I’d like to start this article by stating I believe in ONE CHINA — which includes Taiwan, and quite honestly, whatever the fuck else they could possible want. I don’t really care. I live here. And we’ve got plenty of stupid problems that have absolutely nothing to do with China.
For example: Elon Musk is basically the emperor the universe, and the people who ran on limiting immigration have now shifted course and want to automate and outsource every white collar job we have out of existence. Great job, Republicucks.
With TikTok’s ban, Americans are now seeing the limits of free speech, and apparently that limit is any platform that gains popularity outside of the direct control of the American oligarchy. If we can’t control the propaganda, no one can.
There were a few others who had a beef with TikTok, like our “strongest ally” in the Middle East, Israel. Ya boy Israel was wildin, and by wildin, I don’t mean they made fun of Nick Cannon, I mean they were committing a genocide with our money. However, genocide is a bad PR move, so Israel was like “bro, we need to limit the information about this genocide, or people may think we’re rude.” So, they called in the big guns. Who are the big guns? AIPAC. What’s AIPAC? Glad you asked. AIPAC is the American-Israeli Political Action Committee. They throw money at congress to ensure that America continues to fund Israel’s colonial project in the Middle East. And propaganda (or hasbara) as Israel has called it, is a big part of the package.
TikTok was fucking that up. While Benjamin Netanyahu was all over American television saying that Israel was doing everything it could to limit civilian casualties, our TikTok feeds were making that incredibly hard to believe as we saw endless videos of dead women and children.
America quite naturally didn’t love this. Because if this app can accurately report Israeli war crimes, it could also report American ones as well. That’s not good for the American military industrial complex which basically is the largest employer in Washington D.C. So Congress, the highest legislative body in the United States that notoriously can’t get anything done ever, somehow united on one issue that truly mattered: fuckin’ TikTok.
You would think an endless stream of mass shootings would do it, or maybe the fact that income inequality is at a level that exceeds the times of the French Revolution. Free Luigi. Anyway, those things didn’t unite congress. We just learned to live with it, no matter how shitty it is.
Gen Z, the more autistic offshoot of Millennials, have taken notice of how fucking absurd our country is, and decided to spite the American government by downloading an app that is significantly more Chinese than TikTok. That app is called RedNote or Xiaohongshu. And something beautiful is happening: Americans are interacting with Chinese people in unprecedented ways. And guess what they’re figuring out? We’re not that different.
Great job banning TikTok, America. You’ve once again accomplished nothing except for making closer to the people you want us to hate.
Congrats!