You know things aren’t going well in the negotiations for the U.S. operations of TikTok when President Trump has to bribe the Chinese government with billions in tariff relief.
But that’s exactly what was reported out of the White House. President Trump is willing to give the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) billions in tariff relief if they pressured TikTok to sell its U.S. operations before the April 5th deadline.
What this indicates—ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, of its own volition has no desire to sell its U.S. operations.
The question: Can Donald Trump bribe the CCP into forcing ByteDance to sell?
It is worth stated: President Trump’s gambit has merit. Any company doing business in China, especially one based in China, does so under the oversight of the CCP. So, theoretically Trump’s tariff relief could sway the CCP to act on his behalf as his advocate with ByteDance ownership.
The downside: Donald Trump had to sweeten the pot considerably to get a deal done.
It should tell everyone ByteDance ownership’s doesn’t intend to sell its U.S. TikTok operations. Only under extreme duress (threats of retribution) by the CCP is any deal possible. But, even then it’s a crap shoot.
The same fundamental conditions exist as before.
ByteDance is a global business. What’s more, its business model is predicated on the success of its TikTok product line and that product line’s success is directly tied to TikTok’s algorithm.
Ultimately, it’s all about TikTok’s algorithm.
At stake for ByteDance, if they sell their U.S. operations in TikTok, is opening the door to competition to their entire global enterprise. It’s a bad deal for ByteDance.
After all, Intellectual Property (IP) is the lifeblood of every technology company. ByteDance’s TikTok is no different. It’s why one would expect ByteDance to do everything in its power to protect its IP, its algorithm, even if they have to stand up to the CCP.
Still, one can’t under estimate the influence of the CCP.
It’s been reported, the CCP has frozen all state business with CK-Hutchison Holdings after the Hong Kong based conglomerate agreed to sell it majority held stake in the two ports bordering the Panama Canal to U.S. based BlackRock.
Purportedly, the CCP was not happy with the deal and has engaged in retaliatory actions against CK-Hutchison Holdings.
President Trump’s tariff gambit is likely seeking to take advantage of the CCP’s willingness to pressure companies into making business decisions that benefit China.
With the April 5th deadline fast approaching—we will know shortly if President Trump’s gambit pays off.
If it does it came at a steep price.
Dan Butterfield is the author of 11 E-books written under Occam’s Razor by Dan Butterfield. A list of publications: “Cultural Revolution,” “Prosecutorial Misconduct,” “Benghazi—The Cover-Up,” “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming,” “Treason,” “11 Days,” “First Premise,” “GOP’s Power Grab,” “Guilty,” “Comey’s Deceit,” and “False Narratives.”
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.