Social Media v. The Banhammer

  All over the United States, people are reassessing their attachment to a particular medium  that is social media. And it seems to me  that in the midst of all of this,  many people are losing sight of  the reason why we get onto these mediums in the first place. And that is to connect with people.  From all around the world  to make connections, to display our creativity, to reach out to people who might need aid,  to connect with people who are similar to us as far as race, culture, ability,  occupation, things of that nature, politics, especially.

We also use these mediums  to make money.  There are opportunities.  In all of these mediums for people to make money, some more than others, obviously, we learned that,  but at the heart, at the core of this is not consumerism. It is Connections.  I've got some explaining to do. Let's  get into it.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back for another episode of Ayana Explains It All, the podcast bridging the gap between current events and human behavior. I am your explainer and chief, your host, Ayana Fakir. I am coming to you prerecorded from Northeast Ohio, and it's been snowing since, what day is this?

We are in the midst of a cold snap, as they call it, but it's also snowing and there's snow everywhere. Now, I'm not a snow hater, not at all. I love it. It's the reason why we don't have droughts because our lakes, our waterways get replenished from the snow, but couldn't we just take, you know, just a break?

Can we just have a break? I am recording this episode on Friday, January 17th. 2025, because there is no rhyme or reason to my recording schedule. I should be doing this every week. I used to do it every week. And life, you know, life be lifin as they say.  But Ayana Explains It All is available on multiple streaming platforms, including YouTube.

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And I do mean everything  from politics to science to the economy to I talk about mental health, physical health. I talk about parenting. I talk about education. I talk about race. I talk about  equality. I talk about Islam. Being Muslim. Wonderful. I love it. But it is not the focal point of my show. This is not a Muslim podcast.

This is a podcast hosted by a Muslim woman. Okay. A Muslim human.

If you go to my social medias, you will see me clad and covered in hijab, but I talk about everything, honey. Why? Because I am just a human being. I'm just a human after all. This week, I'm going to be talking about Something that has been on our lips for months,  this damn TikTok ban. Now listen,  I was not an early adopter of TikTok.

It took me some time to get onto TikTok. My kids would send me videos and show me dances and things they were looking at on TikTok and I would go, Oh, please, and I would stick to Facebook and my little Instagram and, and have a good little time over there. I had no problem. I was happy posting my little pictures and, and doing whatever, keeping people updated on my life, being dramatic. I have a flair for drama. Not so much anymore. But,  and one day I was like, you know what?

I am really bored. I'm really bored. Let's see what this TikTok thing is all about.  I think this was. 2022.  I wanna say. I finally opened a TikTok page  and I was like, let me see. My algorithm was not giving. It was mostly, it was a lot of funny stuff, right.  And I would be up in, in, in my bed or wherever on the couch watching these videos like, this is ridiculous.

It's just ridiculous. What are people talking about? What are people doing? This is a lot of nonsense.  I mean, it was, and then I somehow ended up on the, As my daughter called it, the sad side of TikTok.  And I was just watching videos, video after video of  people crying about the death of a loved one.

Because for some reason I must have like liked one of those videos if you're on Tik TOK and you like a video, if you interact with a video in any way,  you end up with videos on your for you page that are similar to that video. And so if you like a video about, I think I liked a video about someone's, family members honor walk when the person passes away and they're donating their organs and they do that walk down the hallway with the person in their hospital bed so that the organ donation team can harvest the organs and et cetera, et cetera.

I somehow ended up with multiple videos of the same kind, and I'm just watching these videos and it's going like, I can't even think of that song. Must've been a deadly kiss. And it was just over and over  and over.  The song, these videos. And I'm like, oh my God, these are so  sad.

One day my daughter was like, you know what? Enough. Let me fix your algorithm for you.  And so she did it and she showed me how to like, you can just click. I'm not interested. I'm not interested. I'm not interested on every time you see a video and then you find a funny video because I just wanted to laugh.

I needed to laugh and she found a funny video and she's like, here, interact with this and then just keep interacting with these kinds of videos and your algorithm will be fixed. And sure enough,  I mean, just the ridiculousness I was flooded with,  so much so  that I started reposting these things on Instagram.

That's how I got my Instagram followers up.  I mean, I  enjoyed it for myself. It wasn't just about here, follow me because I found this funny thing and I want you to laugh too. It was about I'm enjoying myself. I'm learning about people. I'm having a good time. And then at some point they did this black girl follow train and black women were following each other.

This was 2024, I think. And black women started following each other to get our follower count up on Tik TOK.  And I ended up with a couple thousand followers, which doesn't mean anything. You know, you can have a couple thousand followers on all of these mediums. Like I have on Instagram and threads and Tik TOK and even X, and I will get maybe a couple, maybe like a dozen likes  or 20, 24, 20, 30, something likes on a post.

Sometimes even one like on a post,   You have to have that virality, right? You have to have that thing that people like,  and they have to find you funny and clever or pretty and beautiful with everything that you post. You can't just post one thing, go viral, and then that's it. These people are going to stick around forever.

