Chinese Dissident on Wokeness in America: “In Many Ways, You’re Already in the Authoritarian State”
“You just don’t know it.”
A dissident from China named Ai Weiwei was recently a guest on Firing Line, which, I honestly forgot was still a thing. Anyway, he had some fascinating views on political correctness.
He suggested that the ideology of the left is reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
He also said that political correctness is making America an authoritarian state.
The Daily Wire has details:
Famed Chinese Dissident: U.S. ‘Already In Authoritarian State,’ ‘Dangerous’ Wokeism Like Mao Revolution
Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, a famed artist and activist, warned Americans during an interview that aired late last week that they are already under the control of an authoritarian state, they just don’t realize it yet.
Weiwei said that the situation in China has become “more extreme, in terms of censorship, in terms of their tolerance to dissidents.” He later added that he was not hopeful for China’s future given the direction that China is going.
Later, when asked about authoritarianism in the U.S., Weiwei said “certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian.”
“In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”
When asked how so, he responded, “Many things happening today in U.S. can be compared to Cultural Revolution in China.”
“Like people trying to be unified in a certain political correctness,” he continued. “That is very dangerous.”
Here’s a short clip. You’ll notice that host Margaret Hoover tries to bait him into saying Trump is an authoritarian. His answer doesn’t go the way she wanted.
PBS asked Chinese dissident, anti-communist artist Ai Weiwei about authoritarianism, hoping he would condemn Trump.
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
— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) November 15, 2021
The full episode is about 27 minutes long, if you want to watch it:
It’s amazing that Biden is trying to mandate vaccines, the left has gone full-on insane over controlling language and Hoover wanted to know if Weiwei thinks Trump is an authoritarian.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
It takes a foreigner to state the obvious.
The Daily Mail has more objective reporting and journalism covering the US than most of the media in the US.
This is true. Clearly, they favor the more salacious, titillating stories as tabloids frequently do. But, they cover Democrats with the same fervor as they cover Republicans. They were tough on Trump and Bush but also tough on Obama and now Biden.
Confucius say…he right.
That’s because they were boiled in a different pot and know how it turns out.
A foreigner on the wrong side of the old country’s totalitarian government.
In the Book of RItes, it says,
苛政猛于虎也
A harsh government is fiercer than a tiger.
Maybe it can be changed to:
苛政猛于种类主义之白种人也
A harsh government is fiercer than racist white people.
The label white people… person (i.e. attribute) is racist. The politically congruent reference is “people… person of white” (i.e. color bloc).
“You just don’t know it.”
Only if you aren’t paying attention.
Or don’t really have a problem with it.
Looking at you GOPe and neverTrumpers. You know who you are.
Goldberg and Hayes for sure.
You don’t say?
In defense of people who don’t vote for Trump, they are legitimately afraid of the authoritarian, they just don’t buy that one devil is less evil than the other.
They don’t like the current devil, they just believe the media in that that other devil is worse. I’m describing my mom’s fear of Trump. The media’s nonstop negativity worked and she’s not motivated or curious enough to plug into new that says otherwise.
This is a real problem that the Trump right (I include myself in that descriptor) need to understand and figure out how to counter. We forget that the clear bias and established lies the Democrat propagandist media spewed non-stop about Trump (and continue to spew) are actually accepted as true by a great many Americans who just don’t understand or see that the media is not “objective” or even composed of “journalists.”
These American voters will tell you that Trump is a racist, but they can’t tell you one thing he actually said that was racist; they just heard it on the “news” and accept it as truth. When a few can come up with something they heard on the “news,” it’s pure lies (Trump said all Mexicans are rapists and murderers, Trump defended actual white supremacists in Charlottesville, there was a “Muslim travel ban,” Trump mocked a disabled reporter for his disability, and on. And on. ALL lies.). And you can show them that it’s not true, and they will still insist that it is, they believe the media over their lying eyes. I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done about that, but we need to figure something out, particularly if Trump decides to run again.
On the bright side, a lot of people are waking up, particularly as the media lies about Russian collusion and the Hunter laptop are exposed. These things are shocking to Americans who believed the media’s (and deep state’s) lies for so long, and they are not shocking in a good way for the left. Trust in media is cratering, but not fast enough and far and wide enough to make a real difference.
@Fuzzy – 5 years ago – I was one of those people. I accepted the Agenda-driven Media and thought and their portrayal of most conservatives as racist. My social group refused to watch FOX because they said it as racist and evil. I decided to watch for 2 weeks t see what it was that everyone despised so much. I finally was able to compare the Mainstream and the alternative media. Now I watch both – mainly to see how much the Media lies and distort facts. I have helped some friends to see the light. It’s hard because it is literally a cult supported by propaganda and social pressure (I live in the Northeast – so it’s even harder here to have an view outside the mainstream. Many radical liberals say they are tolerant – actually most are not. The Russia hoax and Hunter Biden censorship has really been helpful in exposing the media’s bias. I usually get Democrats to think about the issues when I bring up those cases.
Most of the leftist friends are not bad people – they are being fooled and they want to avoid being shunned social by having a different POV than most others. It takes massive courage to step off the liberal merry-go-round.
Ben
Agreed. These folks are analogous to the yellow dog d of their day. For some their voting habits are based on just that a habit and not a deep philosophical underpinning or attachment to the d/prog.
