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No one likes it when I say this, but you get the algorithm you deserve. Generally speaking, what you get served on social media is a reflection of the things you’ve engaged with the most combined with predictions of what you would engage with based on your age, gender, location, and so on. Hence, my Instagram Explore page is a shameful buffet of women in those shorts Shane Gillis is afraid of providing “glute activation” gym tutorials, clips of Florence Pugh talking about food in a vaguely erotic manner, and drunk Americans belting Alice In Chains in the back of a pick-up; my legitimate interests merged and warped by the digital marketplace of sly OnlyFans promotion and adverts for perimenopausal supplements.
Others, however, might find their timelines filled with other things. Bloodshed, for instance.
In an essay for the latest issue of VICE magazine, The Self-Destruction Issue, Mattha Busby looks into the rise of so-called “fight porn” on social media. That is, the constant barrage of videos of bar fights, dog fights, schoolyard brawls, dashcam road rage, etc, that roll non-stop across our timelines like hot, cortisol-spiking dispatches from the frontlines of the War On The Societal Contract, delivered to us casually between celebrity gossip and photos of our friends’ babies. It begs the question: Are Western societies more violent than they were in the past, or is the algorithm pushing us all, gently, towards insanity?
Mattha writes:
“Perhaps the question isn’t whether we’re more barbarous than our grandparents but what the effect of being constantly exposed to barbarism is on our brains and societies as a whole. To be clear, there is little evidence that street violence itself has exploded in the West, but what has exploded is its visibility—and the way that visibility shapes what feels socially plausible.”
Read the full story in The Self-Destruction Issue or behind the paywall below:
Also behind the paywall this week, you’ll find what is perhaps the spiritual inverse of CCTV footage of Americans punching each other: artistic interpretations of sex in China.
Lao Xie Xie has been photographing Shanghai youth since 2019, following Gen Z through a pandemic and tightening moral codes. Capturing people in their homes, in public spaces, at underground shibari parties and more, his series Shanghai No Why offers a glimpse into the lives of young microcommunities thriving beyond censorship and cultural stereotypes.
Speaking to VICE writer Tom Veréb Czibolya, Lao says:
“To me, these photos are about freedom, freedom to present your body differently […] What I can say is that many of the people I photograph belong to a generation obsessed with images. It’s social media and its hyper-aggressive push toward self-representation, and clearly, this influences how they approach relationships and sexuality too.”
Check out a selection of Lao’s work and read our full interview with him behind the paywall:
To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)
In mid-September, Chinese scientists announced a breakthrough in extracting hydrogen and fresh water from the ocean with about 15% better energy efficiency than older techniques. Their research, published in Nature Energy on Sept. 15, underscores that China continues to dominate in the renewable energy race, generating so much that the country can’t even use it all. As Reuters reported in August, “China turned away enough clean energy to power Mexico for a year in the six months through June as its grids hit their limits.” At the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8, Youyuan Huang, executive vice chairman of BTR New Material Group, the world’s top maker of battery anode materials, said “China’s grid is a very strong and stable one . . . but we’ve installed too much green energy.”
Boy, the U.S. could sure use some of that excess juice. Currently, this country is embroiled in a self-inflicted energy crisis, largely a result of President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, that is sending deep ripple effects across the globe as oil prices spike. In the U.S. alone, diesel prices have risen around 70% since before the war began on Feb. 28, hitting a record $6.52 on Sept. 22, and in the last two months, at least 16 trucking companies, both large and small, have been bankrupted. The world’s richest nations are trying to staunch the bleeding, recently vowing to release up to 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil within four months. But on Monday, Amin Nasser, CEO of Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, cautioned that this is little more than a Band-Aid and that long-term supply issues remain. Until the Strait of Hormuz “fully reopens and confidence returns, the crude reality is that pressure at both ends of the barrel will intensify,” Nasser said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London.
Some “crude reality” would be another nice-to-have for those helming U.S. policy. The rising fury against the war and high energy prices threatens to clobber Republicans in the midterm elections. So the Trump administration is frantically trying to drive down diesel prices, first by floating the idea of banning exports. This tactic, criticized as “unwise” by some oil executives, has been abandoned for now, but at a Monday rally in Nebraska — where Trump also seemed to promote the idea of Iran attacking two California cities — he signed an executive order promoting the use of red-dyed diesel. Normally reserved for agriculture operations, red diesel is exempt from highway fuel taxes, but experts caution that expanding its use probably won’t help much because major fuel suppliers are unlikely to go along with it. For one, the taxes are only deferred, meaning companies could end up paying them later. But red dye, when used, can also gum up tanks and fuel systems. “We do not expect most reputable diesel retailers and fuel marketers to do this,” the Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America and the National Association of Truck Stop Owners said in a note to their members, citing “limited upside.”
On Friday, Trump announced his latest bid to reduce prices: buying oil from Russia. Shortly afterward, the Treasury Department issued a temporary license allowing Russian diesel to be supplied to the global market. Though details were scarce, this undermines the president’s own sweeping Russia sanctions law he signed last month. Regardless, it doesn’t look like it will do much to lower prices. “It’s kind of shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic,” Michael Lynch of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, told the Associated Press. “If we get diesel from Russia, basically it means that their existing customers are not going to get it and they’ll have to go somewhere else, and that will keep the price basically where it is now.”
With diminishing options — besides the obvious one of ending the Iran war immediately, which Trump can do whenever he wishes — the administration’s primary strategy is to blame everyone else. On Monday, he repeated claims on social media that Ukraine is most at fault for high oil prices thanks to their continued attacks on Russian oil refineries, and that “What’s driving up gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz.” The president also said the closure of oil refineries in “blue states” is part of the problem.
