Bipartisan House Vote Pushes Deep State TikTok Ban—Who Really Benefits? w/ Michael Tracey
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
TikTok Ban (9:26)
Interview with Michael Tracey (40:38)
Ending (1:24:31)
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Whenever you have been covering political events for as long as I have, and as intensively as I have, and yes, I know that makes me sound very old to say, whenever you've been covering events for as long as I have, it is genuinely very difficult to become truly shocked by things you see in Washington.
But watching what has been happening over the last week, as virtually all bipartisan establishment Washington has rapidly and even urgently united over a bill, a rather draconian bill, has actually shocked me.
Not only because of the speed and the mindlessness that has driven this unity in official Washington, but also the widespread support for it outside of Washington that it has generated I mean, numerous political factions that usually claim to be very skeptical and even adversarial to the very DC groups that are uniting in defense and support of this bill.
Seemingly out of nowhere, overnight, the leaders of both political parties, with the sole exception of one Donald J. Trump, have decided that it is suddenly a major nationalist priority, one of extreme urgency, to either force the extremely popular social media app TikTok to divest itself of its Chinese ownership within a very short amount of time, a corporate feat that is very difficult, if not impossible, to meet,
Or if they fail to do so, have American law require that Apple, Google, Amazon, and all other big tech mega corporations ban TikTok from operating further in the United States.
The law that is moving at breakneck speed through the Congress and was just passed by the House overwhelmingly and toward the desk of Joe Biden, who was vowed to sign it the minute it hits his desk, is not really just about TikTok alone.
Instead, it vests awesome new powers in the hands of the President to ban a wide range of social media platforms and websites that can be said to be owned by or in service to any country deemed a foreign adversary by the United States.
Now there are so many glaring questions that ought to be immediately apparent and concerning and yet really very few people seem to be answering them or asking them.
To begin with, the push to ban TikTok has been lurking around Washington since at least 2020 in the Trump administration, four full years ago, when Trump used that threat to extract a series of concessions from TikTok about how they store data on their American users, as well as their content moderation decisions.
We've been reporting on this for a long time, including demonstrating how TikTok agreed to turn over control of American data to Oracle and even turn over a lot of content moderation decisions to the US security state.
Now calls to ban TikTok have really gone nowhere for all these years until suddenly in the last few months, they took on a matter of great immediacy, at least as its congressional advocates tell it.
What changed in the last few months that made what seemed to be a fringe and unlikely idea, that even TikTok believed was unlikely, suddenly transform into a barreling train that seems ready to crush and roll over anyone or anything that seeks to stand in its way, on its way to implementation?
Isn't that a very important question to ask?
There has to be something that has changed in the past few months That has rendered this bill a kind of wish list that seemed very remote into a virtual inevitability overnight.
There's concrete reporting that actually sheds great light on the answer, reporting that is as disturbing as it is illuminating.
Then there is the fact that the call to ban TikTok originated with the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, all of whom insisted that allowing its continuation in its current form is for some reason a grave threat to national security.
But I seem to recall, don't you, that so much of our politics over the past seven years, on both the populist right and the anti-establishment left, has been driven by grave concern over the attempt by the U.S.
security state to seize greater control over the flow of speech and information over the internet.
Remember the Twitter files and the ensuing court rulings that the Biden administration gravely violated the First Amendment?
By having agencies like the CIA and the CDC coerce big tech platforms to censor dissent?
Was I dreaming that?
Where did all that concern go about having the U.S.
security state consolidate control over our social media platforms?
How is it possible that the very same factions that spent the last seven years warning, shrilly, of the grave dangers that come from the U.S.
government controlling the flow of speech over the internet, Now suddenly want to consolidate even greater power in their hands by allowing them to seize control of the one massive social media platform used by Americans that they don't yet fully control.
The one lesson I always hoped we had learned over the past 25 years since the beginning of the War on Terror, but so often have to reluctantly conclude that we actually haven't learned this lesson, is that the universal tactic used by the U.S.
government when it wants to seize more power over the American population is to scare them relentlessly about some foreign threat that everyone agrees is bad and that they hate.
or Al Qaeda or ISIS or China or right wing white supremacists in the United States, all in order to induce people to unite around this common enemy and then agree to anything in exchange for protection from it.
That's exactly what's going on here.
And beyond all of that, as happened the last time when the US government said it wanted to ban TikTok, and then offered a bill that it said would achieve that, the bill that is now being presented goes far, far beyond that.
We'll talk later in the show to the intrepid independent reporter Michael Tracy, who has really been doing a great job of closely tracking and analyzing the bill's language to understand what it actually does, which at the end of the day is more important than allowing politicians and media figures to just keep screaming China over and over and over until you're officially and sufficiently scared that you're willing to give up more control Over online speech in the name of this scary foreign villain.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
If there is one rule in Washington over the last 25 years, and I had to pick one universal unyielding rule that has proven true, it is that when the establishment wigs of both parties unite in overwhelming numbers in the name of national security that has as its primary it is that when the establishment wigs of both parties unite in overwhelming numbers in the name of national security that has as its primary purpose seizing greater power for itself in the name of protecting Americans from whatever foreign threat or domestic
Very bad things always end up taking place.
And I would suggest that the level of skepticism that we as American citizens ought to have should be at its highest exactly when both parties are telling us that there is some foreign or domestic threat that is so scary and so dangerous and so grave That the only way to stop it is to hand over more power to the federal government and to the executive branch agencies in the U.S.
security state in order to stop it.
That is exactly what is happening now at a remarkable level of speed and bipartisan unity in Washington that deserves more than just skepticism.
There are a lot of very serious questions that I'm having a hard time finding answers to.
And that's what we want to do tonight.
This is a topic that we have covered many times before.
This issue has been around for quite some time now, which I think is really part of the point.
Here, for example, might be the first time that we covered the issue of whether TikTok should either be banned or its Chinese parent, ByteDance, forced to sell TikTok as a condition for remaining in the United States.