Others were indoctrinated in HS and college and, like many of us, getting married, having children and a mortgage tends to make them pay more attention to the issues of the day; education policy, tax policy. Soon enough they realize that the academic policy arguments they absorbed don’t translate well into the real world.
One problem in the under 30 generation is delayed marriage and delayed childbirth. Many have chosen to wait until their early thirties to marry and have kids which puts off the ideological day of reckoning that brings them towards our side of the table.
Being single or married but childless in a two earner ‘power couple’ marriage in a hip metro area is fun. Disposable income, nice restaurants, pro sports teams, cool bands and cultural attractions. Not to mention advancing ones career and working to land an early partnership. All that is a very attractive lifestyle that kids will definitely upend.
Mind sharing your age?
Fox is a nonentity. They get the most viewers at like 2+ million on most nights, three million on good nights. We are a nation of well over 350 million. Fox doesn’t even scrape the surface. (Why I am very happy to encourage the lefist war on Fox. If they shut down tomorrow, it would change literally nothing.).
It is so obvious to see the orgasmic rapture in the host’s face as she mouths the sacred name of Mao, and then gently lobs the softball to her confederate in the denunciation of Trump.
Oops. Ball one.
Stop being clever and funny, it seems that the right is losing its brains and its sense of humor. The exact wrong way to win the culture war, btw, but you know that. 😛
Fabulous stuff. I love it when these Dhimmi-crat media prostitutes/propagandists attempt to bait guests into bashing President Trump, and/or, conservatives at-large, and fail, miserably, when the guests correctly point out that the vile Dhimimi-crats are the most obnoxiously and manifestly totalitarian force in contemporary American society.
When you dont know, when you can’t kn0w, when you present yourself in utter ignorance of a situation, and decide anyway, even when time is not passing … that’s the finale.
Not one motherfucking person acting on this planet knows the law. Not one. Not the professors, not the judges, not the prosecutors, not the defense attorneys.
Every piece of the judiciary system has to employ s0me f0rm of subterfuge. Ive read over the past few weeks, the lies, maybe half lies the jury has to filter, many not having the proper site to do the filtering. ThRT SCARES ME. .. What Hayek said about the economy is true about the law. Both are spIRaled so elaborately, so intricately, that not only do jurors, average, alert, informed, serious citizens, the damned lawyers dont know the law, at least not cold.
Why do trials for finding not be swift? The goddamn lawyers have top look at thousands of cases that the judge cant even adjudicate properly. Judge Shroeder said as much once last week, if I understood him properly. He’d been favored with a great education, and he was humbles in trying to adjudicate the arguments presented.
Again, I , for one, don’t believe a damn soul can master the laws as they now stands written. Not understanding gets ordinary folks on trouble because they are expressly unable to predict what actions they take are against the laws, laws which no-one can know in entirety.
I like the 4 points of self defense Branca, Esq., distributed last week, but damn, LL THE ASIDES AND THE exceptions and the other exceptions to exceptions, politics fine, not one damn juror can configure most of that as if he was a peer.
And f he can do that, he’s not a peer, he’s other earthly, Jesus maybe.
Greeks. No judge. No tactics, no lawyer. As many as five hundred “jurors”, likely literate, vote. Majority. 0/1.
Who goes where?
Ill be damned, id like to hear it argued by someone not Jesus that that’s not a better system. What would be the difference in error?
Legislators (law writers) are no more competent than any other organ of government, so one reason for not understanding the law is that the law is just wrong, even to the point of self-contradiction. The increasing use of “notwithstanding all other laws to the contrary” makes them even formally noncomputable.
The Massachusetts legislature passed a law around 2000 saying that pistol models could not be sold in the state unless they failed a safety drop test. No one even meant to write that, but they did.
They also passed a law accidentally outlawing patriotic parades by the VFW, Legion, etc. (no person not engaged in hunting shall carry unloaded weapons on public streets). Legislators in another state just passed an almost identical law recently, with the same flaw.
The Wisconsin law on minors with rifles was so convoluted and self-contradictory that it took two law teams and a judge to decide whether Kyle’s conduct was or wasn’t legal. How was Kyle, or any other citizen, to “know” that?
The best anyone should expect any citizen to do is to be well grounded in the federal and state constitutions. All other laws arise from those, and if you understand those, you should have a basic sense of what all the other laws should be. And if you’re wrong, maybe it’s not you who are wrong — maybe the law is literally unconstitutional.
I disagree. The law is unambiguous. The problem was created by the prosecutor trying to ignore Wisconsin rules of statutory construction to get the legal result he wanted.
Unambiguous does not imply clear. I am acquainted with several Wisconsin resident gun owners who were “sure” that Wisconsin law (unlike Illinois’) prohibited Kyle’s possession. One said he was specifically taught this in the (state-run) hunter education course.
Then look at the text of the laws. Any sensible person does not write a law whose title claims to forbid sub-18-year-olds from carrying rifles, then makes it conditional on two other laws, neither of which actually forbids sub-18-year-olds from carrying common rifles. It’s quite clear that whoever wrote this law was either incompetent or being purposefully deceptive. My money is on the former, since postulating a motive for the latter is entirely confounding.
This law reminds me of the ruleset for the “entrance exam” in Heinlein’s Space Cadet: any candidate who punched the button to begin the test immediately failed it.
“He says Trump isn’t authoritarian—and calls out wokeness as authoritarianism akin to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The host is visibly upset.”
Everybody agrees that disease is caused by evil spirits! Why would you misuse my TV show to insist otherwise?
Let me think. Please.