Only the Gullible Could Cheer This TikTok Bill

Why I’m a “No” on the TikTok Bill

On Wednesday the House voted to pass a bill that would force ByteDance, the Chinese Parent company of Tik Tok to sell or be banned in U.S. app stores. A number of prominent Republicans, so-called conservative thought leader, podcasters, and even the renowned conservative think tank Heritage Foundation came out in support of the measure.

Ben Shapiro, for example, host of the enormously popular and influential Ben Shapiro Show, celebrated the bill’s passage, writing on ‘X’ that "It’s nice to see a bit of bipartisan sanity once in awhile.” But Shapiro, the Heritage Foundation, and every single person supporting this bill are all dead wrong.

It’s easy to be lulled into support of the bill as it’s been pitched as a binary choice between supporting the Communist Chinese or the United States. Even the Heritage Foundation wrote simply: “This bill will protect Americans from the influence of the CCP through TikTok.”

The allegation against TikTok is that the Chinese are using the app to gather user data and even spy on journalists. This isn’t news. The U.S. banned the use of TikTok on government-issued mobile devices more than a year ago—in February of 2023 over these concerns.

I might be less cynical and more prone to naively cheer the TikTok ban like Shapiro and the Heritage Foundation if it weren’t for the fact that our own Government and U.S. owned social media companies already engage in the exact same behavior that supposedly warrants this election year forced-sale of TikTok.

Under Barack Obama our own National Security Agency was outed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden for creating a mass surveillance program that was used to collect information on American citizens—you know, like TikTok.

Fox News reporter James Rosen—a journalist—was surveilled by the Obama Administration. His movements were monitored, his personal emails and cell phone records searched—all under the completely false premise that Rosen was a national security threat.

Throughout 2020 and beyond, the American owned social media giant Twitter worked with the federal Government and FBI to censor voices of dissent, ban accounts, and even turned over users’ private direct messages. In other words, twitter was doing exactly what TikTok does.

U.S. owned cell phone companies not only know where users are each time they make a call, but store the data for months and even years and routinely cooperate with government requests for personal information. The DOJ gained access to former President Trump’s Cell Phone data from January 6th over the invented insurrection lie.

Countless J6 protestors, who simply walked into the open doors of the Capitol that day to take selfies—and even others who weren’t—were tracked down by the FBI using their location data handed over by their cell phone carriers.

The CCP is certainly a foreign adversary but our own Government is a domestic adversary and engages in the exact same behavior, using U.S. owned companies to achieve the same ends. The same people rushing to prevent the CCP’s use of an app to spy on American citizens don’t seem concerned at all about our own Government’s use of apps to spy on the same Americans.

Then there is the issue of Congressional priorities. Why is banning or forcing the sale of TikTok more urgent than say, securing the border? Chinese nationals are illegally flooding into the United States under the Biden Administration’s open border policies—to the tune of 18,740 encounters between last October and the end of January. Chinese nationals are now the fastest growing demographic entering the U.S. illegally.

Is TikTok really a greater national security threat than the nearly ten million illegals that have invaded the country in less than four year? Hundreds of thousands of them from China?

TikTok may be spying on Americans but is it killing them? In 2023 more than 100,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses. The chemicals to make the synthetic opioid are supplied by China, of course.

The same Democrats that vehemently oppose securing the border are impassioned supporters of the TikTok bill. It’s odd that they aren’t particularly concerned that the Chinese are killing Americans with fentanyl or illegally entering the country but cannot tolerate for another moment the use of the Chinese owned popular video app.

The Chinese unleashed a deadly virus that killed more than a million Americans and Democrats defended the Chinese for years—smearing anyone that dared rightfully suggest the virus originated in a Chinese bio lab rather than bat soup. It was even deemed racist to draw attention to the Chinese origins of the virus—to do so was to invite violence against Asians in America.

These same hyper-sensitive Democrats to Asian feelings surrounding the Wuhan Flu are suddenly deeply insensitive as it relates to the Beijing based spy app.

Who benefits from the forced sale of TikTok? Supposedly Americans. But this is entirely dependent upon who buys TikTok. The federal government will ultimately approve who gets to buy the company.

Which app or company has done greater harm to Americans—TikTok or the Jack Dorsey/Parag Agrawal run twitter? Did TikTok interfere in the 2020 election by censoring users and the Hunter Biden laptop story?

Which company—the Chinese owned ByteDance or the Zuckerberg/American owned Meta—does more to protect free speech? Will Americans benefit by the sale of TikTok to a far-left activist?

Of course, a great many business owners and investors are enthusiastic supporters of the TikTok bill—chomping at the bit for the opportunity to acquire one of the most powerful and influential social media companies in existence.

I wonder how many champions of this bill have actually read it? Surprisingly, it’s only twelve pages. Even in its brevity it’s full of red flags. For starters the bill grants the President the authority to determine which company or companies must be forced to sell. This is an enormous amount of power.

While only companies deemed to be “controlled by a foreign adversary” can be targeted, both the meanings of a "foreign adversary” and “controlled” are misleading. A foreign adversary is simply someone who lives in or whose business operates principally in a foreign adversary country. Such foreign persons—one or multiple—need own no more than a 20% stake in any company in order for a company to be considered “controlled by a foreign adversary.”

The bill also specifies that any challenge to a President’s decision to force a company “controlled by a foreign adversary” to sell or be banned must be filed in the D.C. Circuit of Appeals—ensuring a company’s fate rests squarely in the hands of a reliably left-wing court.

It was this very Circuit court that ruled against pro-life advocates who wrote messages in chalk on sidewalks but approved of BLM protestors doing the same, for example.

It’s an election year and the push for this forced sale of TikTok and empowerment of Democrats is suspicious, to say the least. At a time when Democrats are desperate to control narratives and speech and are actively interfering in a third consecutive election, the circumstances and risks of permitting the federal government to handpick the new owner of an app used by one of the most coveted voter bases—the youth—far outweigh any benefits.

We need to slow down, resist emotion, and think logically. The last time we took such bait we handed over our liberty for a year or more. “It’s just fifteen days to slows the spread,” we were told. Like the TikTok bill, the supposed temporary shut down was also presented as a binary choice—shut down and be patriotic or resist and be accused of murdering your neighbor with a deadly virus.

The Democrats and Politicians are masters of providing cures intended to be worse than the disease. “Support gun laws or support the murder of children,” is parroted to convince Americans to give up their second amendment right. It’s an Alinsky tactic—effectively create a problem or even use a problem to further your political agenda.

In this case, we are being told “ban TikTok or support the Communist Chinese.” It feels like an all too familiar trap. If we’ve learned nothing else since 2020 it’s that the Government cannot be trusted. This bill is a trap. Those championing it haven’t learned a thing. They’re gullible fools. When was the last time any bipartisan legislation was good for America?