inverted_flag

They extracted what they could from the western team and then cast them off. This has been the Chinese modus operandi for decades.

The buried lede here is that the developers of the game, NetEase, are Chinese and they laid off the entire North American team, which includes key people who built the game such as the director. The game is a massive success, so there’s no financial reason to do this.

> It really is hard to explain to anyone who wasn't around just how much they hated Obama— the most powerful man in the world, a black man?! The Barack HUSSEIN Obama era and how the party changed their mission to one of burn it all down at all costs.

This can’t be overstated. Trump rose to prominence because he was one of the loudest voices among the birther crowd.

Textbook schizophrenia.

A decade of foreign influence ops is finally going to pay off for Russia.

This is more like the US agreeing to end the Lend-Lease program if Hitler promised to stop his conquest of Europe, allowing him to keep his conquered territory while demanding concessions from the rest of Europe.

No, it's even stupider than that. He thinks the US is backing Ukraine because we want their lithium deposits. This is an idea that the Trump admin has recently floated, but it's not the reason that the US has been supporting Ukraine for the last 4 years.

He’s straining to draw a false equivalence between the Iraq war and the Ukraine war.

These aren’t peace talks then, they’re talks on how to divide up the spoils.

Ok. Was this worth torching the relationship with one of our closest allies and largest trading partners over?

He should ensure that we have an America worth fighting for, first.

Firing an employee and then begging them to come back because of how essential they are? Art of the deal.

Even if you do all that stuff, you’re still going to have microplastics in your brain.

all the TSMC employees flee to the US to work at the Arizona fab or the Intel plants.

They very much tried to get Trump elected. They were aware of the damage he would cause.

> Political officials at the Energy Department told its non-political HR administrators to cite poor performance personnel files as a justification for firing the employees, the source said

Illegal as fuck

Why link to this substack instead of just directly to the EO on whitehouse.gov?

Could actually be: https://apnews.com/article/trump-china-russia-nuclear-bbc1c7...

Already being paused: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/live-updates/trump-2nd-term-...

All of these firings are flatly illegal btw. There re laws governing mass terminations (reduction in force laws) and the Trump admin isn't following them.

It's been hours and this still hasn't been removed: https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=7cd300eb-cf3f-47f5-90f1-9e6...

The Executive wantonly violating laws is a bad thing for society.

That USAID was Trump and Musk's first target after taking office is peculiar. They made no mention of it during the campaign and most people were unaware of it's existence until a couple weeks ago. The only group with any strong negative opinion of USAID is foreign adversaries.

Currently, all the Arizona-made chips have to be sent back to Taiwan for packaging, which defeats the purpose of having the fab in the US in the first place.

He's not in charge.

Yes, these are essentially commissars.

I wish it need not have happened in my time.

Red meat for Trump’s base.

It's amazing that people believed Trump when he said he had no association with Project 2025.