Summary

The seed of an epic discord was sown by globalization which benefits Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. The pandemic is driving the wedge even deeper. It will take a technological revolution, backed by Trumpian populism, to make a more perfect Union. When that day arrives, history will be much kinder to President Trump. That day will arrive.

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According to Wikipedia, techno-nationalism is about national pride in homegrown technology. I think it is more than that, as far as America is concerned. For America, it is about intellectual property rights first and foremost. It is therefore inherently against unsanctioned transfer of technology to a foreign country such as the PRC in the name of globalization. This is not new. This is good old-fashioned protection of national interests. No doubt President Trump is championing techno-nationalism, which was born with the United States of America.

Founded just in 1776, America doesn’t have a long history to fall back on. So it must keep going forward, befitting a nation of future-oriented immigrants. For a better tomorrow, we Americans have to be inventors and investors today. That’s why a violation of intellectual property rights is a sin as much as a crime. Indeed, we take intellectual property rights so seriously that we can hardly put up with foreigners who don’t. What we ask for is fair play, and who shouldn’t?

Needless to say, fair play is about fairness to both sides of a business transaction. A business transaction must not be taken as a door half-open to theft. And theft is theft. Theft must not be justified as a way of settling historical scores by the offending party. Yes, on the receiving end of 100-year humiliation, China was a victim. Was, not is. But then, the CCP is quite successful at holding Chinese people back in historical victimhood, even though far more Chinese people had lost their lives to the CCP regime than to the so-called foreign devils.

Make no mistake. Wall Street globalists are more sympathetic to the CCP regime than to America’s white working-class people. No one can rival their deft application of moral equivalence, which is epitomized by Noam Chomsky, a leading linguist. As an icon of the American left, Chomsky always manages to bring the house down when speaking to his elite audience about the unparalleled evils of American Imperialism. Thanks to Chomsky and his comrades’ overwhelming influence on the campus, you would be hard-pressed these days to find an Ivy League student with an Appalachian accent, or a pro-life label, or even just an American flag lapel pin. 

Through their lens of Critical Race Theory, Wall Street and mainstream media elites simply dismiss the white working-class people as a bunch of Luddites, bigots, rednecks, and unwashed latter-day imperialists, who can’t have enough of President Trump. Wall Street ignores the fact that working-class people, regardless of their skin color, have gained little from globalism. In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance has a vivid account of how folks struggle in and around the Rust Belt. But in the melodramatic Netflix movie version, the long shadow of globalism in Vance’s book is nowhere to be seen. What a shame!

Wall Street is about money but not all about money. With money, Wall Street elites are not shy about feeding their globalist machine to stem the rise of American populism in Main Street. They even go so far as to play devil’s advocate, unashamedly. In their marriage of convenience, Wall Street and the CCP are no strange bedfellows. One of  their joint ventures was Google’s Dragonfly Project, which came up with an Internet search engine prototype that could accommodate the CCP’s censorship regime.The Dragonfly didn’t take off, though, due to a conscientious Google employee’s whistleblowing in August 2018. 

In the meantime, intriguingly, another Google employee revolt had practically called off the big tech’s Maven Project designed to improve the US Defense Department’s military application of drone-related A.I. It turned out to be a Silicon Valley revolt against the Trump presidency. Wall Street-funded big techs detest Main Street populism that put President Trump in the White House in 2017. Even today, Twitter is still busy censoring grassroot American conservatives rather than Iranian ayatollahs. Big tech. Small mind.

Back in 1776, citizen soldiers known as Minutemen fought for their property rights and made the American Revolution possible. At this juncture of history, we citizens can make sure that the American Technological Revolution will continue by safeguarding America’s intellectual property rights. The stake can’t be higher. Indeed, leaving tech patents unprotected is a chief reason Why Nations Fail (a monumental work by American economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson).

America won’t fail. By putting techno-nationalism into action, President Trump has already made a contribution to America’s future success.

— Liangyang Jiang