With diminishing options — besides the obvious one of ending the Iran war immediately, which Trump can do whenever he wishes — the administration’s primary strategy is to blame everyone else.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has also spread these claims, appearing Oct. 4 on “Face the Nation” to blame Ukraine and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the latter for closing two refineries. (In fact, Newsom had nothing to do with the refinery closures.) Wright insisted that fuel prices will drop soon, as Trump has been claiming for months now. He also said that Trump was warned before attacking Iran that it might create an energy crisis — “he was well aware of the risk to energy flows that were coming out of the Persian Gulf region” — but the president insisted it would all be worth it to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
Wright has been especially busy lately trying to instill a sense of optimism around the energy sector, dismissing climate change as a non-issue while laundering Trump’s vision of “energy dominance.” All of this is remarkably myopic. Half of it is an artificial war against renewable energy projects, including the cancellation of almost $8 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants, and using specious claims about “national security” to cancel offshore wind projects. The other half is accelerating oil, gas and coal extraction while slashing protections for endangered species threatened by drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But here’s the rub: Neither approach has made fuel cheaper, and it doesn’t seem that will change any time soon.
There’s little wonder why: Wright founded Liberty Energy in 2011, one of the fossil fuel giants that led that decade’s fracking boom, and he has attacked renewable energy projects almost as enthusiastically as Trump, saying they can never fully meet increasing energy demands. China and other countries have conclusively proved that false, but it’s not an either-or situation. Despite being the world’s No. 1 renewable energy producer, China is also rapidly expanding its coal industry. “The growth of renewable electricity is not incompatible with maintaining, and sometimes developing, fossil-fuel capacity,” science and technology historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz explains in his 2025 book “More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.”
In other words, human energy consumption is rising so fast that we’re continuing to grow all energy sectors rather than entirely replacing fossil fuels with renewables. (That’s not great news for the climate, of course.) But only the U.S. is leaning quite so hard into 19th-century fossil fuels instead of 21st-century solutions.
Why would the Trump administration push so hard for retrograde technology? Perhaps it’s time to admit that the president actually has no interest in driving down consumer prices or the cost of living, let alone ending the war, whether it hurts his party’s electoral chances or not. Trump is deeply invested in oil and gas companies, which have enjoyed obscene profits throughout the conflict. As Reuters reported in late September, “The five largest Western oil companies — BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies — are expected to report combined third-quarter profits of around $53 billion, according to RBC Capital Markets estimates, up from $48 billion in the second quarter and more than double year-earlier levels.”
Trump has caught plenty of these profits, with an August report from the Joint Economic Committee finding that the president “owned as much as $45.6 million in oil and gas company stocks in 2025, a portfolio that is now worth as much as $61.1 million given the surge in oil and gas stocks driven by Trump’s war in Iran.”
No wonder Trump continues to hint that the Iran war will heat up again after the midterms: He has a vested interest in keeping it going and inflating gas prices, so maybe it makes sense to call his bluff here. After all, truckers may be dropping more than $1,000 every time they fill up, or losing their jobs entirely, but the ultra-rich aren’t feeling much stress from all this. They are well positioned to buy up bankrupt trucking companies and jack up prices, further consolidating their monopolistic or oligarchic power. It’s the classic “shock doctrine,” in which corporations exploit disaster conditions, created intentionally or not.
It would be more sensible to follow China’s lead on renewable energy, just as it would probably be smart to retreat on Iran rather than get entrenched in another forever war. But that just wouldn’t generate such spectacular windfall profits for Trump or those in his orbit. The solution is to nail these people to the consequences of their decision. They don’t want to end this crisis, so we must make them.
PEKING – China und die EU haben nach Darstellung des chinesischen Handelsministeriums eine Einigung über den Export von Hybrid-Elektrofahrzeugen erzielt.
Die Ankündigung am Freitag erfolgte, nach dem Abschluss zweitägiger Gespräche zwischen Handelskommissar Maroš Šefčovič und chinesischen Regierungsmitgliedern in Peking. Sie waren Teil der Bemühungen der EU, ihr Handelsdefizit mit China in Höhe von 1 Milliarde Euro pro Tag zu verringern und Druck von der europäischen Industrie zu nehmen.
„Nach intensiven Beratungen haben beide Seiten eine Einigung über den Handel mit Hybridfahrzeugen erzielt, die mit den Regeln der Welthandelsorganisation im Einklang steht“, hieß es in der chinesischen Erklärung.
Unmittelbar vor dem Besuch von Šefčovič waren Autos in den Mittelpunkt der Diskussionen gerückt, obwohl sie nur einen Bruchteil des Handelsdefizits ausmachen. Eine Einigung sollte weitere Schutzmaßnahmen der EU gegen Chinas Autoexporte abwenden. Denkbar ist auch, dass sie als Blaupause für andere Branchen dienen könnte.
Die EU hatte im Oktober 2024 bereits Ausgleichszölle von bis zu 35 Prozent auf reine E-Autos aus China verhängt. Hybride waren davon aber ausgenommen. Während europäische Hersteller wie VW ihre Marktanteile bei rein batterieelektrischen Autos seither stabilisieren konnten, ist der Import von Hybrid-Autos aus China sprunghaft angestiegen.
Šefčovič sollte in Kürze in Peking vor Journalisten Stellung nehmen.
Die Staats- und Regierungschefs der EU werden bei ihrem Treffen am kommenden Donnerstag in Brüssel die Ergebnisse der Handelsgespräche prüfen.
A generational shift is underway in China, where young people are stripping away taboos and becoming more casual about sex.
The artist Lao Xie Xie has been photographing Shanghai youth since 2019, following Gen Z through a pandemic and tightening moral codes. His eye-catching pictures give us a glimpse into the lives of young microcommunities thriving underground, despite increasing pressure.