There you see the show, March 31st, 2023, so almost a full year ago.
And The first part of the show was about Rand Paul blocking a censorship bill, and then we had Darren Vadeon to discuss the Douglas Mackey verdict.
But there you see at the bottom, Ron Paul blocks authoritarian anti-TikTok bill.
That was what we called the censorship bill.
was Rand Paul's success in blocking a bill that was designed to ostensibly ban TikTok, and yet it went further, much further beyond that.
And over the years, over the last three, four years, they've had multiple instances where they've summoned the CEO of TikTok to the Senate and to Congress to try and rake him over the coals and to try and imply that even though he's not even Chinese, he's Singaporean, And even though he's the opposite of an ideologue, he's a capitalist.
Somebody who left Singapore to go to London School of Economics, then went on to Goldman Sachs in New York has the exact classical pedigree of a capitalist trying to make money, not an ideologue trying to Spread some ideology let alone communism.
TikTok is a company clearly intent on maximizing profit above all else.
This is an idea that has been lurking around Washington for a long time to ban TikTok and to ban it on the grounds that the Chinese control TikTok and are using it to spy on our youth and to propagandize American citizens and yet it's really not gone anywhere.
There's been no consolidated bipartisan unity in favor of it.
There's been no attempt to prioritize it legislatively.
All of that has changed radically, dramatically in the last several weeks in a way that is extremely rare in Washington to watch the two parties come together in a virtually unanimous way.
And decide that not only is a legislative measure of this significance urgently necessary, but it has to happen immediately.
They're using legislative maneuvers they almost never use to catapult to the top of the agenda.
Here's the New York Times from earlier this week.
House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app.
Quote, the legislation received wide bipartisan support with both Republicans and Democrats showing an eagerness to appear tough on China.
Quote, Republican leaders fast-tracked the bill through the House with limited debate.
And it passed on a lopsided vote of 352 to 65, reflecting widespread backing for legislation that would take direct aim at China in an election year.
Now, among those 65, No Votes was a very interesting coalition of a coalition we've seen before that we're very interested in that we hope continues to grow that you might call the anti-establishment left and the populist right or the anti-establishment right and the populist left.
It had no votes from people like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And Nancy Mace and other Trump-supporting members of Congress who associate with the America First or populist or MAGA agenda on the one hand.
And then you have members of the squad like AOC and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
And Ro Khanna and others who identify as progressive who, and it's not the first time, have come together.
They came together, for example, to try and ban American troops from continuing to occupy Syria.
You've seen this coalition come together before to try and combat this bipartisan establishment agenda that often appears.
And yet, They have nowhere near enough representation in Congress to stop a bipartisan majority when it wants to unite as the leaders of both political parties insisted on uniting suddenly and out of the blue.
Again, with the one exception being Donald Trump, who warned that a ban of TikTok would do little other than force tens of billions of Americans onto Facebook and onto Google, especially onto Facebook.
Which he pointed out has been frequently used by the U.S.
government to censor the flow of information.
Why would you want to eliminate one of the social media apps, especially the one that the American government has the greatest difficulty in controlling, and consolidate even more power in the hands of the U.S.
security state to determine what platforms Americans can use and therefore the types of information to which they can and cannot be exposed?
Now, this question, let's just leave aside for a minute your views on the merits of the bill.
I know a lot of you believe that TikTok is a company, an app that is controlled by the Chinese government, that Americans don't go there and express their own views.
They're somehow mind controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, that the Chinese Communist Party manipulates Americans into believing things that China wants them to believe.
That there's all kinds of spying going on on TikTok even though I've never heard an answer to what kinds of data the Chinese can get from TikTok about Americans that they can't just buy on the open market that's collected and sold by Google and Facebook and other big tech giants that collect and curate all sorts of private data about Americans then sell it to advertisers and sell it on the open market, sell it even to the U.S.
security state.
But let's leave aside for a second The issue of whether this is a good or bad bill, whether it's a good idea to try and expel China from being in the United States via TikTok.
And we have covered at length all these issues about whether TikTok really is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, whether there's any evidence it's being used to propagandize Americans.
Let's leave all of that to the side.
I want to focus on this question.
Why is it That a bill that has been around Washington for four years and that has made almost no progress in being turned into law, and there's a lot of reasons for that.
TikTok is a very powerful company.
They have a lot of lobbyists that work for them.
American politicians are afraid of banning TikTok because of how many tens of millions of people, including young people, use it and the rage that would ensue if it actually got banned.
Why suddenly, in the last four weeks, Is there this explosion of bipartisan unity and willingness to take the leap to hold hands?
Nancy Pelosi and Marco Rubio.
Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton.
Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell.
Pretty much the whole gang of Washington are all ready now to join together and to do this.
Why?
Why did that suddenly happen in the last, say, three months?
Now, I can give you my own views, my own speculation, my own informed understanding of what I think caused that, but I'm going to refrain from doing that because there are mainstream outlets that have done a lot of reporting, including ones that people generally find more trustworthy than others, that provide the answer to this question.
There are media outlets asking this question.
Why is it that suddenly this bill has taken on so much force?
One of the outlets that asked this question and provided the answer is the Wall Street Journal in a news article earlier this week entitled, quote, how TikTok was blindsided by a U.S.
bill that could ban it.
Executives at the app thought they had fended off these attacks.
Behind the scenes, lawmakers and Biden officials were working to force its ban or sale.
Why is that?
Here's the Wall Street Journal's explanation.
Quote, Jacob Helberg, a member of a congressional research and advisory panel called the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has been working on building a bipartisan bi-coastal alliance of China hawks, united in part by their desire to ban TikTok.
It was slow going until October 7th.
So, this was a bill that was having a great deal of difficulty until October 7th.
October 7th, of course, was the day that Hamas attacked Israel, setting off this horrific war that's still ongoing into its sixth month of Israel destroying Gaza.
