Federal banditry regarding TikTok proceeds apace. Back on April 23, president Joe Biden signed the bill that led us to the current precipice, over which 170 million American TikTok users now teeter. Why proscribe this wildly popular platform that a full half of all Americans use and enjoy? Because nitwits in congress lost it over China holding a one percent stake in the mother company. The mega-brains on the supreme court appear poised to agree with them. (Newsflash: On January 13, Bloomberg reported that if the ban can’t be stopped, maybe Elon Musk would acquire TikTok, somehow not, I think, what white house neanderthals had in mind.) Ironically, with the impending ban, TikTok users flee en masse to the Chinese app RedNote. What’s a government censor to do? No matter which way they turn, they can’t prevent users from contact with Chinese social technology. Just think what this could mean!
After all, those devious commies could be using TikTok (or RedNote) to subvert our youth by somehow fomenting dissatisfaction with our marvelous, nonpareil, super-duper late capitalist system – who knows, maybe sowing discontent with our multi-thousand dollar a month rents for closet-sized apartments or seeding discord over bankruptcies due to hospital visits. In short, TikTok could somehow instigate far-left rebellion against our economic arrangement of soaking every last red cent out of everybody so we can have more billionaires…or something somehow like that. Worse, TikTok might mesmerize its users into voting the wrong way, like for Jill Stein, Claudia de la Cruz or Donald Trump (oops, they already did so). How TikTok would do this is never rationally explained. But who needs rationality when the red Chinese are involved? They don’t know much on capitol hill, but they know Beijing is the enemy. So bye, bye First Amendment, and welcome to government theft and suppression of our once hallowed freedom of expression.
Some politicians, however, know which way the wind blows. Back in late December, Donald Trump asked the supreme court to block the ban. He stated, according to Zerohedge December 28, that “he would like to pursue negotiations to resolve some of the issues involved and salvage the platform,” before the January 19 divest-or-be-banned deadline for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Remember, back in 2020 Trump himself called for outlawing TikTok, but he, unlike Biden, later seemed perturbed about the opinion of some 100 million plus voters.
As noted in these CounterPunch pages March 29, “Trump may also be trying to align with Jeff Yass, the billionaire stake holder in TikTok, a money-man who owns much of another company that recently merged with Trump’s Truth Social.” Whatever the president elect’s motives, in this he is doing the correct thing, while Biden may figure the TikTok voters already dropped him like a hot potato and he has nothing more to lose.
Indeed, Trump noted in a December 16 press conference that “TikTok had an effect on the support he received from young people in the election.” Also, Trump’s brief cited “the impact of the law on TikTok’s 170 million users,” and raised the free speech issue as well, saying this ban would lead to a “slippery slope toward global government censorship of social-media speech.” Meanwhile, attorney general Merrick “Make America a Banana Republic” Garland defended the law. Of course. Free speech and a free press are doubtless much lower on the priorities ladder than that bugaboo of neoliberal Dems – “disinformation!”
`In fact, the department of justice basically praised this lunatic congressional handiwork, saying the new law “addresses the serious threats to national security posed by the Chinese government’s control of TikTok, a platform that harvests sensitive date about tens of millions of Americans and would be a potent tool for covert influence operations by a foreign adversary.” Blah. Serious threat to national security – teenagers watching dance videos? I guess if they did so under the influence of commie propaganda, they might lose their minds, and gyrating to the beat of some “covert influence operation,” begin sending messages about the delights of vaping to the Chinese embassy that could then blackmail them when they grow up and go to work for the NSA, and then where would we be? Garland, like Biden and the congressional uni-party would doubtless be fine with censoring all speech even mildly offensive to a Clinton, Obama, NATO, Blinken, Sullivan or the head-choppers currently running Syria. Interdicting TikTok is small potatoes.
Not that the Beltway bandits will come for your New York Times, Washington Post or even Mother Jones subscriptions. No. That’s the government approved press. Our rulers WANT you to read those outlets. It’s social media and far left press, sites like itsgoingdown.org or publications like Black Agenda Report, or unpredictable outlets like Unherd and Medium that our rulers itch to muzzle. They already censored Russian journalism – try writing for Strategic Culture and see what happens. I’ll tell you what happens: the FBI shows up at your door with an arrest warrant. As for reading it, you can’t in the United States. The website is blocked.
So ByteDance appealed to the supreme court, which rushed to “hold oral argument January 10 on TikTok’s claim that the [2024] statute violates its First Amendment rights. (A federal appeals court unanimously rejected that argument in early December),” the Washington Post reported January 3. The Post columnist, indignant over Trump asking the high court to “suspend the law from taking effect until he is president,” has some nasty things to say about that and notes that Trump’s brief was “authored by D. John Sauer, the lawyer who won Trump’s immunity case, and, more important has been tapped to be his solicitor general.”
But let’s back this up a bit. Trump said a lot of things that helped him win the election, like that the Gaza carnage needed to stop, that he would end the Ukraine slaughter, that he would halt taxes on tips and social security income, that he would ditch economic sanctions, that he would protect TikTok, that he didn’t want war with China. Politicians do such things. They say what people want to hear. Just look at Biden and the minimum wage and a medical public option. He swore up and down he’d deliver on both, however, once in office acted like he never heard of them.
My point is this: Trump has actually carried through on his TikTok pledge. This offends the Washington Post, but it shouldn’t offend you, because it means he might actually implement some of his other promises. Just like WaPo taking umbrage at Trump acting like he’s already president – well, somebody’s gotta run the country, and frankly there’s been a vacuum at the top in the white house for months, maybe years.
The Dems have not come to terms with the shocking magnitude of the exposure of their mind-boggling malfeasance, how they tried to pull the wool over the public’s eyes by saying Biden was sharp as a tack and therefore, by implication, within his presidential rights to subsidize the Gaza and Ukraine charnel houses. He wasn’t sharp as a tack. His staff ran and runs those wars, which is not to whitewash Biden’s role. Clearly whenever lucid, he too supported these atrocities, which have the U.S. up to its eyeballs in blood.
Last time around as prez, Tump reneged on some campaign promises. But he did nothing in foreign policy even REMOTELY as awful and criminal as Biden’s Ukraine and Gaza capers. Not even close. I, for one, am heartened that he filed a brief to protect TikTok. Maybe it means he’ll follow through on more campaign vows. On the ones that count, namely ending the west’s iniquity in Ukraine and Gaza.