Lao spoke to VICE about his favorite pictures from the series, Shanghai No Why.
VICE: Who are the people you photograph, and what first drew you to them? Lao Xie Xie: Most of the people in my pictures I encountered through Instagram. It’s usually just the way they present themselves on their profiles—their image, their energy—that catches my attention and makes me reach out. Most of them happen to be Gen Z and from Shanghai.
It’s kind of important that, in China, you need a VPN connection to use Instagram. So if they’re on the app, that kind of prequalifies them as having a different mindset compared to other Chinese people. They might be more against censorship. Rebellious? I don’t know. But they think differently. And they might be more open to taking these kinds of photos, too.
What does sex culture look like among young people in China today? I don’t think my work is tied to sex or sexuality. To me, these photos are about freedom, freedom to present your body differently.
It’s nothing new. Ten years ago, it was [Chinese photographer and poet] Ren Hang, but even before, I used to find albums from the 1970s and 60s at vintage markets in China, of Chinese women posing nude. Nudity, in a way, has always been part of the culture—people wanting to keep a memory of how beautiful their bodies are when they’re young. It’s pretty normal.
Of course, the government likes to communicate that nude bodies equals pornography. Enforce a ban with censorship, threaten with jail [time], actually jail people…
How does China’s cultural climate affect the way young people explore and express their sexuality? I will be careful answering this, because my work is not a documentary investigation into sexuality or censorship in China. What interests me is the possibility of suggestion. I can take a picture of something without the obligation of explaining it. Sometimes, what makes a picture important is hidden, or outside of the frame. That ambiguity is what makes my work mine. I don’t need to explain everything to make an image meaningful.
“To me, these photos are about freedom, freedom to present your body differently”
At what point does sex culture become counterculture? I don’t think there is any clear point. In China, you just have a sense that everything is changing very quickly; everything is evolving, getting more advanced and tech-loaded. I remember, in 2020, there was a sex shop called V Spot in Shanghai, and they hosted a lot of crazy shibari events there. As legislation got stricter, they tried to comply to keep things legal: first, the event flyers became non-explicit, then people had to wear underwear while performing. No one could be fully naked, and if you attended, you’d needed to sign a disclaimer of responsibility.
But people still attend. Yeah. And if it’s a private event, it’s a whole different story, of course. Whether hiding or not, there is a big community underground.
How does Gen Z’s approach to sex differ from that of Millennials or Gen X? I don’t know. What I can say is that many of the people I photograph belong to a generation obsessed with images. It’s social media and its hyper-aggressive push toward self-representation, and clearly, this influences how they approach relationships and sexuality too.
What is a common belief about people in China in the Western world that’s not valid anymore? There is a gap between how people behave in public and privately, with the preconception being that Western people may be more open-minded and outspoken about sex than people in China. It’s kind of not true. I think there is a stigma that has dissolved, and Gen Z is treating sex as something more casual, less heavy, compared to the generations before them. It has become something that is easy, and there’s nothing to regret about it.
How did the pandemic change the way young people experience physical intimacy? I think this is another question that is very personal, kinda different for everyone. What I think happened is that the pandemic actually pushed many young people to leave China, to move abroad to study, to work, to chase something.
“Many of the people I photograph belong to a generation obsessed with images”
What about the effects of social isolation? You know, it’s really strange, because when I talk to people in Europe, I have the impression that they are way more traumatized about the lockdown period. Frankly, outside of Shanghai, we didn’t have such strict lockdowns, and life went on in relative normalcy.
I think the changes are more the combined results of social media and the pandemic. Perhaps they made this generation less likely to overthink body touching or prioritize meeting in real life, the way that Millennials and Boomers had before.
But again, what I photograph is always a particular person, in a particular moment, and my understanding of that moment is inevitably subjective. The only thing I’m trying to figure out is how people relate to their own image, how they look at others, and what happens when another person looks at them through a camera.
What are some of the stories from the series that have stayed with you? The first couple I photographed for the series were a woman and a trans woman living together in a house just outside Shanghai. It was kind of a villa where they would also host parties and gatherings, often around shibari. What I remember most was their openness and the atmosphere they created for each other and everyone around them.
They were incredibly open-minded and made the whole experience feel so very natural and friendly. From the beginning, there was a sense of trust and freedom that allowed me to photograph without feeling like I was intruding into their world. I’m forever grateful for them.
“My role is to create the image. But for me, it will never hold the answer”
After spending so much time photographing intimacy, what do you think these images ultimately reveal about how young Chinese people want to love and be loved? I’m not a documentary photographer. I try to take good pictures of people I find interesting, to convey an idea, and that’s about it. I also haven’t spent my time trying to photograph sex as a subject in itself, so that’s kind of leaving us in the dark here. Sex, intimacy, desire, and sometimes rebellion are present in my work, yes, but they exist alongside friendship, bodies, everyday life, loneliness, humor, fashion, boredom.
I guess my photographs begin with reality, but go beyond that, transformed through my own vision, framing, memory, and imagination. I create my own world through photography. And this is where I think art becomes particularly powerful. Science and philosophy require a certain preparation and language in order to enter their mechanisms. Art has the quality of being accessible even to someone who knows nothing about it. Any of us. The eyes are only instruments for collecting information, but the experience happens through the body, the stomach, the heart, the brain. This is also what I want from my photographs. I want them to create a reaction, something that happens before you decide what the image means. My role is to create the image. But for me, it will never hold the answer.
Find more of Lao Xie Xie’s art at Instagram @lao_xie_xie
Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in the White House on September 24, 2026. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The national conversation about AI in the US is full of fear: fear about AI’s potential to end humanity, fear of data centers moving in, fear that government officials will do absolutely nothing even as the industry pleads for regulation, you name it.