Why would October 7th, A conflict between Hamas and Israel, what would that have to do with suddenly taking a bill ostensibly about China that was slow going and then suddenly accelerating it?
Here's the Wall Street Journal.
Quote, the attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok.
That's the answer so far from the Wall Street Journal.
What changed in the last few months was October 7th, the Hamas attack on Israel, the ensuing Israeli attack on Gaza.
The article goes on.
People who historically hadn't taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos.
And what they saw is an increase in anti-Semitic content posted to the app.
I just, I have to stop here again because I just want to make sure this point gets across.
And the Wall Street Journal is by far not the only credible outlet reporting this.
People who historically had not really cared about TikTok before, that's why it wasn't making any progress in Washington, suddenly became concerned with how Israel was portrayed on TikTok.
That is why it picked up so much steam in Washington.
Because a lot of Democrats, a lot of Republicans who did not think that TikTok, banning TikTok was a priority, suddenly realized there was one platform that was allowing a lot of criticism of this foreign country called Israel.
And when they saw that, they said, wait a minute, TikTok actually does seem to be a problem.
To the United States, not because of China or anything having to do with the Chinese Communist Party, but because it seems like there's a lot of criticism of Israel taking place on TikTok.
And that is what we can't allow.
Now, again, this is not my saying this.
This is reporting from the Wall Street Journal about why suddenly this bill has made its way through Congress.
Anthony Goldblum, a San Francisco-based data scientist and tech executive, started analyzing data that TikTok published in its dashboard for, and buyers, showing the number of times users watch video with certain hashtags.
He found far more views for videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags than those with pro-Israel hashtags.
Now, what is the crime?
That TikTok was found to have committed in the last several months that suddenly caused the bipartisan obsession with punishing it and even banning it?
Here's the Wall Street Journal.
There were far more views for videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags than those with anti-Israel hashtags.
Remember when Nikki Haley said in what seemed like such a laughably preposterous assertion That for every 18 minutes or whatever it was that you spend on TikTok, you become 32% more anti-Semitic?
She was responding to studies like these that show that a lot of people who use TikTok, more people who use TikTok were pro-Palestinian than pro-Israel.
Now, the last time I checked, The American Constitution and the current Supreme Court interpretation of it, as an American citizen, you are actually allowed to be more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israel if you want to be.
One of your rights as an American citizen is to take sides in a particular foreign conflict or to not take sides at all.
And people on TikTok were taking sides and they were taking side the side of Palestine more than they were taking the side of Israel.
Now, that is not a surprise.
And the reason it's not a surprise is because polling data has shown for a long time.
That young Americans, including young American Jews, are becoming increasingly critical of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.
You don't have to like that, but that is the reality.
And since TikTok is a social media platform where more young people go to express their political beliefs and find political community, it stands to reason that TikTok, as a place where more young people are, Would have more pro-Palestinian content than pro-Israel content.
Whereas social media outlets that tend to cater to older people, like Facebook, probably you would expect to find the reverse.
Now, as somebody who believes that the Israelis are more at fault than the Palestinians, and who have made my views very clear on that, it would never occur to me in a million years To look at Facebook and see that there's far more pro-Israel content on Facebook than pro-Palestinian conflict and think to myself, well, we need to do something about that.
We need to ban Facebook.
We need to change its ownership.
Because their views allowed on Facebook to proliferate that I find highly disagreeable.
And yet the people in Congress looked at a social media platform called TikTok that for years they were fine with having exist.
And saw that there were too many criticisms of Israel being permitted to proliferate on the platform.
And it is that finding about Israel, not about China, which according to the Wall Street Journal is what accelerated and then caused this massive urgency to ban TikTok.
Are you comfortable with that?
Now, The Economist In March, reported something quite similar, which was an article entitled, Will TikTok Still Exist in America?
And it began picking up on this sentiment in Congress as well.
As Congress starts the clock on a ban, the app must consider its options.
And they too ask the question of what suddenly changed.
Quote, the proposal gained momentum, partly as a consequence of disquiet over the app's handling of misinformation and anti-Semitic content following Hamas's attack on Israel in October.
TikTok's effort to stall the bill failed spectacularly.
So those are two major credible media outlets telling you that the reason why this bill suddenly picked up steam is not because of concern about China, But because of concern about protecting Israel.
Protecting Israel not from foreign actors but from the views of American citizens.
Being concerned that TikTok permits American citizens who are critical of Israel to freely express their views about Israel and Palestine.
Executive Director of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, who long before October 7th has been a crusader for censorship of things he doesn't like, he was urging Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson for years, went on to morning Joe and essentially made clear that the concern of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is that there are too many social media platforms
In particular, the ones catering to a younger generation that are allowing too much anti-Israel content in the United States.
Here's what he told Morning Joe.
Let's be frank about it.
We've been on this show, we've talked about Instagram, we've talked about Twitter or X, and you've seen my back and forth with Elon Musk, but we need to talk about TikTok.
TikTok, if you will, It is the 24-7 news channel of so many of our young people, and it's like Al Jazeera on steroids, amplifying and intensifying the anti-Semitism and the anti-Zionism with no repercussions.
I've got to ask you, a lot of lamentations about the fact that TikTok's ownership is Chinese, but you know what?
Oracle owns 10% of the company.
General Atlantic owns a piece of the company.
Our friends at Sequoia Capital own a piece of the company.
So does Sequoia and General Atlantic, does Oracle want to be responsible for spreading anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?
It's time to talk about TikTok.
And I think we need members of Congress to be asking them, why are they doing it up?
And let me be clear, I've met with Shou Chu, the CEO.
I've talked to their leadership, but it is long past time for TikTok and its owners and its investors to step up and say, enough, we're going to take action.
Frank, the executive director of VDO goes on to television in December and says, it is time to put our foot down.
About not allowing TikTok to allow so much anti-Israel content and two months later the American Congress is ready to ban it for the first time in years as this proposal has been circulating as media outlets make clear that that inside Congress is in fact the impetus for why this is happening.
