The Real Targets of the TikTok Ban
Suddenly, TikTok is "the problem." But who is actually in the gunsights of the viciously intolerant and incompetent globalist uniparty?
by Twilight
TikTok is pure, unadulterated poison. It is an evil, destructive force aimed at the young in the West who don’t have defenses against its relentless propaganda. It cultivates and exacerbates insecurity and envy in young people along with anger-fueled divisiveness. It stokes rage. It drives insane cults like the current trans craze sweeping Western teens and pre-teens. (Full disclosure, this gay is against grooming children—sexualizing children is abuse, whether it’s gay or straight.)
TikTok’s terms of service allow it to track everything you do across all your devices.
That’s bad. But how is that worse than Facebook? Or Instagram? Both are cesspools of anger, divisiveness, and hatred. Both present phony versions of people’s lives, driving the same insecurity and envy that TikTok inculcates. Both create angst and an addictive FOMO. Both track everything you do across the web and your devices.
How is TikTok worse than the surveillance behemoth Google?
And then there’s the curious fact that we’ve known all this about TikTok for years. And suddenly, right after Donald Trump secures the nomination of his party for an election six months away, suddenly, TikTok is a problem for Nancy Pelosi, Lizard King Chuck Schumer, and the idiot Republicans who couldn’t be bothered to read the bill before bleating out their “yes” votes.
The national treasure that is Matt Taibbi has the best take that I’ve read so far.
the TikTok ban represents a perfect storm of unpleasant political developments, putting congress back fully in line with the national security establishment on speech. After years of public championing of the First Amendment, congressional Republicans have suddenly and dramatically been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile Democrats, who stand to lose a lot from the bill politically — it’s opposed by 73% of TikTok users, precisely the young voters whose defections since October put Joe Biden’s campaign into a tailspin — are spinning passage of the legislation to its base by suggesting it’s not really happening.
“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok, it’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” is how Nancy Pelosi put it. Congress, the theory goes, will force TikTok to divest, some kindly Wall Street consortium will gobble it up (“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steve Mnuchin told CNBC), and life will go on. All good, right?
So, forcing a company to divest because the political elites are unhappy with it is so not like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, or Venezuela.
Taibbi continues:
You’ll find the real issue in the fine print. There, the “technical assistance” the drafters of the bill reportedly received from the White House shines through, Look particularly at the first highlighted portion, and sections (i) and (ii) of (3)B:
As written, any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States” is covered.
If you’re old enough you’ll recall that the Patriot Act, passed after the horrific 9/11 attacks, was aimed initially at “enemy combatants.” Civil libertarians who objected that it was too vague and that the Act could easily be morphed into a weapon used against Americans were dismissed as tin-foil-hat kooks and cranks.
We now live in the surveillance state created by the Patriot Act. The government hoovers up all communications and lied about it for years, claiming that it was paranoid to even suggest such a thing!
George W. Bush invaded and occupied Iraq because reasons and then proceeded to jail and torture Iraqis who had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. W, Cheney, Rice, and Powell invented the ruse of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Except these weapons were imaginary. They didn’t exist.
Obama expanded the law to claim that droning and murdering American citizens without even a hearing was “lawful” under the Patriot Act. You die, American citizen, because a president in the Oval Office says so. Simple as that. This is how bad laws ratchet, always in the direction of giving government officials—often unelected permanent bureaucrats—more power.
The ratcheting continues.
Riots are bad, but many fellow Americans are now being arrested for walking around the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Tossed into jail because the elites characterized this as some form of “terrorism,” even though the actual charges are overwhelmingly trumped-up misdemeanors.
January 6th came after the 2020 “Summer of Love,” when cities burned from coast to coast and the future VP, Kamala Harris supported bail funds for rioters who had been arrested. Most of these actual rioters who caused actual mayhem, destruction, and harm were let go with no charges.
But the leader of the Proud Boys, who wasn’t even at the Capitol on January 6th, has been sentenced to 22 year behind bars.
So, the country we live in now has a party-controlled justice system and a national state police force (like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia).
On the correct side, the side of the ruling uniparty? You cannot commit a crime because you’re doing the bidding of the ruling party. The party in power supports your riots.
Perceived as disagreeing with the party? Torture and prison for you. We now have, in America, political prisoners who have been behind bars, enduring cruel and unusual punishment, for three years without a trial.
How can any politician in the U.S. condemn any other police state?
But back to the sudden rush to bring TikTok to heel.
As Matt Taibbi correctly points out. The real end goal is to give the president unlimited power to declare his political opponents “significant threats to the security of the United States.” This is why they characterize grandmas walking near the Capitol as “significant terror threats” while ignoring unvetted military-aged men pouring through our southern border. Grandma probably votes for the opposition. New, illegal border-crossers are shock troops for sowing chaos and mayhem and also a convenient new voting block once they’re granted amnesty by the uniparty.
So, who’s the next target once this terrifying bill passes and is signed into law?
First up will be X/Twitter. For the threat “mis/dis/mal-information” poses to “national security.” Because things are said on X that the uniparty disagrees with. Or because some posts on X mock the eminently mockable Jurassic Park lizards occupying the centers of power in Washington DC.
Next on the chopping block?
The only bastion of long-form journalism where free speech is still allowed.
Matt Taibbi is right:
I don’t often do this, but…this bill is so dangerous, the moment so suddenly and unexpectedly grave, that we both recommend anyone who can find the time to call or write their Senators to express opposition to any coming Senate vote. It might help. Yes, collection of personal information and content manipulation by the Chinese government (or Russia’s, or ours) are serious problems, but the wider view is the speech emergency. As the cliché goes, forget the furniture. The house is on fire. Let’s hope we’re not too late.
Rand Paul is right.
Tucker Carlson calls out one of the Republican supporters of the TikTok bill, the slimy, duplicitous liar, Dan Crenshaw. Crenshaw is an interesting story. Called “Eyepatch McCain” by Republicans who were duped by his background as a Navy SEAL, his actions, to me, only make sense if you consider him an asset to the intelligence-controlled surveillance state. This makes him part of the ruling party’s Praetorian Guard—a private army devoted to keeping the globalist uniparty in power.
And while he’s no Nancy Pelosi in the stock trading department (in fairness, what mortal could equal the exquisite timing of her stock trades), he’s done quite well since being elected by the constituents he conned in 2018.
Once the elites in power have dealt with X and Substack thanks to Republicans like Dan Crenshaw, they won’t stop. They’ll keep advancing. In video, free speech competitor to state-controlled YouTube, Rumble, will be brought to heel, and then they’ll begin taking out individual websites they don’t like.
Free speech is already under intense assault, as are the other freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. This TikTok bill should be opposed by anyone who supports the First Amendment. We should all understand that freedom of speech only for speech you agree with and support is not freedom. It’s tyranny.
Every law should pass the test of "what could my political enemy do under this law?" For that reason I opposed the Patriot Act. We must stand up to this for the Press and the First Amendment NGOs are coopted.