But the AI conversation looks remarkably different across the Pacific.
In China, driven by public enthusiasm and a state-backed push for AI dominance, the country is in the midst of a large-scale AI integration into all facets of its society, driven by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s support for the technology.
“He’s super AI-pilled,“ said Kyle Chan, an expert on China’s technology development and industrial policy at the Brookings Institution. “When you look at his speeches, when you look at Chinese policy documents, everything is about rolling AI out to as many domains as possible: manufacturing, services, education, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and of course the military. Everything is about trying to integrate AI.”
Beneath this push for a high-speed AI adoption across Chinese society lies a regulatory framework designed to safeguard political stability and keep boundaries on the kind of information AI models are able to share.
Chan joined Vox’s Today, Explained podcast to speak with co-host Sean Rameswaram about the different AI anxieties in the US and China, and whether joint regulations on AI safety are possible while the two countries are engaged in an AI arms race.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
One thing that really struck me about the way the Chinese government is approaching AI is that China has this explicit goal, right?
China has some concrete plans to boost AI adoption through the country, including its recent AI-plus initiative. And their goal is to try to boost the penetration of AI in so-called terminal devices, everything from computers to smartphones, to 90 percent or more by 2030.
It’s going really fast and it is, in part, a state mobilization effort. There are state-owned companies, there are government agencies that are trying to integrate AI, but also there’s just an enthusiasm from the general population.
If you look at surveys like the latest Gallup poll, people in China are much more enthusiastic and positive about how AI might help them and help the country. It’s quite a striking contrast with what you see in the US in terms of attitudes towards AI.
Because people here are worried about AI as an existential threat. People here are worried about AI taking their jobs, people here are worried about AI data centers in their backyards. Is that not the vibe in China?
Not so much. There is some concern about AI and jobs. But in general, China’s not worried about AI wiping out humanity. You really don’t hear that from the Chinese policymakers. There’s no talk about a P(doom), the probability that AI will wipe out humanity. So this is just a different approach to AI risk in general.
And why not the existential risk?
You know, one factor, I think, is sci-fi and the culture.
Huh. We’ve watched too many movies?
It seems like every major sci-fi book or film involves machines trying to kill us all, and I think that that idea has become very prevalent.
When you imagine a future with AI, that is one of the primary futures that people imagine, versus in China, I think a lot of the attitude towards technology in general, not just AI, is about using this edge to keep up and to become more competitive.
For a lot of people in China, technology was something that they saw transform their lives in real time. And Chinese leaders think it’s the key to China’s future modernization and transformation to a global superpower.
Let’s talk about what concerns there are.
One of the biggest concerns that Chinese political leaders have when it comes to AI is political and social instability. They don’t want AI-generated content to act the way that social media or the internet broadly could, which is to disseminate information, maybe deepfakes, maybe viral news that could threaten the [Chinese Communist Party’s] hold on power.
For AI-generated content, it was about making sure that the models didn’t say the wrong things about sensitive topics. A lot of this is about social and political risk rather than about existential technological risk per se.
From pretty early on, China has been developing a model registration system where basically AI services have to be vetted in advance and go through a battery of tests where they’re asked sensitive political questions and they’re supposed to either not answer them or say the “right thing” before they are officially registered. And once they’re registered, then they can be released to the public. So it’s a pretty tight regulatory framework for controlling things like political content.
We know that there’s a high unemployment rate in China, especially among young people, which is also a great concern of the government. Are people worried that this bullish approach to AI could affect employment numbers?
Yes and no. On the one hand, China is actually facing this demographic problem with a shrinking labor force. Fewer people want to go into, say, factory jobs, but China still wants to make everything the world wants to buy.
They see AI as a partial solution to that, a way to automate things like manufacturing. On the other hand, though, there are growing concerns in China about job loss. And you see also some recent court cases in China where they basically are telling employers, you cannot use AI as a reason to fire workers.
But I think overall, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find this balance between the diffusion of the technology and trying to prevent any kind of large-scale protest movement that might arise from sudden mass unemployment of, say, factory workers or food delivery drivers.
And President Xi was of course here in Washington last week. From the limited photos we have of the state dinner or of President Trump and President Xi on the tarmac, everything looks so chummy, even though we are so clearly in a cold war with China over AI. The president’s always talking about how he wants to win.
Was there tension in his visit to Washington last week? Did you notice any?
The weird thing is that just between these two men, there seems to be this kind of romance where Trump really fawns over Xi Jinping.
I think he has tremendous respect, even admiration, for Xi Jinping’s grip on power and control over the government apparatus in general.
What is happening under the surface, though, is continuing tensions and a deep competitive structural relationship. That involves especially competition in AI. AI has emerged as a new fault line of competition between the US and China, one that could come to define the relationship going forward.
I think that on the one hand, they’re talking about cooperation on things like AI safety and AI risk. On the other hand, there’s a whole bunch of issues where the US wants to lead. China wants to also get ahead. And when it comes to things like distillation or cyber capabilities, it’s as zero-sum as it’s ever been.
Who’s winning?
It depends on what you’re looking at and how you define winning. If you’re talking about the best models, for sure the US. And virtually everyone in China would agree, right? In fact, Anthropic’s Claude is very popular in China, even though technically Anthropic bans its use in China.
But aren’t their open-source models kind of popular here?
Yes, exactly. Chinese open-source models are getting more popular in the US, especially at a time when some of the capabilities are so incredible that most normal people don’t really need them, and they also don’t want to pay for the most advanced and most expensive models. Ultimately it’s this weird sort of cooperation and competition at the same time.
American models are popular in China. Chinese models are popular in America. We’re at each other’s throats, but quietly, politely.