Where are all my conservative friends who are so deeply concerned About how the internet is being controlled in order to suppress dissent that Washington dislikes.
Shouldn't you be up in arms about this?
Now, one of the leaders, probably the leader in the House who has spearheaded the so far successful effort to get this bill passed through the House is Congressman Mike Gallagher.
And he spoke to Barry Weiss's outlet.
Barry Weiss is one of the leading pro-Israel fanatics in the United States.
This is her outlet and he spoke to her.
About why he is, as her magazine put it, the man.
Quote, when I asked Gallagher why there was so much bipartisan momentum behind the bill, he had a simple answer.
What is that simple answer?
Is it China?
No, it is not.
The simple answer is October 7th.
Why are we hearing so much about China as the reason we need to ban TikTok when every single indicator And reporting and even the statements from the leader in the Congress of this movement are saying to you that's not actually the reason.
The reason is not China, but Israel.
Quote, that's when I felt the momentum shift back in our direction, he explained.
I can't tell you how many Democratic colleagues I had coming up to me and saying they had seen the anti-Semitism on the platform.
They had seen the whole Osama bin Laden letter, the whole Osama bin Laden letter to America thing, and are asking, quote, hey, where are we on this?
We've got to do something.
Back in November, Gallagher wrote an essay for the Free Press on the way in which TikTok was boosting pro-Hamas propaganda and suppressing pro-Israel posts.
The entire liberal case for censoring social media has been that the reason we have to censor social media is twofold.
We have to stop disinformation and we have to prevent hate speech against marginalized groups.
The case for banning TikTok or forcing a change in its ownership to someone more malleable that we can control better as the United States government Is that we have to stop disinformation against Israel and we have to stop hate speech against Israel as well.
It's exactly the same case as left liberals have been making about why the internet needs to be censored, except this time it's finding extreme levels of support in the Republican Party and in the conservative movement because, as we have endlessly documented since October 7th, there are large parts, by no means no, but large parts of the Republican there are large parts, by no means no, but large parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement that endlessly wave the flag of free speech and then put that flag down the minute it comes to Israel and pick Same censorship theories that the liberal left uses.
Here from CNN in March of 2023, so this month, just a couple days ago, the headline is the House GOP digs in on China-linked payments to Biden family member in a new member.
Now, I want to raise this just before we get to Michael Tracy, who's waiting on the line.
We love to make him wait.
Once I heard he was on the line, I decided to go over a few more things just to make him wait a little longer.
Though I am anxious to speak to him because he's done a great job analyzing the text of the bill, which I think is crucial as well.
I just want to remind you that for many years in right-wing media, in conservative political discourse, one of the primary attacks on Joe Biden, if not the leading attack on Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party writ large, is that Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, the DNC, are captive to, controlled by Beijing.
They're in the pockets of the Chinese Communist Party.
They're afraid to confront the Chinese Party.
They are essentially just a party, an arm of China, similar to the way liberals think of the Republican Party as being an arm of the Kremlin.
Conservatives think of Democrats as being an arm of the Chinese government.
And here is CNN.
House GOP digs in on the China-linked payments to the Biden family members.
This has been the attack on Biden for years that they are in bed with the Chinese.
It is unclear what services were provided to obtain this exorbitant amount of money, Republican Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said in a statement.
House Oversight Republicans claim that these transactions raise questions about foreign influence over the Biden family, but there is still no conclusive evidence that Joe Biden was involved in his son's business matters, and there is no indication he abused his powers in public office to help his family make money. and there is no indication he abused his powers in Here is James Comer talking on May 10th of 2023 about the links between the Biden family and China.
That's why those funds had to go through an intermediary in what appears to be an attempt to hide the transfers from the Chinese.
They also couldn't explain why the Bidens received over $1 million in 16 different wire transfers over a period of three months to at least five different banks.
The president, when confronted with this information, said it wasn't true.
Instead of being honest with the American people, President Biden has claimed since the 2020 election that his family has not received money from China.
That was a lie in 2020, and he continues to lie to the American people now.
The Bidens have received millions of dollars from China.
It is inconceivable that the President did not know it.
The White House refuses to correct the President's statements, showing the President is now using the federal government to run interference for his families and his own role in these schemes.
Now I want to say a few remarks about the developments last week.
A week ago I sent a subpoena to the FBI.
Okay, so that has been the attack on Joe Biden.
He is economically tied to the Chinese, just like liberals say Trump was tied to Russia.
Here from Politico, just to give you one last sense, from July of 2023, the headline, Biden's China Diplomacy Spree Hits the Republicans' Great Wall of Scorn.
Biden tries to convince China hawks and Beijing that talking about talking is worth it.
And here was the Republican attack on Joe Biden.
Quote, Anthony Blinken's outreach to Beijing was, quote, weak and desperate and constituted, quote, pandering to the Chinese Communist Party.
Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, said in a statement last month.
Now, let me ask you this.
If Joe Biden is captive to the Chinese Communist Party, if he does their bidding, if he is willing to serve their interests for profit if the Democratic Party depends upon their relationship with Beijing, if the entire political establishment in Washington is tied at the hip to China, which has been one of the primary beliefs of the populist right in the United States.
Why is it that anyone is now willing to believe that Joe Biden suddenly woke up and joined hands with the entire leadership of the Democratic Party who has been accused for years of being captive to the Chinese and then suddenly woke up and decided, oh my God, it's time that we have to purge the United States of the evils of Chinese propaganda and Chinese influence in our country.
Ben Shapiro today said it's so nice that finally there's some bipartisan sense going on.
Now, let's leave aside the fact that Ben Shapiro's entire foreign policy, almost every plank of it, is supported by bipartisan consensus in Washington.
Having the U.S.
finance the war in Ukraine, having the U.S.
finance the war in Israel, bombing Yemen, bombing targets in Iraq and Syria, encircling China with military bases and now banning TikTok.