No, they don't. They'll move on to something else, someone else, they'll block you, they'll mute you,  so, you have to keep it up. I've had one post go viral on TikTok. I've had posts go viral on Facebook and Instagram and X, but it doesn't necessarily translate to  You going viral every time, especially if you're someone like me who looks like me, a black Muslim woman who has a sometimes strong opinions on things.

People aren't looking for that from, black Muslim women. Nobody wants to hear from a Muslim woman. Not even in our own community. Do people want to hear from Muslim women?

And that's another topic for another day, but not even in our own community. So people outside of the community are especially not also looking for that opinion unless you find some way to relate to them. 

And I'm not willing at all to compromise anything of who I am, you have to be controversial with everything that you post if you're not going to lean into the Muslim thing, is what I learned.  I don't want to do that. I just want to make people laugh.

 I just want to make people laugh. Laughter should be free. Joy should be free, in my opinion, and you know, you have so many things around you that you have to work for that just make you absolutely miserable. Anyway,  I just want to make people laugh and smile,  and I laugh along with these people, people who get on my accounts and they, you know, they look at things and they find them funny.

I'm laughing, too. I'm laughing too. I don't want everything to be rage and fear all the time. I know that the United States itself runs on the fear of its citizenry, but I'm not that kind of person. I don't want to do that. I don't like that.  I don't like doom and gloom all the time. I just want to laugh.

I really love discussions. And I ended up on the, during the 2024  election, I ended up on the kind of political side of TikTok.  And that  became something that I immersed myself into, and I'm learning all of these things about people's. different opinions and their cultures and how they think about politics and politicians and the government.

And I learned one thing in particular is that people don't know a lot about their government. They don't know how government works.  And try as I did to educate them and remind them that we're choosing people to, when we elect someone, we're choosing someone to run our government. not just to be the face of things, but to actually run the day to day operations of the government.

People didn't give a crap about that.

But they will soon find out.  So I got into the political side and I'm enjoying people going live. You can go live on TikTok for hours. Some of these people go live for like 24 hours. It's incredible. I don't know how y'all do it.  I'm clocked out after a couple hours of listening to people just kind of yell at each other.

The thing, that's the thing that I could never really get into is the arguing. I don't like to argue.  I know I'm a lawyer. I don't like to argue.  Lawyering is not arguing with people, right? It's about formulating effective arguments  based in law and facts  so that you can persuade a court.  or another party to accept what you're saying is true.

That is not the same as literally yelling at somebody, yelling your opinion at somebody. And I feel like a lot of these  lives and things are just people yelling their opinions at each other and they're not solving anything. They're not even learning anything from each other because they're too busy yelling their opinions at each other.

And one person will try to talk and somebody else will talk over them. It's just,  gosh, it's too much for me and I will get on these panels, some of these panels, and I will try to educate people about different things, but that's not what they want to hear. They want the controversy.

They want the arguing. They want the back and forth.  I don't really do back and forth because you don't learn anything when you're just,  hitting the tennis ball back and forth. And I love to learn, but I am a proponent of the truth.  I don't just get on these panels and just say anything.

I don't get on this podcast and just say anything. I literally want to advance the truth. I cannot learn anything from a lie except that you're a liar.  And I don't just like to spout off statistics and generalizations because that makes my opinion less persuasive. I want to be persuasive when I'm talking to people, not because I want them to adopt what I'm saying as their own opinion.

It's because I want them to see perhaps that there is another side that they have not considered to their argument.  It's not always the most effective use of my time to get on these live panels, but I enjoy sometimes being entertained by listening to the things that people have to say.  And a lot of it is negative, vitriolic, incorrect.

Of course, there's a lot of misogyny. I'm finding that a lot of the U. S. voters  Did not want  a woman to be president. Why?  The one  opinion that seemed to come up a lot is that, well, A woman can't serve in battle, a woman  can't be taken seriously by other world leaders because she's a woman.

So having a woman president wouldn't be effective for us. This is not just men saying this, okay, this is women saying this too. Women have bought into this patriarchal bullshit.  And I don't know why, as a woman, we do spectacular things with our bodies, it's not just childbirth and growing a baby.

No, we are in pain, excruciating pain for at least one week out of every month, beginning when we are in adolescence, and we have to work, go to school.  take care of kids. We have to take care of a home. We have to take care of ourselves. We probably have to drive a bus, operate a train. We have to serve in the military.

We have to be on our feet. Some of us eight hours a day. We have to be in a courtroom, delivering oral arguments. We have to do all of these things while we are in pain and bleeding.  Anyone who can do that.   Can do anything at all,  but then you're able to grow a whole human being in your uterus.

And then most of us  push that out of your vagina, push it out of your cervix, out through your vagina and birth it into this world. Mine had to be extracted from me, but  I had to withstand two surgeries.  And after I was released from the hospital, was I laid up in the bed? No, I was up walking around taking care of kids.

Yeah, I didn't, I didn't really have a recovery from my C sections. I don't know what that's like.  I had to get up, be on my feet, for a set of circumstances I won't get into here, but I had to get off my ass. And you're going to tell me that someone like me couldn't run a country? Oh, please shut up.