Does the cold war make it all but certain that safety isn’t going to really be a chief priority for either country until something terrible happens?
The fierce level of competition and the very, very deep distrust between the two countries makes any kind of cooperation on AI safety very, very difficult. Even just talking to each other, having the US and China establish an official AI dialogue, which apparently they’ve agreed to, is seen as a huge first step, even though they’re just talking.
There’s a long, long road to go before we can even think about something like an arms control treaty or a broader international agreement about AI and AI safety. But I think that’s what some people, especially in Silicon Valley, are trying to jump to.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping on September 25, 2026. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
I have good news and bad news for the holiday shoppers in the audience.
The good news is that the US and China announced this morning — in the wake of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to DC — that the two countries are suspending tariffs on $60 billion of goods, including Christmas ornaments, toys and other tchotchkes.
The bad news is that, because retailers ship goods for the winter holidays well in advance, these reductions might come a bit too late to affect this year’s bills. But there’s always 2027, right? Barring another unforeseen trade altercation.
The tariff rollback represents a real and continued de-escalation in the trade war between China and the US, which — at one point last year — was slapping Chinese goods with a whopping 145 percent tariff.
But it’s not a conclusive truce, either. The new agreement doesn’t address the touchiest products for either country, like rare earth minerals (which are used in electronics and clean energy tech) and advanced chips (which are critical to AI development). China also didn’t lower its tariffs on soybeans, which have hit some American farmers so hard they’re thinking of voting for Democrats.
There’s a certain irony to President Donald Trump’s about-face on the Chinese tariffs, incomplete though it may be. For years, the president made confrontation with China central to his political identity and reaped the benefits in votes. Now he appears to be circling back to what was, for decades, the mainstream, default Republican position: Namely, that more and freer trade with China is ultimately good for American consumers and businesses.
President Richard Nixon first set that tone 54 years ago, when he famously became the first US president to visit Beijing. Subsequent GOP leaders leaned further into free trade with China, even as they railed against the evils of communism. Greater trade will bring “great benefits…to all our peoples,” George W. Bush said in a 2001 statement celebrating China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
But those “great benefits” were a mixed bag for some Americans, history suggests. The price of US consumer goods did fall in the early 2000s as trade between the US and China exploded. At the same time, US manufacturing towns suffered job losses so severe and concentrated that some still haven’t recovered.
Those job losses may have helped propel Trump to the White House, at least in his first term. Researchers have found that communities hit hardest by Chinese competition elected more extreme Congressional candidates in 2010, and then swung hardest to Trump in the 2016 election.
One 2016 paper by a highly regarded team of economists actually calculated that — in an alternate reality where US-China trade grew half as quickly between 2001 and 2016 — Hillary Clinton would have won North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan…and thus, the presidency.
In other words, Trump tapped into real harms and anxieties when he veered from the GOP’s usual stance on China 10 years ago. And he might be attempting to address new economic anxieties about inflation and living costs by reversing his course on China again now.
Call it Trump’s Nixon-to-China moment. The question, of course, is whether voters will give Trump credit for (partially) solving a problem that he himself created.
One link for later
➨ “Microdose” movement. As the weather gradually and inexorably gets colder, many of us will see our daily step counts fall off. You could do as the Swedes do and load up on layers…or you could stay safely indoors and try microdosing movement. Just five minutes every half hour can help reduce the health impacts of extended sitting. Try tying little walks to a specific cue, like the need to refill your water bottle or the end of a meeting.
Today’s trivia: What is the name of Quasimodo’s (unrequited) love interest in Victor Hugo’s classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the film that won Best Picture at the 85th Academy Awards. That would be Argo, a political thriller about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.
Certain obvious questions arise from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this past week, a spectacle that one observer has described as “diplotainment” rather than actual diplomacy. Exactly how much did Donald Trump abase himself in service to a temporary and transactional friendship with the dictatorial leader of a nation that is, at least by conventional standards, America’s principal strategic enemy?
No one knows; I am tempted to surmise that Trump doesn’t know himself. The man who in sunnier times for his regime enjoyed calling himself “your favorite president” does not seem to be his own favorite president these days. Trump almost visibly glowed with delight when Xi praised the quality of service and attention to detail of his White House visit. “Everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every little detail,” the Chinese president said through a translator. “And it’s greatly appreciated.”
You could describe that as the meaningless courtesies of routine statecraft, but it also suggested a high-flying hotel guest offering his compliments to the concierge: The eggs this morning were entirely delicious. And the way your people turn down the sheets at night: exquisite!
If we could somehow remove ourselves from the anguish and destruction caused by Trump’s improvised policies (which resemble comic-book versions of Big Brother’s “Two Minutes Hate” from the film version of “1984”) and his aggressively stupid public persona, we might be able to perceive some pathos in his predicament. He cannot escape from a situation he believed he had created and felt he could control: He is the massively unpopular elected leader of a rapidly collapsing superpower, whose downward slide he promised to reverse but has only accelerated, perhaps to the point of terminal velocity.
Trump visibly and hungrily longs for things he cannot have: the alleged greatness of the mythological American past, rendered as white supremacist schlock inherited third hand from the more vigorous fascist movements of the last century; the enforced adulation and obligatory public spectacle of a totalitarian regime such as Xi’s China or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea; most of all, perhaps, his own youth as a brash Manhattan philanderer and unstoppable political renegade, when he didn’t fall asleep in public or stumble around awkwardly with an unexplained contraption under his clothing.
Trump visibly longs for things he cannot have: the alleged greatness of the American past, rendered as white supremacist schlock; the enforced adulation of a totalitarian regime; most of all, perhaps, his own youth as a brash Manhattan philanderer and unstoppable political renegade.