Ben Shapiro's idea, like, oh, finally, some bipartisanship.
Bipartisanship is something that Ben Shapiro finds in almost every one of his foreign policy views.
But let's leave that aside.
If the Republican Party and the conservative movement really believes that Joe Biden is captive to the Chinese Communist Party, why are they also so sure and convinced That the motive behind Joe Biden's support for this bill and the Democratic Party's support for this bill is they've suddenly decided to get tough with China and to kick China out of the United States.
Isn't it much more rational to believe that there's some other motive here that is causing the U.S.
security state that has been agitating for years for TikTok to either be banned or to be transferred to control of a company much more like Facebook or Google that they can control much more easily in terms of, quote, content moderation and the other kinds of information that flow over it.
So there's no dissent allowed.
So there's no more wars where people are free to freely express their opposition the way they have been with the bipartisan support for the war in Israel.
Where are all the people who are so concerned about the U.S.
security state consolidating control over The internet and the ability of Americans to use social media to express their political views, it seems to all have evaporated simply by a few utterances of the word China that send people, some people, into such frenzies of fear that they're willing to hand over to the government control over the internet, very similar to the way that Europeans and American liberals have done the minute people start uttering the word Russia.
At the very least, Doesn't a lot of this deserve skepticism given that the winner of this bill will be either the fact that tens of millions of Americans who now use TikTok will be forced onto Facebook and Google, platforms we know are easily controlled by the U.S.
security state if TikTok ends up being banned, Or if a American company takes over TikTok.
There's reports today that Trump's former Treasury Secretary, the extremely wealthy Seth Mnuchin, is trying to lead a purchase of TikTok.
That it ends up in much friendlier hands, hands much friendlier to the U.S.
security state, who will be just as malleable when it comes to requests or orders from the CDC and the CIA, the FBI, about what to censor and what not to censor.
When you have reporting that is telling you that the real reason this bill is rushing through Congress is not for the stated reason, which is China, but because of bipartisan concern over how freely people are to express their criticisms of Israel, Then, at the very least, you should be extremely concerned about the implications for free speech, which we've all come together to agree is a value that has to be very aggressively safeguarded.
All right, so let's delve a little bit into the bill itself and some related topics.
And to do that, we're going to bring on a friend of the show, a friend of mine as well, a friend of yours as well.
I know from all the very positive reaction that comes whenever he comes onto the show, and that is Michael Tracy.
Michael, good evening.
Welcome to the show.
It's always great to see you.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks Glenn, and the commenters are no friends of mine.
I'll just say that.
Sometimes they love you, sometimes they hate you.
I think it depends on your behavior.
So if you're well behaved, I think you're going to get a lot of positive feedback.
So let's see how your mood is tonight and how your comportment goes.
Now, let me begin with the following question, Michael.
The last time there was a bill that was presented as a bill to ban TikTok, Even people like Jesse Watters on Fox News ended up noticing right away that the bill went way beyond that.
And he confronted Lindsey Graham on the air about his support, Lindsey Graham's support for it.
Lindsey Graham was embarrassed and said, you know what, I'm going to have to go back and look at this bill.
Is the bill that is currently making its way to Joe Biden's desk, has passed the House on its way to the Senate, a bill that narrowly targets TikTok?
Or is it a bill that best broader power in the hands of the executive branch with regards to control over social media?
The bill goes well beyond merely proscribing TikTok.
But we should clarify up front that this would constitute the imposition of a federal prohibition on TikTok.
The word prohibition is in the actual legislative text.
So this would bar TikTok from American internet service providers, app stores, etc.
And it would constitute a classic federal prohibition.
So I think that should be Hold on, let me interrupt.
It would bar TikTok in the event that they are unsuccessful in spinning off TikTok from ByteDance within the prescribed period of time that the bill allows.
In other words, if TikTok can find a buyer and can buy it away from ByteDance within six months and A lot of experts have said that it's almost impossible with a company this size, but assuming they're able to do that, TikTok could just continue but under different ownership.
Yeah, or another way of putting it is if TikTok and ByteDance don't comply with radical U.S.
demands for a forced divestiture within six months, then that's the time at which there will be a federal prohibition imposed.
But the point is that the legislation sets up the mechanism by which to impose that prohibition, and also it sets a countdown on the clock.
So it's six months from now, or six months from time of the document, which conveniently would end up being a month or two before the 2024 presidential election, which is another sort of interesting side issue here, potentially.
But in terms of vesting the executive, I mean the president, with unilateral powers, that's an aspect of this bill which hasn't gotten as much attention as I think it ought to because the tic-tac aspect is getting, understandably, a lot of attention.
But there's this other component which empowers the president, whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump or whomever, to, on his own accord, without any checks and balances from Congress, because Congress is ceding this power explicitly to the president.
So it's affirmatively ceding a power to the president for him to wield unilaterally.
The president can, from this point onward, designate an application.
And an application is defined not just as a mobile app, like TikTok, but also any website and other kinds of internet services, the president can designate that so-called application a national security threat totally on his own whim.
And all he has to do is submit a public notice announcing this and then submit a report to Congress.
But he doesn't have to obtain Congress's consent, right?
So in the American system of government, the executive branch has for decades been arrogating more and more power to itself To the disadvantage of especially the legislative branch, arguably to some degree, the judicial branch, but particularly with vis-a-vis Congress, right?
So this is, to some extent, a continuation of that trend.
But what they're arrogating to the executive now is an incredibly radical power for a president to be able to wield unilaterally.
Something that Congressman Warren Davidson, who is one of the very few Republicans who did vote against the bill yesterday, one of 15, Republican from Ohio,
He brought up the prospect that given the powers enumerated here and afforded to the president, other apps down the line, well beyond TikTok, could be subject to banning, such as Telegram, which given the vagaries of how the bill defines what it means to be controlled by a foreign adversary,
You know, a president who has a particular agenda to shut down Telegram because they can claim some national security threat now has the tools at his disposal to potentially do so by claiming some spurious and tangential connection to, say, Russia.
