America in ascent...
Why are so many American journalists Writing PR for Xi Jinping Instead of Reporting the American Future?
Lately, defending America feels a lot like being a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Everybody hates us. Everybody predicts collapse.
So let me clear my throat: America is not in decline. America, at 250 years young, is in ascent. And this has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. American innovators are leading humanity into the Fifth Industrial Revolution… where American technological advances will eradicate diseases and explore deeper into our Solar System.
Don’t believe me? Look up at the Moon. Americans went there last week.
Yet everywhere you thumb through online (like on Xi’s TikTok), the American chattering class continues to predict America’s decline:
Li Yuan in The New York Times claims China sees Trump’s America as an “accelerator of American political decay,” sliding toward “polarization, institutional dysfunction and even ‘Latin American-style instability.’”
Ryan Hass reports the same thing in The Atlantic.
The Economist frames it as China viewing the United States in “imperial twilight.”
Christopher Caldwell declares in the New York Times that America is “officially an empire in decline.”
What is this lack of fact-checking Xi Jinping? These pieces recycle his favorite slogan — the rise of the East and decline of the West — without ever pausing to examine whether China’s own economy can actually deliver on it.
Fact check: Xi can’t.
The media is doing Americans a grave disservice by covering the contest between Communist China and America like just another domestic partisan brawl — Democrats versus Republicans — or worse, like the Eagles versus the Cowboys.
As the founder of meet the future (mtf.tv) and host of iHeart Media’s HELLO FUTURE, I’ve spent years reporting on the actual innovators building the next century — not the pundits writing think pieces about it. I was also one of the first journalists assigned to cover Trump back in 2015 and later served as chief Washington correspondent for Bloomberg.
I’m not naive. America’s adversaries have found ways to weaponize our freedoms against us in our own institutions. Global income inequality threatens to strangle the American dream. Hyper-partisanship — bankrolled by billionaires playing poker with outdated campaign finance laws — fuels extremism. And when political extremism turns into violence, we must all call it a cancer.
But Americans openly admitting our problems is not a symptom of decline. I think it’s a sign of a redemption.
Have These Journalists Forgotten 1776?
America has always been a raucous and deeply contentious republic. From the moment we cast British tea into the waters of Boston Harbor in an act of defiant resistance, the world has repeatedly predicted our collapse.
European monarchies dismissed the American colonists as little more than unruly rebels doomed to fail.
During the Civil War, many sophisticated foreign observers confidently forecast the permanent dissolution of the United States.
In the 1960s, amid riots, assassinations, and wrenching social upheaval, respected voices declared the American experiment had finally run its course.
And yet, time and again across our 250 years, we have emerged from these periods of turbulence not weaker, but renewed — often carrying the cause of equality and human dignity further than before.
What some call dysfunction is not decline. Vigorous political debate and open protest are not signs of decay. I would argue they are quite the opposite: they are the very mechanisms through which our country has always corrected, renewed, and in its imperfect way, perfected itself in a never-ending quest to form a more perfect Union…
The Real Story: America Is Leading the Fifth Industrial Revolution
While these outlets chase political optics, the United States is dominating the convergence of quantum computing, commercial space, and biotech.
Just Last Week: Artemis II Made History: NASA just released more than 12,000 new photos from the successful Artemis II mission — the first crewed flight around the Moon in over 50 years. The Orion spacecraft completed its 10-day voyage in April, testing deep-space systems and paving the way for sustained lunar presence.
On the commercial side, American firms captured roughly 82 percent of the global launch market last year. Reusable rockets, satellite constellations, lunar landers, and Mars architecture are not aspirations. They are flying hardware. Civilizations literally expanding beyond Earth are not in decline.
Quantum Computing: America’s Clear Lead: I’m obsessed with quantum for a reason — it is the next foundation of computing, materials science, medicine, finance, and national security. American companies and investors are driving the breakthroughs.
In 2025, U.S.-headquartered quantum companies raised more than $2.7 billion in venture capital — more than double the previous year and the overwhelming majority of global private funding (QED-C State of the Global Quantum Industry 2026 Report).
China’s entire quantum computing market generated just $118.5 million in revenue in 2024 and is projected to reach only $410 million by 2030 (Grand View Research).
The U.S. private-sector ecosystem — IBM, Google Quantum AI, IonQ, Rigetti, PsiQuantum, and others — leads in hardware milestones, error correction, and commercial applications. Open research, capital markets willing to fund uncertainty, and cross-border talent flows create frontier breakthroughs that centralized systems simply cannot replicate at the same pace.
What China Actually Faces (The Part They Don’t Fact-Check)
China excels at scale and replication (which is a nice way of saying stealing American intellectual property). But Xi Jinping’s economy is confronting demographic collapse, youth unemployment stuck near 17 percent, a property-market hangover, and capital flight pressures. These are not vibes. They are structural headwinds that no amount of state messaging can wish away.
America’s Freedom of Speech Is the Real Advantage
This is the part I really want to hammer home. While I think it’s lazy reporting for these pieces to do the bidding of Xi Jinping’s narrative, I totally agree with their right to be lazy.
In Xi’s Communist Party, freedom of speech does not exist. Dissent is censored. Unusual ideas are dangerous. Breakthrough creativity eventually slows.
America — whether you love or loathe Trump — has never been more politically engaged. Our loud, messy argument is not weakness. It is the engine. It is permission to challenge consensus, speak up for equality, and self-correct in public. That’s never been easy. But it’s been democracy. Centralized systems can copy what already works. Only open systems invent what doesn’t.
The next time you read another “America in decline” story: Are they looking at the data — or just repeating a story that flatters their worldview?
Then, respectfully, look up. The Moon is infrastructure. And right now, the country building the strongest bridge back to it — through Artemis, quantum leadership, and American innovation — is still the United States.
And I’d still take all of the dysfunction in a democracy over Xi Jinping’s worldview any day.