To consider such matters is not a distraction; it begins to point us toward the larger and more painful questions behind the Xi-Trump pseudo-summit. It surprised literally no one that the two leaders negotiated no new agreements on regulating A.I. (or “Super Intelligence,” in Trump’s self-parodying rebrand), the status of Taiwan, the sporadic trade war between the two nations or ending the war with Iran and restarting the global flow of Middle East oil. No mention was made of Trump’s vaporware claims last May that the Chinese had agreed to buy hundreds of Boeing aircraft and $10 billion worth of U.S. beef and soybeans, but Xi promised to send two pandas from China’s breeding facility to the Atlanta zoo. So much winning. It’s impossible to calculate.
In large part, the absolute nothingness of this summit reflects the fact that China is already winning across the board and Xi needed nothing from Trump beyond the legitimation provided by a diplotainment spectacle “to the highest order of perfection.” As China scholars Nicholas Bequelin and Yaqiu Wang write in a Foreign Policy analysis published before the summit, over the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, the geopolitical “balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor”:
China has weathered the trade war, narrowed the technology gap, tightened its leverage over critical supply chains, increased pressure on Taiwan, and deepened ties with Russia and much of the global south.
Contrary to more Sinophobic commentators, they argue that China’s ruthlessly pragmatic leadership is not interested in dominating the world, or at least not in the same way postwar America did. But it does have a long-term agenda, they write, which includes breaking the global dependence on U.S.-centric financial institutions, discrediting democracy and furthering a historical process Xi has described as “the rise of the East and the decline of the West.”
I don’t disagree with any of that, but the most important aspect of Bequelin and Wang’s analysis gets a little buried beneath a forest of impeccably organized policy details. Xi has no need to strike an overtly aggressive posture and can afford to cosplay friendship with Trump because “the West,” or at least its greatest military and economic power, is doing a terrific job of declining all on its own. To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake.
It may take generations — if there are any future generations — to measure the scale of America’s self-inflicted damage, which goes well beyond material issues into the realm of psychology or perhaps spirit. (If it’s pretentious to use the Hegelian term Geist, it still fits.) It remains astonishing, not to mention upsetting and enraging, that in the face of a global climate crisis that has already caused millions of deaths and is obvious to nearly everyone on the planet, the U.S. has deliberately chosen to double down on fossil fuels while “China is consolidating its worldwide dominance in batteries, solar, and EVs,” as Bequelin and Wang write.
Faced with America’s spectacular self-own, who can blame people in the Global South for suspecting that the tradeoff between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” was never as straightforward as they were led to believe?
Chinese solar panels and batteries, often offered at steeply discounted prices, are revolutionizing transit and energy issues in many poorer countries, beginning to break the expensive and damaging addiction to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. has largely abandoned or dismantled its foreign aid programs aimed at fostering economic development, public health and education, while doing its level best to destroy its own reputation as a multiracial secular republic rooted in the rule of law. Faced with America’s spectacular self-own (which didn’t start with Trump, to be clear), who can blame people in the Global South for beginning to suspect that the tradeoff between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” was never as straightforward as they were led to believe?
Despite the widespread anger and disillusionment of Trump’s second term — an encouraging trend, to be clear — it’s still too easy for Americans to duck the biggest and most glaring question of all: To paraphrase one of the greatest works of postmodern angst, how did we get here? It no longer feels remotely adequate (if it ever did) to suggest that angry, vicious people accidentally elected an angry, vicious president who is pursuing a self-destructive and nihilistic agenda, and that at some future date our national sanity and our “indispensable” role in world affairs will be reasserted.
We tried that, remember? It didn’t work. Perhaps, from some great historical remove, Joe Biden’s presidency will appear noble and tragic. But it was also doomed, trapped in a vision of the past every bit as delusional as the MAGA fantasy, and nearly as damaging. The Biden regime’s self-appointed mission of enforcing a “rules-based order” involved pretending that the world had not changed, that America was still widely beloved and admired, that our so-called republic had not bred and nurtured Donald Trump and that he did not embody its bottomless greed, its gleeful ignorance, its wounded and flatulent national pride.
And so we arrive at the final conundrum of the Trump-Xi summit, and our president’s stopped-clock tendency to stumble upon hard truths. In his inimitable ass-backward fashion, Trump has discerned that the “free world” has become a meaningless abstraction and liberal democracy is in a state of systemic failure. He is correct about that, at least to a point. But he can provide no answer beyond prostrating himself before dictators and building monuments to himself in imitation of their grandiosity. If China’s repressive techno-state makes a distinctly unappealing candidate to lead the world into the future, America can only offer competing versions of an imaginary past. Hey, at least we got those pandas.
Breaking Down the Different Flavors of GOP Midterms Cope
It’s never a good sign when the Senate Majority Leader suggests the election prospects for his own party look grim. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) admitted in a recent interview that he believes even losing Senate control in the midterms to be a real possibility for the GOP, saying, “I worry about that, for sure.”
Donald Trump is largely responsible for this situation. He’s fully leaned into unpopular policies (building AI data centers, going to war in Iran, launching trade wars with allies, etc.) that have driven up prices, and, despite his dismal approval rating, is insisting there’s no daylight between himself and the rest of the party. As he said at his weird fake midterms convention in Dallas, “Pretend that I am on the ballot.”
Even accounting for all the usual caveats about poll margins, it does seem like the Democrats are on track to have a strong midterms cycle. So Republican candidates are experimenting with different flavors of cope as they look towards Election Day. Nicole and John have tracked some of this in Where Things Stand and The Brief, respectively, so we tried to come up with some handy categorizations. Here’s what we’ve got.
