Congress is hastily writing legislation to extend the TikTok ban by 270 days. They are panicking because hundreds of thousands of Americans are joining Red Note. CBS says in this article that Red Note is "also" a Chinese app, as if TikTok is a Chinese app, but TikTok’s offices are in Texas. They employ a ton of Americans. TikTok’s *parent company* is in China. Red Note is a literal Chinese app in location, language, and user base. You can get banned for insulting President Xi. Your data is collected by the Chinese government. Everyone going to Red Note knows both of these and does not care. Why? I’ll tell you why.
Most Americans grew up in an America where our data was always for sale, from College Board selling the data they collected from us in high school from the PSAT and the SAT, to the news, commerce, and entertainment websites we use every day as adults. Americans believe China already has all their data (if China even wants it, which is dubious). Why wouldn't they have it? It's been for sale to anyone who can pay for the past 25+ years.
There's a huge percentage of this country that have zero loyalty to the United States. The ideals of America and the Constitution? Absolutely. The American government and the current iteration of America as a country? Not in the slightest.
They have no loyalty to America because America has no loyalty to them.
Incomes, when adjusted for inflation, have shrunk significantly. Home ownership and parenthood are unaffordable. A hospital stay can bankrupt you. Companies lay people off even in times of record profits and then demand horrific levels of "productivity," far beyond anything humans have ever experienced in history apart from slave labor, from those who are left. Expenses are skyrocketing. Even rents have become impossible to afford on these salaries that are now, in real dollars, LESS THAN HALF what people earned in 1975. (I just did the math.)
Why didn't wages keep pace with inflation? Where did that money go? Into the pockets of the 1%. Their slice of the pie increased exponentially while ours shrank away to nothing. And not only does our government reject raising taxes on the wealthy, or any notions of a wealth tax (apart from a few Democrats, mostly women, that no one listens to), but the incoming administration is planning to cut taxes for the wealthy even further, eliminate all consumer protections, and let the WEALTHIEST MAN IN THE WORLD cut the government programs we rely on while he smirks that there will be "hardship," just not for him or his cronies.
Republicans' only loyalties are to an orange felon, to lowering taxes for the wealthy, and to punishing anyone who isn't a wealthy white cis male Republican. The Democrats always seem like they're appeasing Republicans because the news orgs pretend they are and that narrative is insanely hard to fight, and because they rarely fight as hard for the people as they do for the wealthy.
TikTok was banned with *huge bipartisan support* on the obvious lie that it's a national security risk (LOL) and they're backpedaling now because it was a BLUFF to get ByteDance to sell TikTok-- one of the most successful and lucrative apps of all time-- to wealthy Americans that donate to their political campaigns. That's why the bill was written as "sell or ban" instead of just ban. No one is naive enough to think that an app being owned by a US company keeps user data in the US. Well, maybe people in Congress, but no one with any experience in the real world.
And if the ban actually went through, Congress-- instructed by the tech industry lobbyists who wrote the legislation-- believed users would flood back to Meta's Instagram or Google's YouTube, again, enriching the wealthy donor class. They never dreamed that a million people would willingly join a Chinese app *just to spite them*.
Today thousands of Americans were connecting with thousands of Chinese people, with both sides wondering why we're instructed to hate each other. Americans are helping Chinese youth with their English homework. Americans and Chinese are trading makeup and skin care tips; they're liking each other's thirst traps; they're squealing over each other's pets; they're trading recipes. The idea that China is our enemy, to be feared, is about two days from being dead because these Americans don't associate with their government and therefore don't associate Chinese people with THEIR government. They think both governments suck.
What will the ultimate outcome be here? Who knows. All I know is: This is a cultural inflection point. This moment, when millions of Americans are realizing together that we are, all of us, the whole 99%, without question or hope, on our own in a nation actively hostile to our best interests, began with Luigi and it won't end with Red Note. Pay attention.