But sometimes I feel like people want to get their hot takes off and their, their hot opinions off. And they don't really think about the impact of their words. They don't think about the impact of their words  because your words come from opinions that come from your brain and these are your beliefs.

These are your set of beliefs and your beliefs become how you vote.  Yeah, people vote with their beliefs.  They don't necessarily do what is right for their communities or even for themselves. They vote with what they believe.  They vote out of their biases, their prejudices, their religious convictions.

And this is one of the issues the U. S. government has with TikTok is that it allows all of these voices to congregate into this one arena.  And it doesn't really put any,  moderation, any kind of,  checks. On what people are saying, it has some content things you can't do bullying and harassing and et cetera.

But it allows for people of all kinds of walks of life and opinions and values to have a voice.  And sometimes that voice is racist. Sometimes it's sexist. Sometimes it's misogynistic. Sometimes it's harmful to people, especially children.  Sometimes it's things you don't want to see, but all of these social  medias allow this, right?

Have you ever seen after like a school shooting or a mass shooting event, people will be on the internet talking about the shooter or the killers YouTube channel  or their Facebook page where they were espousing all of these things or where they had posted a manifesto.  All of these mediums are allowing this, but because Tik Tok is  Chinese based, the ownership is based in China, it's dangerous  because the Chinese government has access to  American social media users and can perhaps influence us.

And I'm laughing because the U. S. government really believes that the American people have no ability to discern.  I mean, obviously, since Trump is president, maybe we don't. Maybe they're right. Maybe we're all a bunch of idiots.

Maybe we have no idea what we're doing  and we need our hands held. We need to be led. We need to be,  they need to call the herd or they need to make sure we don't see certain things or have certain oversight or maybe we need more oversight.

It's funny though, because the U. S. will go so far to protect American citizens from  every  so called enemy or influence but itself.  The biggest enemy to the United States is sometimes, and most of the time, the United States itself.  All of these things that the U. S. accuses China of. Human rights abuses.

 We've done it.  Religious discrimination. We've done it. Racial discrimination. We've done it. Manufactured poverty. Check, check, check, check, check, check.  Government intrusion into personal affairs. Got it.  Torture. Got it.  War. Got it.  Illegal military campaign.

Got it.  We've done  Everything that we are accusing the Chinese government of doing only we've done it under capitalism  and a democratic constitutional republic. And they've done it under mostly communism, which is the most hated government system in the world. Most hate it.

Why? All because it's not capitalism. That's why.  That's it.  It doesn't really allow for freedom of press and the right to petition the government and freedom of religion and freedom of this and freedom of that. But let me tell you something,  in the United States, we really have kind of these, this illusion of all of these freedoms, right?  We have an illusion of freedom of religion. Like, I'm Muslim, and I know,  I can be Muslim wherever, all over this country, but I know that there are people in charge  who would rather have their religious beliefs  be the law of the land,  who would try to impose reading of the Bible in public schools.

And have their Ten Commandments posted at their state houses and have their prayers read and said before, sports events and public meetings.  Who would rather their religion be the only one, even though we have freedom of religion here.   It's an illusion.  And the only reason why I get to practice my religion as I want is because of the U.S. Constitution. If we didn't have that protecting us What do you think this place would be like? It would be a place you would not like to be in.  The people who are living in China, Chinese people or foreign nationals living in China, they don't have a choice  living under communism. They don't have a choice.

Of course, they could leave, they could defect, whatever. Americans defect too. Americans become expatriates  in other countries.  But for the most part, those one billion people living in China, they don't have a choice.  But they are punished because their government is a communist government.

But the United States and Americans think all over the world we're so respected and revered and feared and loved. Let me tell you, that is a crock of you know what.  People are laughing at us.  People are crying for us. They're sad for us.  People are mocking our leaders.  And how do I know this?

Well, number one, I read books. But number two, I joined an app recently called Red Note. Little red book. Xiaoheng Xu, as they say. I hope I said that right. Xiaoheng Xu. It's a Chinese based social media app. It's their version of Instagram. They'll tell you, they'll tell you flat out. This is not their version of TikTok. They have a version of TikTok,  and it's not allowed to be distributed in the United States.

But, this is their version of Instagram. And I don't know what I thought it was going to be when I logged on to this. I thought it was going to be just like Instagram and my God, it is not, it is not. If you log on to Instagram,  first of all,  U. S. social media, that is these apps run by U. S. corporations.

Some of the most miserable ass people I have ever encountered in my life exist on these spaces and they open their mouths every single day on these spaces to say the most atrocious, horrendous, hurtful, nasty, vile, bitter things every single day, sometimes several times a day.  They spill the most. Sacred secrets of their lives on these apps.

They tell the most horrendous stories.  Sometimes they're not even true. A lot of people lie.  They lie to manipulate. They lie to get you to click on their website. They lie to get you to, to follow them. There's a lot of rage baiting, click baiting,  but just plain old flat out misery. I can only open these things for a few seconds because it's like opening a portal to hell.

It really is like opening a portal to hell.  And you just kind of look around and you see everything is on fire and then you close it and you go on to do something else.   I want to laugh and have a good time. That's what I go on to these apps for,  but that is not what you get when you log on to Instagram and Facebook and Threads and X,  even Reddit.