Because the country that are designated as official foreign adversaries under this legislative rubric are not just China.
It's China, but in addition to China, the standard litany of Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
So people should just understand that although the TikTok specific elements of this bill are fairly momentous enough, there's also a comparably momentous component to the bill that empowers the government, in particular the president, to take unilateral censorship action against a whole array of other potential apps.
So Michael, I want to show you a, there are several people in Congress, very serious and smart people in Congress who have amassed very convincing arguments against this bill, including right before we went on air, there was an interview that Tuck Carlson conducted with Senator Rand Paul, who obviously has been a opponent of this sort of government control for a while.
I also want to show you a two and a half minute speech that Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky gave about why his concerns are are in his view, very compelling.
But in fairness, I also wanna show you what I found to be one of the more effective speeches given by a member of Congress in favor of the need to ban TikTok.
And that came from former House Speaker, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.
And I wanna ask you to comment on this very powerful argument that she made.
Let's listen to what she said earlier today. - Glenn, I have a sense that you're being, Glenn, I detect sarcasm. - No, no, this is a very potent argument.
It's something that she appeals to a metaphor and I want to hear what it is that you have to say about it.
This is not an attempt to ban TikTok.
It's an attempt to make TikTok better.
Tic-tac-toe.
A winner.
A winner.
Okay, Michael, so her argument is that what essentially is happening here is as the child game... You know, I never thought of that argument before.
I know, but it's a little complicated, so let me explain it to the audience in case they didn't get it.
So, there's the child game tic-tac-toe, where you make a line, a diagonal line of X's or O's, whatever the case may be.
Whoever wins, you can make it horizontal or vertical.
And essentially what this bill is doing is, it's a tic-tac-toe victory because it's making TikTok better.
Now, I found this to be one of the more compelling arguments.
Presented by Advocates of the Bill, and I want to, in fairness to the case, hear your response to what it is that she had to say.
You know, Glenn, my IQ was never high enough to excel at tic-tac?
Tic-tac-toe!
Tic-tac-toe!
And so, you know, I'm just going to defer to Nancy Pelosi on the validity of that analogy because, again, my mental processing power is not up to par with hers to grasp the fine nuances of the analogy that she's drawing.
I don't know if you're right, but I don't know if you could... It definitely couldn't be the case, right, that she, just because she's, like, 82 and she's a member of this geriatric political class that never... that clings to power until they literally die, like Dianne Feinstein.
I guess elderly women in the Bay Area have this tendency.
I remember, first of all, I don't know if you could only hear her or if you could see her, but she actually made a very dramatic hand gesture where she illustrated what a tic-tac-toe victory looks like to illustrate what this show was.
I think it's a Native American hand chop she was doing.
It was a little cultural appropriation, but I think it was for a good cause.
You know, I remember when we did the Snowden reporting, which was obviously very complicated, and you had these 83-year-old people on these judiciary committees and these national security committees who were responsible for debating some of the reform, and they could barely turn on a computer.
And I remember them trying to explain why NSA spying was so critical.
All right, let me show you A couple of minutes of Thomas Massey's argument, because I think this is important to listen to, and I want to get a sense of your reaction to a couple of the points.
Hey, Clay, can I comment on something Pelosi said that's actually important real quickly for 30 seconds?
Yes.
Jokes aside, and her maybe partial senility aside, at 82 or something, she started off that whole tirade with a complete lie.
And that's what lots of Democrats have been doing with respect to this bill.
They say it's not a ban.
They say TikTok is lying to its users when they claim it's a ban.
They say that opponents of the bill are making things up or exaggerating when they characterize it as a ban.
That is itself a lie to assuage what would otherwise be a very significant uproar from their constituents when they realize that Congress is actually serious about barring them from using one of the most popular apps in the country.
So it's just a lie.
They did a legislative end run where they could set up a pretext to say, oh, it's just a forced divestiture.
It's not actually the government banning the platform because that could raise constitutional concerns.
So we're going to do that indirectly, even though the government is generally barred from doing things indirectly that which it cannot do directly.
But anyway, it's political deception for Democrats who are not going to be quite as gung ho with some of the Republicans about just railing against the infiltration of communist Chinese and stuff.
but they still nonetheless voted to ban TikTok, And I just, I think it should be, you know, underscored that Pelosi and lots of other Democrats in the House yesterday who have been making the exact same point, because the talking point memo clearly went out.
Again, the way they're doing it is, you know, they know that if they just passed a bill saying, Americans are hereby barred from using TikTok, or TikTok is hereby barred from offering services in America, or Apple and Google are barred from offering this app in their store, it'd be immediately challengeable on First Amendment grounds.
So what they're trying to do is write the bill in a way that masks the unconstitutionality by pretending it's doing something else.
So what they're pretending to do is not ban TikTok, They're pretending to require divestiture by ByteDance of TikTok by selling it to another company within an allotted period of time.
And if they fail to do so, then Apple and Google and the rest are banned from offering updates and other versions of the app, including new versions or downloaded versions of the app.
In the Google and Apple store, which incidentally was the model that was used by Democrats to pressure Google and Apple to ban Parler at the time that Parler became the number one most popular app after Donald Trump was banned by both Facebook and Twitter.
They pressured Google and Apple to kick off Parler, to ban Parler, pressured Amazon to remove it as well, and now they're trying to legally implement This model, and the problem with it is, is that in order to sell a company of the size of TikTok, which is probably one of the largest companies, if not the largest company ever proposed to be sold, if this actually ends up happening, the idea that you could do this in six months is a virtual impossibility.
So it's, although it's not written as a ban necessarily, that's obviously the intention of it.
This whole, you know, pretext of what we're just forcing them to divest.
Is something that is designed to get to the ban and then pretend that they didn't actually ban it.
