creators and content were dumped or sidelined. Big Tech already abandoned fact-checks when Mark Zuckerberg caved into threats of imprisonment. It’s not only the end of the post-war liberal order and beginning of the aristocrat oligarchy. It’s also the end of 400 years of the fact, science and evidence-based Age of Enlightenment. Robber baron techno-feudalism is here and despises you.

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We’re Third World, They’re Living In The Future

Welcomed into their Chinese counterparts’ homes on Red Note, they compared rents, food prices and work hours. They made friends and heard jokes along the lines of “I am your Chinese spy,” showing how smart, wry and generous they are in real life. A far cry from the anonymous ants and robots of age-old stereotypes fed to us by propagandists.

They learnt the truth of China’s hard-won progress. How, in a few decades, China raised 800m out of absolute poverty and created a middle-class of 550m, nearly twice the population of the USA. China’s mere existence is an indictment of the US elites who swallowed US national wealth, pauperising everyone else.

In 2025 you don’t need the Red Pill because the truth is so hard to miss. Western workers were fattened like cattle, asleep in the American Dream while they snuck up on you. And now 170m TikTokers are in danger of being fed to the oligarchs like Morlocks herding Eloi into cattle pens.

Will they work out a way to challenge their oppression in the face of threats by the Trump Royal Family and their acolytes? It’s going to be fascinating to watch.

The two wings of the US state have been openly fighting each other to see who gets first dibs on exploiting the American people. They’re fighting over who gets the best cuts, not over protecting their people. What started with Reagan beating Carter to the White House with the aid of hostage shenanigans ended by reversing the share of national wealth.

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Donald Trump Chaos Ushers In Reign Of Fear

Anna Chen – 26 January 2025, President Donald Trump

Here’s Donny!

President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the White House Oval Office, January 2025

Orange Godzilla’s Show-Stopping Return

A tsunami of breathtakingly spiteful executive orders signed in the White House in the first few days of Donald Trump’s presidency smashes home the unassailability of his power domestically and abroad. A stitched-up Congress and Senate, and a Supreme Court that’s already ruled the president can’t break the law, means checks and balances needed in a working democracy are gone.

Less than a week in and King Trump is trampling the world like an orange Godzilla. Aided and abetted by his gang of ne’er-do-well drunks, sex bandits and the far right, all are welcome under the Death Star Big Top. The crazier his appointees, the more he likes it. Mundane power is so passé. Absolute Power is doing its thing. Hubris abounds. Imperialism removes its gloves.

We can take a little solace in the knowledge that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Unfortunately, we’re no longer pampered popcorn eaters observing safely from the sidelines. This time we are firmly bit-part players in this disaster movie.

Donald Trump At Home And Abroad

His opening act was partly anticipated. Land-grabbing designs on Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal were already sending shock waves through the global community. However, even though he’d previewed this madness loudly in the media, it could have been showbiz. It was 50-50 that he’d actually go for it formally. But on the day of his inauguration, here it was.

Is it a negotiation gambit? He’s making crudely thuggish demands with menaces, grabbing the world by the pussy. Because he possesses zero self-knowledge and self-restraint. This is all seething id on a global scale and we wonder who can reel him back in.

Renaming parts of the world in his own flag-humping image, as if calling it the Gulf of America is going to raise its value in a cheap realtors’ trick, only makes the world outside the MAGA bubble laugh. And that’s at him, not with him.

He froze US aid to every country except Israel. Ethnically cleansing the Palestinians out of Gaza and dumping them on Egypt and Jordan may get him his Trump Tower on Gaza beach but not the love he craves.

Everyone – EVERYONE – is to be tariffed and sanctioned up to the eyeballs unless they move manufacturing to the US.

Anna Chen on Empire Watch Election Special, 7 November 2024

A Cheap Labour Solution For Donald Trump

And here’s the rub. To produce goods Americans can afford, if American workers are not paid Chinese/Asian wages, you need cheap labour. Otherwise, who buys the goods? The 13th Amendment makes slavery legal for prisoners in the US. Undocumented migrants held under the recent Laken Riley Act, in for-profit prisons, would make the perfect new serfs.

At home, attacks on the Constitution by ripping up birth-right citizenship and perversely setting ICE on Native Americans, appear to be rounding up the new cheap labour force they’re going to need. The choice is prison slavery or being kicked out even if you have a family. Deportation flights have already begun. Mexico refused landing permission for one US army plane carrying expelled migrants.