I'm on Reddit too. Gosh,  are you people ever happy?  Are you ever in a good mood? Are you ever feeling good? If you went on these apps, you would absolutely think that no one is happy. And that's, I know that's not true.  I know that's not true,  but if you go on these apps, man, I don't know if it's just the people I'm following or the people that these apps are showing me, but every time I reconfigure my algorithm, my for you page,  just misery, just misery.

Oh, I can't believe this is happening. Oh, this is happening and this is happening and this is,  there's no good. Even the good stories, people are like, y'all better make this go viral.  Like, damn, okay.

It's just people yelling at each other.  And I  will admit that  I used to be one of those people. For whatever reason, whatever I was going through at the time.  But Recently, learning and growing will have you feeling like you want to be in a different place in a different space where there's joy and happiness and people having a good time and people are laughing despite what's going on in the world.

Remember resilience?  When you learn to be resilient,   you look for joy,  you exude gratitude and joy.  You want to be in spaces where people are  upbeat,  where people are feeling good. Where people are, they have that resolve.

Yes, something bad happened. But I'm going to figure out a way to get out of this. And I'm not going to let it bring me down. I'm not going to stay mired in whatever it is I'm going through.  Let me tell you, Red Note is that thing. Red Note is that thing. As soon as you open that book,  that Xiaohongshu, You open that up and the joy just leaps off the pages.

The joy just leaped. I mean, oh my gosh,  it's so bright there. It's like, it's, it's like you walk into a grocery store and the lights are so bright. And you just want to turn around and like, oh, maybe that's just me.

 That's just my neurodivergence showing, but it's so bright and wonderful in there.  It's like a breath of fresh air. People are dancing and they're showing their daily lives and they're telling stories and telling jokes and they're going, yeah, this is how I spent my day.  They're showing you their homes and their beautiful gardens and their hobbies, you know, they, they sew, they knit, they do whatever we're doing here for hobbies.

People do the same thing all over the world. Only some of the stuff is regional, you know, people going live and they're showing you their downtown areas and, and all of the different provinces and cities and things. And it's just amazing.  It's curated that way, right? Because there are certain topics that Chinese people are not really allowed to discuss  publicly.

So, there's no talk about politics. There's really no talk about religion either, even though you be religious on these apps, right? There are Muslims on these apps. There's Christians on these apps. People celebrating Christmas, et cetera, et cetera.  But, there's no like, Talking about what you believe and why you think what you believe is the best and how you want other people to believe as you believe it's just everybody letting everybody be who they are,  right? They make fun of our political leaders. I've seen so many caricatures of Donald Trump.

I haven't seen any of any of Kamala Harris, which, ooh, relief, but you know, everybody's fair game.  But. It's, it's just like the, it's so bright and beautiful  and people have been for the most part welcoming of all of the TikTok refugees as we've called ourselves, people who, because of the ban have decided to find another social media app where we can just go and hang out and have fun and look at videos and waste time and where you can go when you're bored.

Like, okay, I have ADHD. Not a secret,  but I get bored like a momma hunka, okay? And when I get bored, I'm gonna fall asleep. That's what I'm gonna do. Some people when they get bored, they eat. I take a nap.

I will straight clock out and close my eyes, and I don't care where I'm at. I'm at the doctor's office, the dentist's office. I'm in my car.  Not while I'm driving.  Like if I'm waiting for, you know, one of my kids to get out of the store or doctor's appointment or something.  I'm in my car. Sleep. I will take a quick nappy nap.

Wherever I'm at.  When I was in college, I used to nap all the time because I was bored. Law school? Bored. All asleep.  If I go to somebody's house for like a meal or gathering a get together  and I'm bored. I'm going to find a corner and just kind of fade away  into la la land.

I don't care. I don't care.  And I don't care who sees me, who knows it, whatever. I do not care. I was always the first to fall asleep at sleepovers. My brain needs constant stimulation, which is a problem. It is a problem, but that's, that's part of the neurodivergence. But when I get bored I go on to TikTok and laugh and get a little bit of dopamine, put a little dopamine into the receptors of the brain,  and then I can go back to doing what I was doing.

The U. S. government has said to TikTok, Hey,   because you are part of China,  because  you are in China, Even though it's not owned by a Chinese person  because you are in China and you are run by Chinese people Because the Chinese government subjects all of his social media to its give us your user data whenever we ask for it laws  You have to sell your company by dance who owns tick tock You have to sell it to an American corporation or you will be banned  It will be banned in the United States.

It will be banned. And the U. S. is not the first country to ban TikTok, right?  But it's the first, one of the first democratic republics to do this.  ByteDance is like,  wait,  you can't tell us what to do. We're not an American company. We're going to fight this.  And they did, they fought it and they lost at the federal level. They lost at the appeals level. They lost at the now Supreme court level, but the Supreme court did something that was interesting that I feel like a lot of people are missing the point of  the Supreme court.

said that this is not a curtailment of the freedom of speech, even though the result is that freedom of expression and freedom of speech will be affected. What Congress is doing is regulating commerce in the interest of national security. Anytime they use the excuse of national security,  Whatever, people are on board and of course, if it's against a communist nation, those dirty commies,  people are going to be on board.

