TikTok is getting close to being banned in the United States. That’s a good thing.
The House of Representatives has now passed a bill, 352 to 65, that would effectively force TikTok to divest from its Chinese ownership, which makes perfect sense. ByteDance, its parent company, would have to sell its share to an American company, which would make TikTok significantly less of a threat to national security.
TikTok is a viral psyop that was created by the Chinese government. It’s incredibly sophisticated algorithmically in that it is amazing at picking up viral content and then magnifying it.
But there are editorial choices made inside that algorithm about which content to magnify in the United States. The content that gets magnified on TikTok is the most politically polarizing, and it also tends to be the most socially contagious. Huge amounts of the LGBTQ agenda are pushed by TikTok, particularly the trans epidemic in the United States, an epidemic that cannot be explained biologically.
As evidence of this, a new Gallup poll found that almost 30% of Gen Z women now identify as LGBTQ+, most as bisexual.
That is not a biological bottleneck occurring in real time. That is a social contagion being promoted by apps like TikTok that present victimhood and victim identity as some sort of positive good. If the claim is now that one third of all Gen Z women are either bisexual, homosexual, gender nonbinary, or trans, that claim makes no biological sense. It has never made sense of any subpopulation anywhere in world history ever at any time.
All of this is pushed by TikTok to destroy the U.S. Meanwhile, TikTok in China doesn’t do any of that.
What they’re really attempting to do is dissolve the social unity of the United States through social division. That is the goal of TikTok.
This is not new. It’s a long-time communist strategy. During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese understood they didn’t have to beat the United States on the battlefield. Far from it; they weren’t capable of beating the United States on the battlefield.
All they had to do was keep up the internal pressure in the United States, push their agenda with the peaceniks, and then have the peaceniks undermine the war effort in Congress, thereby essentially handing South Vietnam over to the North Vietnamese.
China is figuring the same thing, that if they wreck whatever social fabric exists in the United States through the means of culture — which is what TikTok does by creating this very highly addictive, highly watchable medium and controlling exactly what people see while gathering data about them — they can divide the U.S.
If they can do that, then they can undermine the power of the United States, not only at home, but in the world more largely.
TikTok has created viral sensations where people act in strange ways and create social contagions, all of which has been mainlining into American politics. Trans politics was not part of American politics 15 or 20 years ago.
In early March, GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Democrat Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois introduced the so-called Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
That bill prevents app store availability or web hosting services in the United States for ByteDance’s controlled applications, including TikTok.
Gallagher gave a clear message to TikTok, saying, “This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users. America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States. TikTok’s time in the United States is over unless it ends its relationship with CCP-controlled ByteDance.”
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Krishnamoorthi added, “So long as it is owned by ByteDance and thus required to collaborate with the CCP, TikTok poses critical threats to our national security. Our bipartisan legislation would protect American social media users by driving the divestment of foreign adversary-controlled apps to ensure that Americans are protected from the digital surveillance and influence operations of regimes that could weaponize their personal data against them.”
Last year, the TikTok CEO admitted to the Energy and Commerce Committee that ByteDance’s employees in China have access to U.S. user data.
Meanwhile, TikTok has been using all of its powers in an attempt to push people not to vote in favor of forcing ByteDance’s divestment.
Thus, critics of the bill argue the attempt to divest TikTok of its Chinese ownership violates the First Amendment. Their claim is that what users post on TikTok is free speech and because free speech is protected, TikTok can’t be collaterally attacked.
The other argument against the bill states the property rights that are inherent in TikTok are not all owned by people who are a national security risk, so they cannot be divested of their property without due process of law. That would be a Fifth Amendment claim.
The claim on the other hand is going to be that this is a national security risk because it’s the Chinese Communist Party that basically runs the place.
Now the bill is headed to the Senate, where it is likely to pass.
Former President Trump opposes the bill, which is a mistake because it allows Joe Biden — who is unbelievably soft on China, whose son was paid by China, who has been extraordinarily soft on China’s production and shipping of fentanyl into Mexico and then into the United States where it’s killed over 100,000 citizens a year — to outflank Trump on China.
Passing the bill is necessary.
