The TikTok ban was not about China, it was about manipulating the public

but not necessarily in the way you think...

In my last piece, I alluded to how we are being played by the establishment. Today, I want to elaborate because the US TikTok ban is a perfect example of the manipulation in action. There are two hypotheses for why TikTok was banned: the first being lobbying from AIPAC to protect Israel from criticism, and the second being lobbying from big tech to eliminate a Chinese rival. There is definitely some truth here, but it doesn’t tell you the full picture.

If you didn’t know, President Trump has postponed the TikTok ban after it was put in place for about a day. Suddenly, Trump looks like the good guy again, the lesser evil, not because he is good, but because the Democrats are so unspeakably incompetent and evil. However, I’m not sure there was any incompetence from Democrats, I suspect this was deliberate.

How else do you explain such ridiculous self-sabotage? Millions of TikTok creators, who depend on the app for their livelihood, suddenly found they would be unable to pay the bills. Many millions more ordinary people, who loved using the app to chill out or see what was going on in the world, found their favourite thing was taken away.

Everyone gets this was a radicalising moment, but what you must understand is the radicalisation was not all in one direction, and while Republicans voted for the ban, it was the Democrats who took the blame. As a result, the party that had already haemorrhaged support over its refusal to stop arming Netanyahu, found itself bereft of young supporters. It was a crushing blow at a time the Democrats desperately needed to regroup. It was so damaging, they will be out of power for a long time while the Trump administration does all the evil things it’s wanted to do since 2016.

The Republicans are more than happy to play the role of greater evil, but now they’ve halted the ban, they have found themselves in a position where no one sees a greater evil. They have found themselves in a position where the so-called resistance is a joke. As such, a second Trump term could be much more damaging than the first.

One thing this shows is just how comfortable the establishment is in lying to, and manipulating, us. There was never the slightest risk to national security from the TikTok app and they knew it. It does not matter if China knows how many cat videos you’ve liked because that is not going to help them win a war! Indeed, the British government essentially made that argument, their position being that only officials should not use TikTok - a sensible position.

It remains to be seen what Trump will do during the 90-day postponement: he could fully overturn the ban or force TikTok’s sale, but regardless of what comes next, TikTok remains accessible and the Democrats remain hated by everyone, apart from the people who think Kamala ran a perfect campaign (there are about three of them).

In the US, we have witnessed the Democrats score own goal after own goal, decimating their popularity and neutering them as a political force. We have seen the same in the UK with the Labour Party. The strategy has been to shatter the public’s expectations of the “left” (they’re not the left) and make them grateful for any small offering from the “right”. The strategy in both cases is to push the US, UK, and presumably other countries, into the arms of the far-right.

Where centrists go wrong is that they fail to understand all of these corrupt politicians are on the same side and their differences are performative. None of them give a fuck about the culture war; they’re simply trying to prevent a class war.

While I have been using labels such as “left”, “right” and “centre” due to their familiarity, the fact is none of these corrupt politicians are on the left, right, or centre: they’re way up top, pissing on us while we blame each other for the growing stench of urine.

What we are seeing is the public being duped into accepting authoritarianism as the “only” alternative to neoliberalism. The establishment knows neoliberalism is dying and is desperately manoeuvring to prevent the rise of a democratic (small “d”) alternative. It has a window of maybe five to ten years to pull this off because of changing demographics: it needs to get the power structures in place while the electoral landscape makes it possible.

In the UK, we saw the establishment go all out against Corbyn, coming up with strategies to split his voter base and guarantee electoral success for an unpopular Conservative government. They knew that after 2019, they probably couldn’t pull that off again, but they didn’t need to: they’d got their guy Starmer in charge of the Labour Party.

Starmer’s job was not to represent us, not to make our lives better, he certainly didn’t care about “getting the Tories out” or holding a second EU referendum: he used wedge issues to manipulate the electorate and broke every promise while in power.

The Democrats did something similar in the US: they had their fake resistance bullshit and then did almost everything as badly as the Republicans while committing genocide and taking us to the brink of World War III.

These conflicts and tensions could’ve been ended easily, but the aim of the Democrats was not peace, it was to make their own voters hate them. This is why we have witnessed own goal after own goal.

The TikTok ban is just one example of these own goals. It gave Trump the opportunity to look like a hero in the eyes of the gullible. It improved his support while turning the youth away from the Democrats who, just a matter of years ago, could absolutely count on the youth vote. The Democrats will now use this as “proof” they must shift further to the “right” to regain the public’s trust.

In the past, the US and UK had two fascist parties who pretended to be moderates who opposed fascism, but we could soon enter a phase where the two parties are arguing over who is the best at fascism. While this takes place, your living standards will continue to fall, the wars will increase in their brutality, and you will probably blame foreigners if you’ve not understood what I’ve written. Stop punching left or right and start punching up.

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