Very nice. I was just listening to Adnan Husain’s new independent podcast where he was discussing the frustrating current military projection asymmetry in that the US gets to project whereever it wants but China is unable to reciprocate even with the genocide in Gaza.

I think the current administration is an example of being wannabe realists in the line of Kennan, Kissinger, and Brzezinski just like Mearsheimer. I’ve seen some articles highlighting Rubio’s recent public statements and how that gusano, who made being anti-China his entire political after his humiliation of being bullied by Trump calling him a “robot” off the Republican Presidential convention in 2016, is quite in the clear-eyed realism camp of the US “China threat” lobby.

The weird American nationalist conservative David Goldman covered some of Rubio’s recent Congressional report writings:

If this report conveys any message, let it be that the United States cannot be complacent about Communist China. Think-tank scholars and economists may bank on China’s coming collapse. Beijing is taking the other side of that wager.

[…] And Communist China will still be a more formidable adversary than any the United States has faced in living memory. At this point, the burden of proof should be on the critics who insist the CCP’s project is doomed to fail.”

https://archive.ph/hezZ0

B of MoonOfAlabama also recently gushed over Rubio’s “pragmatism” in the past couple weeks when he spoke about how the unipolar moment was over in a recent speech. He highlighted some of Rubio’s comments:

I think the mission of American foreign policy – and this may sound sort of obvious, but I think it’s been lost. The interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America, right? […] [A]nd that’s the way the world has always worked. The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what’s in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances; where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they’re going to further theirs. And that’s been lost.

[N]ow you can have a framework by which you analyze not just diplomacy but foreign aid and who we would line up with and the return of pragmatism. And that’s not an abandonment of our principles. I’m not a fan or a giddy supporter of some horrifying human rights violator somewhere in the world. By the same token, diplomacy has always required us and foreign policy has always required us to work in the national interest, sometimes in cooperation with people who we wouldn’t invite over for dinner or people who we wouldn’t necessarily ever want to be led by. And so that’s a balance, but it’s the sort of pragmatic and mature balance we have to have in foreign policy.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/rubio-its-not-normal-for-the-world-to-have-a-unipolar-power.html

I think through this tone alone, it’s clear that Rubio is gunning to be a Kissinger/Brzezinski clone. Goldman talked about how “a credible anti-Communist like Nixon could make a deal with China without accusations of selling out, and Secretary of State Rubio could repeat the exercise, according to this line of thinking.”

Ever since 1989, America’s China policy had been hijacked by the “human rights” warriors so it is true that it has been a while since America donned up the Kissinger pragmatic realpolitik mask for its relationship with China. I personally think there would be nothing that China could gain from another hypothetical “grand bargain” with America as the fundamental contradiction of American hegemony over the world is not something that can be kicked down the road under the guise of “peaceful co-existence,” as the errors of the post-WWII Soviet leadership with their constant searching for “detente” under Khrushchev ultimately amounting to nothing but some actor freak like Reagan calling them a “evil empire.” Some parts of the Chinese government was able to recognize this back in the 2010s when China rejected Obama’s proposal for a “G2.” As the Russian term “agreement-incapable” hints at, I don’t believe even a pragmatic veneered American China policy will be able to tolerate giving any real concessions to China.

As such, I think it’s much more likely that a more geopolitically pragmatic American foreign policy will simply be a MAGA Republican flavor of the China containment objective, primarily through attempting to pull Russia away from China (as Trump had talked about many times explicitly on the campaign trail and his special advisor to Russia Kellogg recently publicly fantasized about). The pragmatism realpolitik angle will be that anything is a possible candidate to be thrown under the bus for the goal of convincing Russia to distance itself from China, as what is happening right now with the EU vassals and the Ukraine fascists. Whether the modern Sino-Russian relationship, built on economic ties this time around rather than the ideological solidarity of the Sino-Soviet era, can withstand these American overtures under Trump will be the open question of the day.