All you have to do is say, this is about communism, not running the earth. We don't want the Chinese being better than America. The senators, when they did this hearing to vote on a bill for a stay of this ban,  Senator, I believe his name is Tom Cotton,  I believe he is out of Arkansas,  said flat out, The Chinese think they're better than us.

They think they're more exceptional.  We don't want these people to be better than us. We don't want them to be ahead of us, be ahead of our children in education, beat us in technology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We don't like them. They're communist. They're bad people. This is a bad place. They are a threat to the United States.

They threaten our national security. We don't want these people to have influence over our citizens.  And that's why I'm voting against the extension of time on the ban.  And I'm thinking to myself,  number one,  what, what do you think we are? Like, who the hell do you think we are? You think we're people who are just like, like we're programmed?

Like you could just flip a switch and program us to be something else? Like suddenly we're all going to become, communist government sympathizers? No. We became sympathizers of the Chinese people, not the Chinese government. Now I understand that there are a lot of U. S. Americans who  favor socialism and communism and that's their business.

They don't like capitalism. They don't want the oligarchy. They don't want the egalitarianism. They want socialism and communism and whatever, they can find a country where they, they can do that and have it,  but it's the Chinese people  who suffer because of the opinions and ideas about the Chinese government.

And like I said before.  They don't have a choice in this matter. If they're in China, they're living under communism. Period. They don't have a choice.  Maybe they're programmed to believe that communism is wonderful and great. I mean, when you look at them on this RedNote app, and they're going shopping, and they're paying like 50 percent less for items than we do here in the United States.

You would wonder why they would give that up.  There are a few reasons why they might want to give that up, but a lot of, a lot of them are not going to give that up. They're not going to give that up and come to the United States and pay triple, quadruple, quintuple what they've been paying in China.  They have better technology, better technology all around, in every avenue, better cars, they have better cars, better computers, better cell phones,  I mean, it's, it's incredible.  And you learn that by talking to them. And by just kind of observing them in their daily lives,  they might even have better television. Hell, every time I turn on Netflix, there's some Korean show or Japanese show or Chinese show.

It's crazy.  Not that I don't enjoy it. I certainly do.  But, The suggestion that somehow we're better than them because we are a capitalist society in a democratic republic is BS. That's not the reason we might be better than them.  Like I said before, everything that we've accused them of doing, the spying, The influencing, the human rights abuses, the clamping down on human rights,  the curtailing of certain rights.

We've done all of that here in the United States and abroad.  Hell, people are just starting to find out the truth about their favorite U. S. presidents.  Jimmy Carter, who recently passed away. People think he was such a great man. And then you ask people who lived in Latin America the time he was a president, and they don't agree. It's well documented. Well documented of the U. S. campaign to prevent socialism and communism from taking over Latin America while Jimmy Carter was president. And then while, Reagan was president.  And while Bush was president.  And while Clinton was president. And then the next,

 But people don't want to hear that because, well, they were fighting socialism and communism and those things are bad and they're bad for the world and bad for the people.  Look at how they fought it though. They fought it by killing people. They fought it by sponsoring campaigns where innocent people were murdered.  Hundreds of thousands of people.

 Nixon did the same thing and they did not give a fuck  because in their mind saving the world from communism and socialism is the goal and it's an important goal and it must be carried out or else.  And every single U. S. president  that is still alive today  is responsible in some way for human rights abuses, torture,  killing of innocent  civilians abroad.

Every single one of them.  But we're the best! Oh, we're the best.  We're exceptional. And I'm not one of these people who buys into this American exceptionalism  bullshit. I don't do it.  I don't care how you feel. I don't care who you are. We are not exceptional.  We're good. We're good. We're fine. We're sufficient for most people.

Well, Ayanna, if we weren't so great, then why, why would all these people want to come here?  There are people immigrating to other countries too. You're not the only one that people are crying to get to. The United States is not the only freaking country on the, in, on the earth that people want to belong to.

There are other places, but because we believe in our exceptionalism, because we believe that we are the best. Number one,  self declared number one after World War II, by the way, no other, no other country could say it because they were all in tatters after World War II.  We were the only ones left intact, and that's because we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan,

 And even at the time when we still had racial segregation on buses and in schools, we declared ourselves number one in the world.  We declared ourselves the greatest nation in the history of nations  at our baby age.  It's remarkable. And since then, we've been around the world enforcing this by military campaigns  through defense.

And our leaders constantly put us in fear  of our lives and our freedoms, so that we will support them putting more money into defense so that the defense budget can grow so that they can defend us against what  most of the threats  to our country are The call is coming from inside of the house.

Like that attack from, in New Orleans. On New Year's,  on New Year's Day, that was an American  and he wasn't influenced by China.  And then the guy who blew himself up outside of Trump Tower in Las Vegas, that was an American.  These school shooters, they're Americans and they're not influenced by China.