Women were already suffering enough from his previous abortion laws passed by Trump’s Supreme Court appointees when they reversed Roe v Wade in 2022. On his second bite at the cherry, he’s gone completely Handmaid’s Tale on them, signing two more femicidal orders that deprive women of federal government funding for any abortions at all.

January 6th Capitol rioters have been pardoned. Even the ones that attacked serving police officers. And sacking seventeen independent watchdogs, government agency Inspectors General who guard against corruption, has cemented his kingpin immunity.

China Shakedown

China Shakedown developments are taking place more or less in secrecy. State Secretary Marco Rubio, a notorious China hawk, requested and was granted a phone call with Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Friday 24th. According to one unofficial translation, it appears to have resulted in Rubio agreeing that Taiwan is not independent after all.

I am reminded of those videos of dogs snarling rabidly at each other through a gate until the gate slides open and, self-preservation taking over, the dogs calm down. Wang, of course, is more beautiful swan than XL Bully. He told Rubio that major powers have to act like major powers and, presumably unspoken, not like mobsters and street thugs.

One small victory for those on the side of the angels. China suddenly released a number of AI models that are many times more efficient and cheaper than the humongously expensive Stargate AI trumpeted last Wednesday by Trump and his Silicon Valley chums, for free on open source. Sam Altman’s $500 billion copyright-breaking OpenAI plans with Oracle and SoftBank just exploded and millions of creatives cheered. (See Suchir Balaji)

“This will be the most important project of this era,” said Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

This is hilarious. Reminds me of when greedy parties tried to sequence, copyright and privatise the human genome years ago. In a gripping international race against time, the good guys won in 2003 and made it open source for everyone.

Apart from Wang Yi, only Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen have stood up to Trump so far. But we won’t know what deals have been forced until they’re biting us on the bum. More news as it comes in.

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DONALD TRUMP SWORN IN AS 47TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Inauguration Of Donald Trump — MAGA On Steroids

Donald Trump Sworn In As 47th President Of The United States

Anna Chen – Monday 20th January 2025, President Donald Trump

President to be Donald Trump surrounded by his Tech Bro court, RFK, Barron and Melania in the Capitol Rotunda

Donald Trump Redux: This Time It’s Personal

Hi. How’s your weekend been? Here’s how mine went.

The Inauguration Of Donald Trump — MAGA On Steroids

Monday, 20 January 2025: You could smell the avarice in the company of wolves on the podium at the Capitol Rotunda today. I’m surprised the Tech Bros weren’t openly salivating. Glittery eyes anticipated a feast as Trump threw them bone, meat, fillet mignon: the whole carcass.

A 20,000-strong audience watched the Don sworn in as America's 47th president at 17:02GMT in a ceremony reminiscent of Cleopatra’s arrival in Rome. They listened to his MAGA speech like it was the Second Coming, rewarding him with non-stop standing ovations in the Adoration of the Ham. The Silicon Valley elite bunched up on the podium on the left. Former presidents fading away on the right. The Oligarchy had arrived.

A slice of the world shuddered.

Trump says God saved him from the assassin’s bullet to Make America Great Again.

A slice of the world started drinking.

Some might read his aims for the nation to be “proud, prosperous and free” as screaming out his own personal needs: to be respected, grow even more filthily rich and continue to evade prison. Less so as a declaration of selfless good-will towards his fellow human beings we have grown to expect from Donald.

“America will be greater, stronger, more exceptional than ever before.” No longer to be bitch-slapped like the librul wussy living in his head at very expensive rental but which few of us have ever seen. “I will have my revenge,” he almost growled like the pantomime villain role models beloved by Masters of the Universe in the declining hegemon.

A Storm Of Presidential Orders

So how is Donald Trump to achieve his presidential nirvana?

First, every demagogue knows you need scapegoats for an inflation-stricken economy as you move fast and break stuff. Hundreds of immigrants without the necessary paperwork are said to have been rounded up for deportation even before he signs the Trump tower of presidential orders. These include declaring a state of national emergency at the southern border.

“Millions and millions” more will be expelled with the end of the current “Catch and Release” policy. That’s going to leave a lot of crops unharvested and homes left to clean themselves.

To add drama to the tragedy, the US army is being sent to the Mexican border to repel the “disastrous invasion of our country”. And the cartels are now designated as foreign terrorist organisations. Ooh, someone wants a ruck.