Personally, I think that rationally speaking, China has done decent material work over the past three years since the Ukraine war in making itself economically indispensable to Russia, but given that past Russian leadership dissolved the USSR because they saw the inside of a Walmart and wanted to get pats on the back from the likes of Reagan, Bush and Thatcher, I frankly put nothing past the Westanbetung Russian ruling class.

The core issue for Trump and Rubio and their ilk in the current administration is that just because you know the recipe, as they claim to do, doesn’t necessarily mean you actually have the ability to bake the cake in the end. I think that will be the defining trait of their foreign policy.

There’s definitely an internal contradiction within America’s elite classes that has ballooned with the monumental capital accumulation from, especially, the past decade through the seismic technological gains. The paradigm of America’s upper class composition was indeed one of finance for most of modern American history, but I do suspect that the rise of Silicon Valley has suddenly created a new power base that has the capacity to come into friction with the traditional institutional elite.

The fact that many of these tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg eclipse the traditional financial elite in wealth means that they have no interest in falling in line at the bottom of the pecking order as “New Money.” The recent TrueAnon episode about them really highlights the sense of “persecution” these narcissistic freaks obtained during the Biden government.

To be frank, they do have a compelling case to sell in that the state apparatus firmly believes technology is the primary means to secure American hegemony and sees their much fantasized ultimate showdown with China as one defined primarily by technological capabilities. So this is a contradiction in which they believe in their own self-importance as the lead actors of modern America and much of the state apparatus also believes the same thing. If that is true, all those avenues you highlighted of the further “technologification” of American society would be inherently to their interest and would cyclically entrench their explosive influence in modern America.

Fantastic read, thank you for that link.

Given that Thiel supposedly injects himself with Gen Z blood, coming from that crowd, it was probably meant as a compliment.

I don’t see the difference and splitting the hair seems irrelevant. The US military isn’t just an imperialist fascist force, it’s also a jobs program for millions of Americans. It’s dialectical to acknowledge all relevant facets and the existence of those orgs as a institutional golden parachute is one of them. I don’t care if someone weighs it as “just that” or “primary” or “secondary” or “whatever” it’s simply a crucial element that should be highlighted.

Yes, the Reddit Democrat “analysis” or the Hasanabi interpretation of this as just “evil dumb racists” doing “evil dumb racist” things isn’t necessarily wrong. There’s no value in framing this under that sole paradigm, however.

The liberal explanation is that Trump is a big dumb dumb and doesn’t understand the role of those orgs in US hegemony.

The fact that relatively few institutional voices from the US state apparatus are stepping out to denounce this move, collectively running out waving their arms for the bull to stop running around the china shop, if it was really done out of sheer ignorance, shows that there is likely more of an internal power struggle at play rather than some “comrade Trump” working against US empire.

There’s still no real indication whether Trump will actually follow through on any of this. Regardless, however, one thing that should be noted is the reality is that those orgs are essentially the sinecure of the US institutional elite, where their spawnlings that are too incompetent even for some Wall Street board seat or STEM lord Silicon Valley company management are fobbed off to. Those like Anderson Cooper and the like. If you get a liberal arts major in the wasteland of the American job market nowadays, you’re likely in for a struggle as a normal individual. If you get a liberal arts major as a failson/faildaughter of some US institutional elite, you get a job at USAID/NED and the Radio Free Whatevers. These “non-partisan” NGO careerist positions were their golden parachute and they had all largely swung in the Democratic camp over the years as they had alienated Republicans with objectives like rainbow imperialism.

There was this big news story a while back about the “Chaguan” column for the Economist (a cushy one-man job journalist position in Beijing that also funded travelling around China writing anti-China propaganda hitpieces by doing cherry-picked interviews) being shut down. Amidst all the Economist’s whining about the “hostile journalism environment,” it inadvertantly revealed that this “journalist” was the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie.. These are the kind of places that the failsons of Western institutional elite drift into and Trump’s actions against them is essentially a form of blackmail to cow them and attempt to make them fall in line. The important thing to note is that new institutions more closely aligned with the MAGA Republican flavor of US imperialism will inevitably be created, whether wholesale or more closely under the government’s leash within the State Department, and the intent of these purges is enforce a reset so that anyone who wants to regain their old spots would need to pay fealty to the new order of the day.