They're not influenced by communism and socialism. Those are Americans who are influenced by American culture,  American militarism,  American values.  American gun toting, gun loving culture.  They're angry with the government, they're angry with their families, they're angry with themselves, and they want to kill somebody.

It ain't got shit to do with China,  but your U. S. government will have you believe that China is your big threat, that the Middle East is your big threat.  Israel spies on U. S. citizens. The United States spies on U. S. citizens.  Edward Snowden cannot come back to this country because he blew the whistle on the United States spying on their citizens.

Remember that controversy when Obama was president?  Remember when we learned about the FISA courts?  Remember when you people wanted the Patriot Act so badly and then you found out that the Patriot Act was being used so the United States government could spy on its citizens?  And how upset you were?  Was that China?

No, that was not China.  But China Through TikTok  is what you should be afraid of and so we're going to eat, tell these people you either sell this to an American corporation  or  It will be banned, and that is strictly because of the U. S. Government's hatred of China.  It started with Trump in 2020 with him saying we need to ban this.

Not only it's not only because of their hatred of China, it is because these apps, especially tick tock, were being used to disseminate information that Was unfavorable to Trump and the Republican party. People were learning things about their government. People were learning things about voting. People were learning things about their politicians and about politics.

And they were sharing this information with each other. They were connecting with each other  and they were being influenced to not vote Republican.  They were being influenced to vote their conscience,  and that is not something that the Republican Party likes.  That is not something that Trump likes. They don't want you to vote your conscience.

They want you to vote for this, for maintaining this American exceptionalism idea. Make America great again! Ooh! Ooh!  That's what they want you to do.  They don't want you to know the truth. They don't want you to know what's really going on. They don't want you to discuss ideas with other people. They don't want you to connect.

And if you're connecting and discussing and getting together, it's because you all are getting together and agreeing with whatever the government is telling you is the truth.  Whatever these politicians are telling you is the truth about the world because, oh, they must know something that we don't.

You probably know more than they do. Remember, see something, say something.  We know more about what's going on with people than they do. Don't let these people fool you into thinking that you're some easily programmable thing, some bot, that you're an idiot, that you don't know anything, that you don't deserve to know the truth, that you don't deserve to be holders of information.

That you don't deserve to think for yourself that you should be led.  And if you are to be led, here's where you're going to be led to. So this case where TikTok is, going to probably go dark. We don't know. We haven't really received confirmation yet. Maybe by the time you listen to this or after you listen to this, we'll know for sure.

But this case. Was not about freedom of speech. Social media does not equal freedom of speech, first of all. Dissuade yourself of that notion. If you want to exercise your freedom of speech, that's a place you go where you want to say something, and then  you wait for AI to tell you if it's okay for you to say that or not.  At any time, these people can kick you off of their platforms. At any time, these people can shut down their platforms. At any time, these platforms can go out of business. Their parent corporations can go out of business, and there you go.

What happens to your freedom of speech? You still have freedom of speech. You just can't say it on Facebook, . You just can't say it on Instagram. If you've ever had a an account suspended on one of these things, you think, oh, they're trying to take away my freedom of speech. You do not have freedom of speech on someone else's platform.

Get that through your head  for once and for all.  You don't have free speech on someone else's platform. If you have your own website, you can say whatever the hell you want to say.  If you want to say whatever you want without somebody telling you to shut up or take it down, get your own website. Or do like some people do and write it on a big poster board and go stand on a street corner  and shout it to the cars passing by.

 But on someone else's medium, you do not have freedom of speech. That's not what social media is for. Social media is for connecting. Connections. Meeting people. Discussing ideas. But at any time, that medium has the right to tell you to shut the hell up. Go away. Don't come back.  Leave when you go.  Take your things with you.

Or better yet,  We're going to keep all of your things, all of your photographs, all of your videos, all of your connections, your contacts,  everything. We're going to keep it all. It belongs to us. Facebook tells you that.  Meta, they tell you that. It all belongs to them.  Not only do they tell you that,  but they do this little thing where they track you  wherever you go on your computer or other device.

They track you when you search things on Google. They track you when you search things through Google.  They track you when you're talking on the phone to someone, they track you when you're texting, have you ever had this thing happen where you mentioned something in a text message and then you go on to Facebook and  there's an ad for it  and you're like, how did they know?

 Those little things when you say, Oh, agree to all cookies or decline. All cookies. First of all, you can decline every single cookie every time  in real life and online,  you can decline cookies.  You don't have to allow these tracking cookies  when you go to a website.

I always hit deny, decline, deny, decline, whatever I hit it. You don't need them.  There are some that are essential to the performance of the website.  The rest of those, they're just tracking you. And social media is tracking you all over the internet.

Everything that you do.  They're tracking you everywhere,  every word that you use. If you have Alexa in your house,  Alexa's listening, Amazon's listening. Amazon follows you all over the internet. All of these corporations are mining your data.  The difference between these corporations and say TikTok is that  they hand the information over to the government if the government asks.