All Aboard the Islamophobia and Red Scare Express
Some red state MAGA loyalists are playing the culture war hits, trying to keep the focus on nonexistent crises rather than any of the issues actually affecting their voters. We’re talking Sharia takeovers, communist creep, and stolen elections. As Josh Kovensky reported earlier this year, Texas Republicans Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Senate nominee, pioneered the strategy of targeting the local Muslim community in their midterms messaging. Abbott spent the summer fighting “a proposed mosque-anchored housing development outside Dallas” and “campaigning against what he calls the imposition of Islamic law,” per The Guardian.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the gubernatorial nominee in Alabama, has taken it upon himself to become a foremost critic of Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, calling him a “TERRORIST” and “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “do everything he can to destroy America.”
Other Republicans are red-baiting their hearts out, with Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) claiming that Medicare for All is a “communist” policy and Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) labeling Democratic immigration policies “crazy communism.”
Self-proclaimed “MAGA warrior” Mike Collins is going for an “all of the above” approach in his Georgia Senate race, promoting xenophobia; pushing 2020 Big Lie conspiracies; and advocating to compensate some people prosecuted for Jan. 6. (Meanwhile, he’s doing little to distance himself from the many racist extremists in his orbit — including in his family.)
Flirting With Criticism
Republicans in swing states and seats are trying to toe the line, breaking with Trump on specific issues, particularly ones germane to their states or districts. They’re leveling targeted criticism and trying to display independence.
So you’ve got midwestern Senate nominees Mike Rogers in Michigan and Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa calling for an end to the Iran War, saying soaring gas and grocery prices are harming their voters. Both previously supported the war. Last week, Iowa Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks even voted to support removing U.S. forces from Iran.
Rogers has also bucked Trump’s AI boosterism, calling for a “national security framework” on the technology and for a one-year moratorium on new construction in Michigan. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) has gone further in his reelection campaign, sponsoring legislation to make data centers pay their own utility bills.
In Florida, Rep. María Elvira Salazar used her first TV ad of the general election to warn that Trump will lose Latino voters thanks to his overly aggressive immigration enforcement and mass deportation policies. Salazar, who serves as assistant whip, claims that she risks losing her seat in a district Trump won by 15 points.
Trump Will Always Be Daddy
While most vulnerable Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Trump, a brave few are hugging him tight. Take Eric Flores, who is running in a South Texas district currently represented by a Democrat, and where Latino voters will determine the result. Praising Trump’s immigration policies, Flores told Fox, “When people say that folks are running away from President Trump, I’ll tell you, I’m certainly not doing that. And let me tell you why: Because he has made promises to South Texas, and he has kept them, especially when we look at border security.”
We Don’t Know Him
Probably the funniest genre of response comes from Republicans pretending that Trump straight-up doesn’t exist. As John noted in the Brief this week, several Republicans have stripped mentions of Trump from their campaign websites, including Florida congressional candidate Mike Beltran, Iowa congressional candidate Joe Mitchell, and, most recently and notably, Florida gubernatorial nominee Byron Daniels.
Team ‘We’ll Defy Expectations!’
Despite all indications that Democrats seem likely to take back the House, Speaker Mike Johnson insists Republicans are going to defy history and “grow the majority.”
“It’s a contrast election, and people are making a contrast between common-sense solutions and candidates, and really crazy, which is represented by the other side,” Johnson told Fox News Digital in September. “I am very bullish about the outcome on election night.”
Rep. Ryan McKenzie (R-PA), who spoke at the GOP convention, also predicted Republicans are “actually going to defy the historic trends. Why is that? Because the Democrats are so far left they are totally out of touch.”
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By Allegra Kirkland
[Report]
GOPers Blame Americans’ Data Center Opposition on China
Watching the Super Bowl last winter, I saw a commercial from my local electricity company that seemed a little… political.
Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) was trying to convey something to me that seemed tangentially related to bipartisan data center opposition that has been rising nationwide and is especially poignant in the D.C., Maryland, Virginia corridor also known as “Data Center Alley.”
“Private power plant companies that control our power supply are failing to meet demand,” the ad said, with PRIVATE POWER PLANT and CONTROL OUR SUPPLY in capital, neon letters. “When there’s a shortage, prices go up.”
The ad was indirect but — and without speaking to the merit of its intentions — the vibe was pretty obviously trying to leverage public outrage about skyrocketing electricity bills related to energy demands from AI data centers. I was struck by the idea that my electric company would wade in any way into such a charged political issue — a self-interested energy corporation joining hands with riled-up townspeople and climate activists against a common enemy.
If you ask Reps. Jason Smith (R-MO) and John Moolenaar (R-MI), that enemy is the Chinese Communist Party.
Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means committee, and Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, sent a letter Tuesday to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano blaming American data center opposition on an orchestrated disinformation campaign supported by the Chinese government. Yes, you did read that right.
“This is not an organic grassroots movement,” Smith said of data center opposition. Instead, Chinese-backed nonprofits are being used to “manipulate public discourse surrounding the technological infrastructure necessary to win the AI race.”
Smith and Moolenaar’s proof? An OpenAI report which found Chinese-linked influence over social media content “claiming that data center construction was raising electricity prices.” (It is.) And a report that X, owned by AI mogul Elon Musk, identified 200 bots posting anti-AI stuff on the site. OpenAI found no evidence that the campaign it uncovered influenced public opinion.
Instead, data shows that 58% of registered voters believe data center construction by big companies will do more harm than good, according to a September NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Wednesday.
Data centers are even more unattractive when they’re local, with 60% of Americans, including 54% of Republicans, responding that they would not be comfortable with a data center in their communities, according to a Pew Research survey published Tuesday. And Pew’s survey also found negative sentiment about data centers increased by 16 points among Republicans between January and August.