To add onto this, though this is clearly just the early stages, I think what we’re seeing with the consolidation of the Silicon Valley elites and Big Tech giants under the Trump faction is, in many ways, a coup by America’s “New Money” Tech oligarchs against the traditional 20th century financial/industrial institutional elite that the MAGA Republicans had moved away from and therefore had visibly coalesced under the Democrats. I was listening to TrueAnon’s take on the Republican “shift” of Big Tech and they highlighted the persecution complex that Silicon Valley had under Biden, where people like Zuckerberg were dragged into Congress and made to endure a televised grilling. This was something that would have never happened to the likes of Dimon, Soros or Buffett.

Given that explosive stock market capitalization had made these Tech oligarchs far wealthier than the “Old Money” ever had been, it must have been humiliating for narcissistic freaks like Zuckerberg who have megalomaniacal messiah complexes from usually being just in their Silicon Valley yes-men echochambers to experience being treated this way when they’re also the new overwhelming power in America’s elite. These deeply resentful individuals then saw in Trump’s admin a way to finally have the Big Tech power base institutionally reconstituted at the top of the hierarchy, above the “Old Money.”

Rather than LARPing as a character in some British drama about “New Money” losers spending the entire series trying to ingratiate their way into the “Old Money” elite nobility, they’re deciding to simply flip the table and pull down the entire superstructure to rebuild from the rubble something that can acknowledge the powerbrokers. The destruction of all these old levers of American institutional power and the government careerists that have decades of networks with the “Old Money” elite (including in places like USAID, RFE and VOA - though it shows a bottom line of US imperial consensus still exists as RFA is untouched and unmentioned in all this) is to pauperize the latter’s connections within the US state and to reset the playing field in a way favorable to the recognition of the overwhelming wealth of the new Big Tech oligarchy. The intent is to demonstrate an overwhelming show of force that demonstrates their political power through what Trump is able to do with their sponsorship, rendering it impossible for the Big Tech elites to be alienated and treated the way those like Zuckerberg were under Biden.

You know it’s been a rough week for the liberal empire when @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml posts an Economist article.

This was precisely the problem that the 20th century European socialist states encountered, which is that people typically don’t appreciate something until it’s taken away and have a tendency to believe the grass is always greener on the other side.

In some ways, China has become better equipped than the USSR at combating some particular elements. There won’t be any Chinese liberal dreaming of throwing away the socialist state just so they can get their hands on Levis blue jeans, because the CPC has strategically situated post-Deng China as the producer of all material goods in the modern world (I’d say with combatting this mentality that the USSR faced consciously in mind). The Gorbachev/Yeltsin/Yakolev types lurking in China aren’t at least going to be morons that converted to anti-communism because they visited the West and saw a Walmart. The recent RedNote incident shows that this paradigm has flipped the other way around, with normal Americans losing their minds over the endless variety on Chinese supermarket shelves.

In other ways, China faces the exact same challenges that 20th century socialist states encountered, which is that where the West has Orientalism; the socialist world had “Occidentalism.” Orientalism for the West is a chauvinistic boogeyman projection of everything the West is not, where the existence of the “Orient” itself defines what it means to be the “West.” At the end of the day, it recapitulates and engenders a form of collective gratitude where a “Westerner” is meant to go “well now, aren’t you glad you’re in the West and not in the East?”