If the Chinese government asks for user data.  ByteDance would have to give it to them.  However,  that's not as bad as when maybe you're accused of a crime  and your text messages and phone records are handed over to law enforcement by your telephone provider, by your ISP. That's the United States, that's Verizon, that's T Mobile,

 that's what they do.  And then all of your text messages, all of your private text messages, all of your private dreams, all of your photographs, all of your Google searches, everything. And this is just if you're accused of a crime,  never mind charged,  indicted, on trial, this is just if you're accused. They can get warrantless, they have warrantless searches, they have warrant searches, they can get all of this information, honey,  but they will have you thinking, the government politicians will have you thinking that, no, it's these outsiders who are doing this.

They're the only ones who are doing, don't let them get away with that lie. Don't let them get away with it because it is certainly them who are also doing it.  Don't let them get away with the lie that everything that's happening abroad is strange and different and evil. Certainly the Chinese government is guilty of some horrendous acts.

Absolutely, 100%. This is not a stump speech at all for the Chinese government, because  📍 fuck them.  This is about Us being lied to and fed propaganda about Chinese people to the point that most Americans actually despise and hate Chinese people for the simple fact that we were told that they were our enemy who hated us, who hates us, and that we should fear them  and that they're trying to take over and they're going to take over our country and we're all going to be speaking Chinese and  they're dirty Chinamen.

Some point you all will have to read the story of how  Chinese laundries came to be in the United States.  It's not because Chinese people were so  📍 fucking good at doing laundry.  And it's not because, because they were run by men, right? Men were not the ones doing laundry in China. Okay.  Read up, read it up,  how those things came to be in the United States.

 And then I want you to look at the racism.  That flowed from that.  And the racist tropes. There's so much racism against Chinese people in the United States.

It's disgusting.  And there's no reason for it other than this is a hateful, ugly place sometimes.

I know it. I'm a black, Muslim woman. I know it.  Am I lucky that I get to be able to do what I do and have the job that I have and work where I work and live how I live and worship who I worship? Some days I am.  Some days it is pure luck.  Because there are people who are in charge who would have  the masses believe that because of my religion,  I'm evil, I hate America.

No, sometimes I don't like this place because I know the truth about this place.  And the people who run it  because I know the history  and the systems that are still in place  that before I was born were used to keep people who look like me

on a  marginalized level, on a subservient level, on a subclass level,  on the lowest caste in the caste system of the United States,  those systems are still in place. And now people are seeing with this TikTok ban  that indeed this is a caste society.  That there are people who are at the top who will always be at the top, who will assure that you were always somewhere in the middle or at the bottom, and that you will only have as much as they want you to have.

You will only have access to as much information as they want you to have, to as much income as they want you to have, to as much resources as they want you to have. And when they see their resources running out, they will use class warfare to pit groups of people against each other. Such as blacks and immigrants,  so that we will blame the others, the foreign others,  for the lack of resources.

So we will operate from a scarcity mindset and give all of our money and votes to these higher groups of people.  So for them to solve this problem for us,  when there really ain't no problem.  There isn't.  They're charging as much as they want for food. They're telling you what ideas you should be listening to.

They're telling you what people you should be respecting. They're telling you what groups of people you should interact with. They're telling you who is dangerous and who isn't. They're telling you what influences you should succumb to and what influences you shouldn't as if you don't have a mind of your own, they don't respect you, they don't respect your way of life, they don't respect your intelligence, they don't respect your discernment, and sometimes you allow this to go on because you are lazy thinkers.

You want somebody else to make you feel better. You want somebody else to think for you. You want somebody to come up with the ideas for you. You can't be lazy thinkers.  You can't be. You can't be lazy in this, point in time, in Earth's age. In 2025, you can't be lazy. 2025  has people learning that they need to be resilient,

has people learning that they cannot depend on outside others to prop them up, to keep them going, to build their success, because one day that rug can be yanked out from under you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

All of the connections and things that you've made on TikTok, gone like that.  And you have to find somewhere else. People are scrambling now to find somewhere else to do these things, to make these connections. To reform these bonds and these groups. And, and oh, maybe do I have to get a job now? And then let me just say, because this bothers me.

A lot of things bother me, but whatever.  People saying that, well now these influencers and content creators will have to go out and get a real job.  Those are real jobs.  If it pays, it's a real job. If it pays, that means you pay income tax on that income. That is a real job. Maybe it's not a job where you have to get up and put on a suit and go sit on a train and go be miserable in a cubicle, but it is a job.

It is a job that you have to work at, and sometimes, 10 hours, 12 hours. This podcast that I do, that's kind of a hobby, sometimes it pays, sometimes it most of the time, it does not. It takes me hours to edit one hour of podcast. It takes me hours. And the next day, I'm always drained. Drained because it takes a lot of brain power.

It takes a lot of energy.  A lot of these influencers and content creators, most of them are all doing this editing and these shoots and these, going out and to go on a target and look at what I bought at Target.

They're doing all of these things themselves.  And they're probably getting paid by a brand. Sometimes they get paid by a brand. Sometimes they do this and send it to the brand and say, Hey, look at what I did for your store or your wig line. Don't you want to pay me?  And sometimes they have to do these lives where they're on, on for 10 hours so they can get paid sufficiently.

