In this attempt to criticize Donald Trump, this PBS host tries to get this Chinese dissident to compare Chinese authoritarianism with the way that Donald Trump ran America. He gingerly rejects her notion and compares political correctness to Chinese authoritarianism instead.
PBS asked Chinese dissident, anti-communist artist Ai Weiwei about authoritarianism, hoping he would condemn Trump.
— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) November 15, 2021
He says Trump isn’t authoritarian—and calls out wokeness as authoritarianism akin to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The host is visibly upset. pic.twitter.com/UctRu0Fpeq
The close-mindedness that authoritarianism tends o encourage and breed is what China has been long based on. It has changed drastically in the last two decades. But that does not mean that China is now an open-minded country. Not at all. It is a totalitarian form of capitalism with a super strong central government at the center. Freedom of speech does not exist at all. Freedom of religion does not exist much either. But most of all, freedom of movement and a true society based on freedom does not exist. The richest billionaires in China, a growing class, are extra careful to declare their total allegiance to the Communist Party. They know where they would end up in they don’t follow the party line. That is what totalitarianism is about.
There are forces in America that are indeed socialist – like Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and others. They truly want to curb freedoms and to redistribute wealth in a massive way. Put simply, they want to take hundreds of millions of dollars from every billionaire and tens of millions of dollars from every millionaire with hundreds of millions of dollars, and they want to give it out as handouts to the poor and unfortunate. This sounds so fair and caring to the weak. However, this forgets one major issue – it will destroy the American economy. Taxing the rich heavily to fund the poor has always boomeranged against helping the poor. What ends up happening is the rich find a way to shield their funds from the taxing authorities, and the poor have no incentive to work towards upward mobility. So the hard-working middle class get squeezed by some of the tax policies and the small business have no employees willing to work because they are receiving handouts. This is what is gradually occurring now under the Biden administration.
However, in China, the authoritarian and corrupt form of capitalism wherein a communist central government sits atop the entire enterprise, is actually succeeding in bringing upward mobility to a greater number of people. China has always had a massive lower class. But in the last few decades, hundreds of millions of people have joined the middle class, and they are happy about that – even if they have less freedom than they used to. That is why China is thriving. Basically, oppressed people who’s lives are improving are happier than free people who are losing their ability to thrive financially. Trump brought more freedom to the United States via his economic policies that freed up the markets and businesses from the shackles of a large central government. Biden’s policies are bringing America down – one handout at a time – as more and more people leave the workforce. China’s economic dominance may be coming sooner than we expect if we don’t get back on track.