It's just telling that you've got an authoritarian playbook that sort of, at every pass, seems to be more focused on driving up corporate profits at the expense of the American people.
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front matter
manufacturing jobs. (“Learn to code!” they would gloat.) These were just the price of progress. Engagement was at every step Beijing’s project, not America’s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictated terms, only to break them whenever it suited them. They stole our technology, spied on our people, and threatened our allies, all with trillions of dollars of wealth and military power financed by their access to our market.
Then came the rise of Big Tech, which is now less a contributor to the U.S. economy than it is a tool of China’s government. In exchange for cheap labor and regulatory special treatment from Beijing, America’s largest technology firms funnel data about Americans to the CCP. They hand over sensitive intellectual property with military and intelligence applications to keep the money rolling in. They let Beijing censor Chinese users on their platforms. They let the CCP set their corporate policies about mobile apps. And they run interference for our rival’s political priorities in Washington. One side of Big-Tech companies’ business model is old-fashioned American competitiveness and world-changing technological innovation; but increasingly, that side of these businesses is overshadowed by their role as operatives in the lucrative employ of America’s most dangerous international enemy.
If you want to understand the danger posed by collaboration between Big Tech and the CCP, look no further than TikTok. The highly addictive video app, used by 80 million Americans every month and overwhelmingly popular among teenage girls, is in effect a tool of Chinese espionage. The ties between TikTok and the Chinese government are not loose, and they are not coincidental.
The same can be observed of many U.S. colleges and universities. Through the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, Beijing has been just as successful at compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America.
A casual reader might take the last few pages as surveying a broad array of challenges facing the American people and the next conservative President: supranational policymaking, border security, globalization, engagement with China, manufacturing, Big Tech, and Beijing-compromised colleges.
But these really are not many issues, but two: (1) that China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor, and (2) that America’s elites have betrayed the American people. The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.
International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed: They should be abandoned. Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not