And sometimes they have to figure out a way to get followers on their channels and on their pages so that they will be. So that they could even be a part of a fund that would pay them for their content.  It's work. It is a job.  It's, it's part of the gig culture. Why don't you Google that, what gig culture is.

Like delivering for DoorDash and Uber.  Ubering.  It's part of the gig culture.  Now that's not a new category of employment. People have been doing this forever. But it's work. and being flippant about people losing their income, their source of income, losing their job, is not the way to go. No, that's not empathy.

That's cruelty. Don't be cruel. I don't mean cruel. I know that was corny, I'm sorry. And I'm leaving it in.

But you know, I've connected with some people on RedNote. And I, I, I love it. I love it. I love just going on there and seeing how happy people are and seeing them and their, their pets. They're like, you know, you come here, you got to pay the cat tax. I don't have any cats or dogs. I have plants. So I use my plants instead.

And, I was showing  pictures of my upstairs plants. I have upstairs plants and downstairs plants.  And someone remarked, wow, you have a big house and look at those plants. Those are fancy. Where do you get those from? I don't know. And I'm like, um, I get them mostly from Home Depot.  But then that, that, that got into my head.

Like, I always see my house as being small. It's just me and my two kids,  and maybe it's small compared to some other houses around where I live, in I'm in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

It is, we have million dollar mansions around here. With, you know, you get eight rooms, four, four rooms with six bathrooms and there are mansions all over Northeast Ohio. It's ridiculous. This used to be where I grew up in East Cleveland, Ohio. Euclid Avenue was Millionaire's Row. That's where, you know, Rockefeller, his, his estate was Forest Hills Park.

There are big houses and I grew up in a big house and I always look at my home and I'm like, oh, it's so small compared to where I grew up. It's small. But a person on the outside looking in going, wow, you have a big house.  And that's because a lot of the homes in, in China, they're smaller homes and people make the most of it though.

I mean, they fill these things up with so much light and plants and furniture and happiness and laughter. And it's incredible. And they're grateful for what they have. And this is me sitting here going, Oh, maybe I want a bigger house. Maybe I want another bathroom. Maybe I want a bigger bathroom, you know, not really seeing that what I have is sufficient and I should be grateful and show gratitude to God for even being, being able to sit here and do this podcast in a house that I own.

But making connections with other people around the world has helped me to appreciate what I have here. And I am very appreciative. I'm very grateful to live in a country where I can practice my religion.

I don't want that to be  misconstrued at all. Okay? Very grateful,  but I'm also aware of the systems and things that are in place that continue

I also see that there are other people and possibilities in ways of living in ways of life that perhaps I have been lied to or led to believe are acting against me.  I'm not saying the U. S. government is the big bad wolf, that we should be afraid of the U. S. government. Absolutely not. But I'm saying that they are not, are sometimes. not acting within the best interest of all of the people that sometimes they are acting within their business interests as we've seen. With our soon to be, by the time you listen to this, will be the President of the United States.

The billionaires, the millionaires, the people at the top, they act in their own best interest. They act to keep themselves at the top. And we're allowing it to happen because we worship them. We think that they're going to share a piece of that pie with us. That their wealth and their esteem. And their things are going to trickle down to us, and that never happens.

And when it doesn't happen, and you're upset with your government, with your politicians, what do you do? You swing in the other direction.  And then when those people can't make you happy, you swing back in the other direction. And we're just swinging back and forth and back and forth.  What we need to do is focus on our communities, what is best for our communities, how we help our communities and saying the word community and helping your community does not equal communism. You can still help your community and build your community within the confines of a capitalistic society.

 It's possible for us to learn and grow and learn from each other and share ideas and build wealth. And sustain our communities within the confines and the strictures of what we have. But we have to believe we can do it. We have to not allow ourselves to be lied to, to be misled about our abilities and our power.

We are powerful.  See what happens when people bond and they get together and they decide they're going to do something. All of the people who have been pushing against this TikTok ban have made strides  with, uh, you know, getting Congress and the Senate, House of Representatives to recognize how important these things are to millions of Americans as far as jobs are concerned, as far as freedom of speech is concerned, but also how we all decided, you know what?

The U. S. government, U. S. corporations have compromised our data, they've spied on us, they've put all of our information out onto the internet. We're going to just go over to this Chinese app and if they want to do the same damn thing, we don't care. We're tired of being told that the people across the ocean are the only ones who are harming us

I'm not saying that the government wants to harm us. I'm saying sometimes they don't care.  Because it's only important to the people who are in power that they stay in power and that they have all of the money and all of the resources and that all of their goals for their PACs  and their special interest groups are maintained.  That all of their buddies Get to have as much money in their pockets as much profits and as many yachts as they want  And that because of that, you have to look out for yourself.

You absolutely do. You have to do what is in the best interest of you,  but also for your community.   Because where there is you, there are thousands of others who also need to be looking out. And if we can work together, we can, harness our power, we can do good things. We can.

This is where one of my friends, who I adore completely, would send me a Martin Luther King Jr. gif as a way of saying, you know,  we will get there.  And this has been Ayanna Explains It All, brought to you by Facts,  Figures, and Enlightenment.

Take care.