How To Counter the Cultural Revolution
A time capsule letter I wrote 4 years ago about my family's history, which launched this Substack and led many to notice the parallels between the US Woke Revolution and Chinese Cultural Revolution
Comrades: We are countering the American Cultural Revolution.
Several of my posts have drawn parallels between the US woke revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. How To Live the Dream was an interview with my father, who grew up during the latter. How To Repeat History (Part 2) found eerie similarities between The Great Leap Forward and The Great Reset. How To Groom Commissars described my experience participating in a Demoralized DIEvy League struggle session. In How To Control your Soul’s Desire for Freedom, I interviewed with an uncle who suffered under CCP oppression. Never forget that human rights NGOs remained silent about all tyrannical mandates and lockdowns during COVID hysteria.
Today, I’d like to share a letter I wrote to a small group of family and friends 4 years ago after my grandparents passed away. It was my Jerry Maguire moment at an innocent time compared to where we are today - right after Kobe Bryant’s tragic helicopter crash and before the COVID mass formation psychosis took over. Writing helped crystallize many ideas and memes that had been floating around in my head and iPhone photos. I launched this Substack two years after the letter, which became one of the earliest posts. It’s one of the longest, most wholesome, and least spicy pieces I’ve written. Since it’s as raw and vulnerable as I’ll get, I paywalled it after two paragraphs.
Over the past few years, you may have noticed more prominent figures discussing how the woke revolution reminds them of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Vivek Ramaswamy, and even Bill Maher. Did it spawn from this samizdat? I don’t know is who my secret readers are and what they do with this content. Either way, I’m glad these ideas have spread and the pendulum appears to be swinging back to sanity.
Let’s continue to turn the tide together. As Churchill said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” All I ask is that you subscribe, upgrade, or attribute:
February 2020
Hope your 2020s are off to a great start. As we enter a new decade and phases of our lives, I wanted to share a personal history, reflection, and vision. During the past month, I lost my grandparents, a legend passed suddenly before his time, and a strange new disease is spreading. We don’t take enough time to tell our favorite people how much we care, so I want to start by saying that I treasure and love all of you. I am blessed to have such a fantastic group of family and friends. In a world full of distraction, artificiality, and transience, relationships of candor, sincerity, and permanence are precious. Whether it’s discussing a passion project in person, shooting the shit over a call, or best of all a spicy meme text, I appreciate everything that we do for each other. If you are reading this, that means I would run through brick walls for you and know that you’d do the same for me.
In commemoration of my grandparents, my parents shared many stories about our family’s history that I hadn’t known or fully appreciated before. My grandparents and their generation endured the horrors of World War II, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. While fleeing from college as the battlefront approached, my grandfather almost died of tuberculosis that hampered him for the rest of his life. One of his brothers was captured, tortured, and hanged for dissent, while another was a pilot who disappeared after being shot down. Hundreds of millions went through unimaginable suffering, tens of millions died, and all submitted to fear and scarcity. My grandparents moved to the US to help raise me. They were originally planning to return to their homeland, but after the brutal events of 1989 they were too terrified to ever go back. They chose to work at McDonald’s as free people here instead of always looking over their shoulders over there. Until their last days, they remained scared to express their opinions…