This feels like an issue uniting Americans across party lines in grassroots opposition, driven not only by NIMBYism, or even by the documented harms to climate posed by energy-sucking super computers, but also by the desire of the everyman to stand up against entities they believe pose a direct risk to their immediate communities and their pockets.
In attempting to blame anti-AI sentiment on a foreign adversary, Smith and Moolenaar have opted to follow their leader, President Donald Trump, off the “AI opposition is a hoax” cliff.
The president’s contrary positions on AI and data center construction have pushed Republican politicians, especially those facing competitive midterms, to split from Trump.
While Smith and Moolenaar are both up for reelection, they’re in uncompetitive districts ranked by Cook Political Report as solidly Republican. But Ohio Republican Jon Husted is facing backlash to his once-strong support for data centers as he’s locked in a dead heat with former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Other Senate Republicans are pushing to support Husted’s bill focused on shielding people’s electricity bills from data center energy usage hikes. In Texas, Democrats are hoping their early opposition to data centers can help them win statewide office for the first time in more than two decades. And at least 27 states have passed legislation that datacentertracker.com categorizes as “favorable for communities.”
For what it’s worth, Twitter’s former head of corporate communications told Axios all evidence points to data center gripes being authentic, not the product of a “Chinese psyop.”
“If you can get both Greg Abbott and Kathy Hochul agreeing on something,” communications consultant Jim Prosser told Axios, “it’s probably not a Chinese psyop. It’s probably not a mass delusion people are having on these issues.”
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By Layla A. Jones
[Good Posts]
5 Year Plans
no dad, owning a successful lesbian covid conscious bar in western mass was YOUR dream. I’M going to clown school
Who was the anonymous White House source cited in the Politico story Trump is using to justify denying the publication access because the reporting “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods”?
After effectively shutting down the Kennedy Center when he wasn’t allowed to put his name on it, which culturally significant national landmark is Trump apparently trying to slap his name on next?
Which musician was scheduled to headline a MAGA music festival that ended up getting canceled because it failed to sell more than a handful of VIP tickets?
Answers below
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[Galaxy Brain]
Anti-Vax or Pro Rock?
Campaigning for state auditor in Minnesota, failed gubernatorial candidate and real-life doctor Scott Jensen wants to know why western medicine keeps ignoring the science — from hundreds of years ago. Jensen’s medical license has been challenged for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and he has admitted to “quietly” being a member of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS/AFD), known for its anti-vaccine activism and for its founder, Simone Gold, being involved in Jan. 6. As Jensen told an interviewer, “The notion of electromagnetic powers, of minerals, and rocks, and things like that, that could have curative capabilities, we’ve ignored.”
Given the widespread use of magnetic resonance imaging machines and the countless rock and mineral-derived chemicals used in modern medicine, we’re uncertain who the “we” is here. But sure, Dr. Jensen, go on. “We” would recommend a bong hit first, but know that your views on legalized weed have changed, despite co-authoring a bill supporting legalization in 2019. Not sure what you have against plants, but good luck with your rocks.
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[Words of Wisdom]
Knowing Where You Live is the Robot’s Job Now
“There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company
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[No Words]
Maybe This Should Have Been the Strategy All Along
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 19: The White House Briefing room, on September 19, 2026 in Washington, DC. Reporters from MS NOW, CNN and Politico were barred from the White House a day after President Trump said he was banning the three outlets from the property. (Photo by Graeme Sloan/Getty Images)
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Trivia answers: 1) JD Vance 2) The Ford Theatre 3) Kid Rock, of course
President Donald Trump greets Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews on September 23, 2026. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
President Donald Trump rolled out the literal red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday afternoon, greeting his plane with a military band and a jet flyover at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews.
It’s a very warm welcome for the man Trump once dubbed his “enemy,” and it reflects a fascinating, dramatic shift in his tone toward China — a country that Americans have also come to view more favorably over the past five years. (More on that about-face in just a minute.)
Trump and Xi have lots to discuss during this week’s state visit. On Wednesday, the two countries agreed to extend the current pause in their on-again, off-again trade war — but that kicks several pressing issues, like technology restrictions and access to critical minerals, further down the road.
AI safety advocates are also hoping the two leaders can reach some kind of agreement to slow down or safeguard AI development, following calls from a chorus of American tech executives.
Trump isn’t the only one reassessing China these days. A trio of recentpolls found that Americans also feel markedly more positive about China than they did five years ago, with the largest gains among young people. On average, American sentiment toward China is about the same today as it was 10 years ago — before Trump launched his first trade war.
What changed Americans’ minds about China? There is undoubtedly no one cause. It probably helps that Trump himself has changed his tune, no longer portraying the relationship between the US and China as an existential rivalry between so-called great powers.
Americans’ views on China have also recovered steadily since the Covid-19 pandemic, as memories of that period fade into the rearview. And foreign-policy issues — like, say, the status of Taiwan — generally aren’t top of mind for the average American voter.
But there’s also a cultural component here, particularly for young Americans. “Younger Americans are less wedded to notions of American primacy and more comfortable with coexistence,” Ryan Hass, a China scholar at the Brookings Institute, posted on X.
Many young Americans have, in fact, grown up embracing aspects of Chinese culture, from TikTok to Labubu. And there’s a pervasive sense, in some corners, that Western-style capitalism hasn’t precisely delivered the goods.
But let’s not kid ourselves here — China has plenty of problems, too. Like an economic slowdown, a mounting demographic crisis, and a culture of widespread political repression, to name just a few. For now, at least, an increasingly hostile US isn’t one of them.
Today’s trivia: What’s the word for the lowest female singing voice? Hint: It’s an adjective also used in the names of several instruments. (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the stage name of the American rapper Adam Yauch. That would be MCA, a founding member of the Beastie Boys and an outspoken advocate for Tibetan independence.
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