All right, let me... Glenn, the actual sponsor, the chief sponsor of the bill, who you played a clip from earlier, Mike Gallagher, Republican from Wisconsin, he has said over and over again, this is not hidden, this is in open public statements, he has said that his intent with these legislative actions is to ban, quote, ban TikTok as soon as we can.
So Glenn, question to you.
Do you remember when Trump tried to impose the travel ban on the majority of Muslim countries and they claimed that it was not religiously discriminatory because it was technically about the nationality of the people who were coming and then the courts found that they could discern easily from Trump's public statements that his intent was actually to impose religious discrimination because he said he wanted to ban Muslims from the country?
Couldn't the legislative intent of, like, the dozens of Republicans, including the chief sponsors and the committee chairs who were integral to ushering through this bill at warp speed, they just said out, like, Kathy McMorris-Rogers, the chair of this House and Energy subcommittee, Mike Gallagher, who is the lead co-sponsor, but they said it overtly and unabashedly that they are trying to ban TikTok.
So, like, couldn't a court make that connection in the similar way that they made that connection with Trump?
What happened was TikTok issued a statement on Twitter as part of their official account saying, look, although this bill is written as a bill requiring us to divest, the reality is the only inevitable outcome is it will ban TikTok in the United States because we'll never be able to comply in time.
You had major leaders in the Congress and in the Senate come and quote tweet that tweet by TikTok and say, you're absolutely right.
Our goal is to ban you from the United States.
We want you gone.
Now, How the court decides to interpret the law, it depends in reality, especially according to conservative jurisprudence.
The way you interpret a bill is strictly through the text of the bill itself.
You don't look outside to the debates about the bill.
You only do that if there's a lack of clarity.
So a lot of it depends on what interpretive methods the Supreme Court ends up using.
But the ACLU has come out in sort of the old ACLU style way.
I wish they had done this with Parler.
They didn't, but they're doing it here.
And they're saying this is an attempt by the government to pretend that they aren't doing something because they know that what they want to do and what the real goal is is prohibited.
So they have a pretext about about trying to do something else.
And I think at the very least, those statements by those leaders of the effort to get this bill implemented, obviously can't help the cause if and when it gets to the Supreme Court.
All right, let's listen to Thomas Massey, who is easily one of the leading civil libertarians in the Republican Party, along with Rand Paul.
And he has a, I think, very thoughtful reflection on what the real goal of this bill is.
Needless to say, Thomas Massie as a libertarian has zero love for the Chinese Communist Party or for any left-wing country or regime on the planet.
That is not something, an accusation to which he's vulnerable.
And yet here he is making an extremely compelling case about what is really going on here.
Let's just take a couple minutes to listen and then we can talk about it.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I know the other side is sincere, and we've not questioned that here today, and I won't question their sincerity.
In fact, I think they've identified at least three problems that we have in America.
Moral decay of our society, invasion of Americans' privacy, and our competitiveness with China.
But in this case, their cure is worse than the diseases.
You know, there are ways to get at these root problems.
We just haven't taken it upon ourselves to address those root problems with actual legislative solutions that have been put forth here in Congress.
For instance, Mr. Warren Davidson's The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.
We'd put a strong stake in the ground to protect Americans' privacy, whether it's from our own government or some foreign governments.
That is the kind of thing we need.
We need warrants in the FISA program.
You shouldn't be able to—our government shouldn't be able to spy on Americans without a warrant, yet they are.
Let's bring that to the floor and vote on it.
These are the kind of cures we need, not the bill that's offered here today.
The bill that's offered here today, even though I know it's offered genuinely, it could also be named the Facebook Protection and Enhancement Act.
Because it's not the American people who are going to benefit most from this, it will be Facebook.
Their stock is going to go up if this bill should pass the Senate.
Now, what are some ways that we could improve this bill?
Well, it should at least have a sunset.
I mean, that's the only reason we're able to debate whether FISA should have warrants in it.
Because it sunsets.
And what have we observed?
FISA's been abused.
That's my concern with this TikTok ban.
It will be abused.
If it's just banning TikTok and ByteDance and copies of that, why does it need to be 13 pages long?
And I know they say it doesn't ban it, it forces divestiture of the company.
This sounds like when American companies try to do business in third world countries and a dictator says, well you can do business here, you just gotta give me your company, and now you can continue to do business.
We wouldn't let another country take over Ford Motor Company for selling Ford cars in their country.
Yet that's what we're wanting to do here.
And again, You know, this is a cure that is worse than the disease.
Who's going to be prosecuted by this bill?
Is it ByteDance or TikTok?
Will they be taken to court?
No!
I mean, they're the target of this, but how do you elicit or effect a ban on them?
By prosecuting Americans.
The only way you can ban TikTok and the other companies from being here is to say what this bill says.
Which is, we will bring civil action, the government will bring a civil action suit against you if you so much as host them here.
If you have an app store that allows them to be here.
You are an American or an American company, and you will be the target of this bill.
Those are the only people who can be pursued under this bill, and I know it's in order to go after TikTok, or so they say.
Well, I would just close by saying that, you know, we're sitting here with phones made in China, we're wearing suits made in China, we drove cars here with chips that are made in China, and there are foreign adversaries, and by golly, we're going to do something about it.
What are we going to do?
You're going to tell Americans they can't put a piece of software on their computer.
They can't go to certain websites that the president designates.
So I urge my colleagues to oppose this well-intentioned... Alright Michael, so there's a lot there.
Let me just go one by one through a few of the issues that I think are worthy of discussion.
First of all, for years, There were countries that were saying to Facebook and Google, we will not allow you into our country unless you agree to these conditions to ban this kind of speech in order to protect our citizens from this kind of content that we don't want.
China was one of the countries that did that most.
In fact, they banned Facebook.
And all we heard was this was proof that these countries are authoritarian.
They don't want free speech in their country.
They won't allow Google and Facebook to enter their countries.
They don't want Google searches that are unlimited.
They don't want Facebook.
allowing free speech.