Occidentalism is the exact opposite where the “Occident” is everything the “Orient” ought to be. Orientalism is a chavinistic negative foil while Occidentalism is a toxic positive one. America, for example, is therefore held to be a land of milk and honey. Just as it was in the USSR, everything China has done wrong or has disappointed them on, for those people, is something the America-in-their-heads has surely done right. The same RedNote incident shows how prevalent this mentality was among the normal Chinese population. It was thought that a dishwasher living in America could afford a middle class Homer Simpson lifestyle, providing for an entire nuclear family to boot. It was a case of “never meet your heroes” that you could witness being disrupted in real-time on that app. I’ve seen them post retrospectives of how many Chinese intellectuals have poured endless ink shouting the same thing to them in China, but they only began to believe it when some American made a RedNote account posting about having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. It’s like that post-Soviet Russian joke about how “Everything they taught us about Soviet socialism was a lie, everything they taught us about the West was the truth.”

It is without argument that there is much more that China can do, though some parts of this come from a fundamental historical asymmetry. I’ve recently read Jiang Shigong’s 2021 article “A History of Empire Without Empire” posted on Redsails and he frames the Chinese confrontation against America as “better characterized as China, a rising sovereign state, facing the U.S.-dominated world empire or world system. It’s not a question of managing a relationship between two sovereign states, but a question of how China faces the U.S.-dominated world empire.” I’d personally expand this characterization to the 20th century Cold War as well. The USSR and the socialist world was never fighting a “peer” in the West but a world empire formed by 500 years of imperialism. The modern history of the world has only ever known an unchallenged paradigm of Western supremacy. Any challengers like China itself in the Opium Wars and Boxer Uprising were beaten down until they accepted this paradigm. The failure of the USSR and all 20th century socialist states in combatting Occidentalism should also account for the wider historical context that they were fighting an uphill battle not just against the contemporary material conditions of the socialist world vis-a-vis the West but also the engrained intergenerational societal and cultural propaganda of Occidentalism.

To be honest, I think this is a sort of psychological confrontation that socialist education is ill-equipped to confront without generations of consistent reinforcement. Even then, there have been many socialist states that attempted to do so (with varying degrees of imperfection) and failed. The short and medium term means of securing ideological security against the West might be better addressed by a careful toleration of nationalism. It’s indeed what worked for much of history and is what all capitalist states rely on today as a means of ideological cohesion. The Indian Marxist argument has been that Third World/Global South nationalism shouldn’t be prejudiced inherently just because Europe mucked it up in the 20th century. I’m not entirely convinced that the risks of European nationalism are entirely inapplicable in cases of Global South bourgeois nationalism like BJP-run India today and I’m cautious about its compatibility with actual socialist states. However, this is something observable in all AES today, particularly China and Vietnam (I’m not sure about the DPRK/Cuba/Laos), where there is a greater emphasis on (largely socialism agnostic) patriotism as a rallying banner than was the case with 20th century socialism (non-existent in some cases like the DDR, where any national sentiment was squarely defined by socialist pride). The challenge is, of course, in subordinating it so that it never cannibalizes the socialist state in a fit of nationalist stupidity like how Yeltsin’s Russian nationalism-pandering destroyed the USSR.

Honestly, the root of every struggle session that community has had recently all comes down to how much that admin team enjoys LARPing as the Western stereotype version of a Communist Party politburo: as opaque as a black box. Evidently, it’s caused a birds of a feather problem, where the admins find communication challenges even among themselves and attracted the types that would withhold critical site information from each other like domain credentials, brushing the others off with disingenuous assurances that “they’ll definitely renew the domain, trust.” And the others apparently just went “okay” and waited all the way until the time ran out.

The best case scenario is that some rent-seeking site traffic squatter buys out the domain because it could easily be weaponized by a hostile reactionary freak aware of the site’s demographic to maliciously IP grab or phish as disgusting ideological revenge. Plenty of the users take multi-month or even years-long hiatuses from the site and there would be no channels to notify them by if they return and type in “hexbear.net.” There really should have been a front page permanent top banner blaring 24/7 that the domain might be lost and at least familiarizing people with the “chapo.chat” mirror from the moment they knew this could be a possibility since at least September.

The one possible upside of this is that with the site management being the way it is, I’d say that possibility of the site being some fed honeypot has definitely gone down a few notches.