“The full and immense power” of federal and state law enforcement will be used under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to “eliminate” the presence of all gangs and foreign criminal networks from US soil, cities and inner cities. I’m Commander in Chief, I’m going to defend you from the Enemy as defined by me, with full force “at a level nobody’s ever seen before”.

According to Donald, record inflation was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and he’s telling his minions to defeat it. Who knows how? A reminder that inflation was kept low before his wrecking-ball policies of trade war on China, the world’s factory, and the Trump Pump ended the economic stability brought about by China’s intervention after America’s disastrous Great Crash of 2008. Not that Biden did much better with his war expenses.

Drill, Baby, Drill. Kill, Baby, Kill.

Declaring an energy emergency, Trump reiterated his promise to “Drill, baby, drill.” America will have the largest amount of gas and oil of any country on Earth (watch out, Venezuela) and he will export it all over the world.

He’d forced Prime Minister Boris Johnson to rip out £billions of Huawei 5G infrastructure we’d already paid for in 2020, despite GCHQ finding no problem. I guess this means our wind farms and solar renewables are next. Let’s see how steely Keir “I have the balls” Starmer is in resisting the order to self-harm all the way to the Stone Age.

Killing off Climate Change action, Donald Trump will end the Green New deal, revoking the Electric Vehicle mandate, focusing on US autoworkers to produce cars. He neglected to say if they’d be working for Chinese wages. And if not, who will afford to buy them?

He intends to tariff and tax foreign countries to “enrich our citizens”. Which sounds ominously like an extortion racket with menaces. A new External Revenue Service will collect all the wealth pouring in from foreign countries. Yeah, I bet it will. The implication is that China is expected to fund Trump’s renewed American Dream. Lord, this is so 18th century Empire building.

He will establish the Department of Government Efficiency, to be run by Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet whose government contracts are worth $10 billion. In true Orwellian fashion, this indicates the opposite is likely to take place. Will they all be keeping receipts? Perhaps Elon should rip up his little earner and save the government money.

Donald Trump And The Golden Age

All government censorship will end and free speech brought back to America. Fair and equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law. Law and order brought back to the cities. Race and gender considerations to be ditched in public and private life. It will be a colour blind and merit-based society. There are only two genders: male and female.

Service members expelled from their jobs for defying vaccine mandates are to be reinstated with full back pay. Armed forces are to focus on defeating America’s “enemies”. Will build the strongest military the world has ever seen. Success will be measured by the battles won, wars ended and wars not begun. Trump’s legacy will be role of peacemaker and unifier.

He implied that the Israeli hostage return, the day before he assumed office, was his achievement (shades of Reagan and Iran). Joe Biden and Kamala Harris applauded with frozen smiles and joined the standing ovation bouncing up and down like a Mexican wave. Talking of which, he’ll be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. And will be taking back the Panama Canal that he claims is operated by big boogie-man, China.

America will be disease-free, practise manifest destiny, and will plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars. “Our Golden Age has just begun.”

In other news, China’s Foreign office says it will allow ByteDance to make its own decisions regarding TikTok operations and acquisitions, reversing its previous decision to never sell.

The TikTok Ban And The Missing Hours

Sunday 19 January 2025: The TikTok ban was due to start on Sunday. TikTok had changed 170 million American lives for the better over five years. Not only did it provide income streams, pulling many out of poverty in the richest country on the planet where people need two or even three jobs to survive. It also opened up relatively free communication where information was rapidly exchanged, raising the collective consciousness faster than at any time since Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and the Vietnam War.

This lost the state its control over narratives such as Gaza. Israeli politicians feared a generational difference in political perceptions, rather than a left/right split. Their allies in the US called for a ban on the app, using the excuse that it is supposedly owned by China and was therefore a national security threat.

In fact, only 20 percent is owned by the two Chinese techs who founded it in 2017. Sixty percent is owned by foreign investors, 20 percent by TikTok workers (including 7,000 in the US) and the CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is Singaporean.

In his first term as president, Donald Trump threatened a ban unless this highly profitable app was sold to an American entity. A bill, led by Republican Mike Gallagher who left politics early to work for Palantir, was signed by Joe Biden in 2024.

TikTok vigorously resisted sale of its valuable algorithm.

However, in a sleight of hand, the app went dark a day before the ban was due to kick in and returned less than 24 hours later, only a day before Trump’s inauguration, possibly with a changed algorithm. Dissenting creators and content have been wiped off in the Night of the Delete Button. The Singaporean CEO is no longer named on his TikTok account as the CEO. He was invited to the inauguration.