How is it that it is tyrannical for China, for Iran, for Russia to want to ban Facebook and Google or to impose conditions on their entry into their country, but somehow it's not tyrannical for us to want to do the same?
Well, what's amazing is that the people who tend to be the most bellicose about the alleged authoritarianism of the Chinese government and the curtailments or limitations what's amazing is that the people who tend to be the most bellicose about the alleged authoritarianism of the Chinese government and the curtailments or limitations of speech I
I mean, it's a system of government where there's clearly less individual rights that are enshrined in their kind of governing philosophy, at least compared to the United States, for whatever its faults.
And so, yeah, they're just willing to emulate or mirror that which they're always fervently denouncing.
It's emblematic of this incredibly fearsome Chinese communist authoritarianism.
And so what is that?
I mean, that's like an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth or something, right?
I mean, it's kind of like a morality to say that.
Let me just show you.
Here's a New York Times article from August 6, 2018.
A generation grows up in China without Google, Facebook or Twitter.
And the whole article is about how deprived and how depressing it is that these populations have to grow up without access to American apps that, as we know, are subject to all sorts of controls by the U.S. government.
Let me move to a different issue that a lot of advocates of this bill are raising, which I actually find validity in as well, which is the idea that you have enormous numbers of teenagers.
And as a parent of teenagers, every single parent of teenagers I know know that this is a huge problem, that you have to constantly combat the fact that these apps are constructed to lure your kids in to keep them online and attached to this phone, to these apps.
They're designed to not let people off, to keep them entranced.
They have teams of psychologists and psychiatrists and archaeologists and You know, every conceivable field of discipline that had been deployed to make these apps as addictive as possible.
You have all kinds of skyrocketing mental health crises in countries where these apps are most frequently used.
There's clear correlation between the two.
There are a lot of studies about this.
We actually covered this when we covered some of the scandals recently in a lot of these left liberal streaming communities about how unhealthy it is to spend eight and 10 hours online attached to your telephone.
Some adults as well.
have that problem as well.
I have no doubt that that's a problem with TikTok.
The question I have is how is that also not a problem with Facebook and Google and every American journalist I know who sits on Twitter all day long?
I remember an article from the New York Times several years ago that Silicon Valley parents won't allow their own children to use the products that they're designing and peddling to American citizens precisely because they know that these products are designed to be as addictive as say nicotine cigarettes are.
That they're But this is not unique in any way to TikTok.
Maybe TikTok does it a little bit better, but these addictive behaviors that people are concerned about with TikTok are just as powerful.
At least in the same category as Facebook, as YouTube.
I think, in fact, young Americans spend more time on YouTube than they do even on TikTok.
In what conceivable way is this a problem unique to TikTok?
It's clearly not.
And people are aware of that.
And, you know, the arguments that are made in favor of the bill tend to be pretty muddled or garbled, in my experience, at least as to what I've been able to pick up on.
So you will hear people complaining about what they see as the addictive nature of TikTok or how it's infiltrating kids' minds, ruining their attention span.
And I don't doubt that that could be a serious issue for a lot of people.
The issue is they're framing this TikTok ban, this particular legislation, as a means of protecting national security.
They're not saying that we have to regulate all the possible technology that could be addictive to young people.
Because what's happened since TikTok has had this explosive growth in the United States over the past, you know, five, six, seven years?
Well, lots of other social media programs like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Google to some extent, even Twitter to an extent, have incorporated some of the most popular aspects of their rolling scrolling video algorithm that TikTok really pioneered or made mega popular that fueled its own growth.
That's kind of been borrowed from and incorporated to varying degrees within the other platforms.
So by banning TikTok, you're not getting rid of what you're complaining about.
If what you're complaining about is the propensity of younger children to get Addicted to social media and then face various kinds of cognitive or mental impairments because of that.
The national security aspect is the real aspect of this.
And I wanted to make another point, Glenn, that I don't think really has been sufficiently emphasized, just on the legislative procedure.
It sounds boring, but it's actually really notable here because of the incredibly expedited timeline on which this particular bill was ushered to passage.
It was introduced on March 5th.
of this year, March 5th, earlier this month.
By March 7th, it was already going to a full committee vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which it passed unanimously.
And then by March 13th, yesterday, it passed a final vote on the floor of the House.
So that's eight days for introduction to passage I mean, Congress almost never does anything this rapidly.
This Congress in particular is notoriously dysfunctional.
Remember, they didn't have a speaker for six weeks or however long that was.
They haven't been able to do a lot of the standard legislative procedure just because of the problems that they've had administratively.
And yet they're able to get their act together to usher through at lightning speed this very momentous and But Michael, there's reporting on that as to why.
That is the big question.
Why?
Because this is not something that just emerged in the last two months.
So we need to ban TikTok.
This has been around for years.
It went back to the Trump administration.
And if you go into Congress with congressional reporters, as the Wall Street Journal and The Economist have done and other outlets have done, And you say, even Mike Gallagher told Barry Weiss's outlet, the reason we were able to get so many Democrats on board and everybody on board is because the US security state came and showed us how much criticism of Israel is being circulated on TikTok.
And that is what everybody freaked out when they realized that So much of this anger about the US support for the war in Gaza that is jeopardizing Joe Biden's national re-election campaign, that has caused a greater percentage of Americans more than ever to oppose aid to Israel, that a lot of that is circulating on TikTok, not because the Chinese party is generating it.
It reminds me, it's amazing sometimes how identical conservatives and liberals are, even though they think they're the opposite.
For years, every time there was an argument that liberals disliked, they blamed Russia.
Oh, Americans didn't on their own hate Hillary Clinton.
They got tricked into hating Hillary Clinton by the Russians and by Russian bots.
Now you have a bunch of conservatives saying, No, Americans on their own aren't disliking what they're seeing Israel do in Gaza.
It's the Chinese Communist Party tricking them into disliking Israel.
And so this is the real reason why this bill got fast-tracked.
And it's not just me saying that.
It's not like Grayzone saying it.
It's the most centrist outlets.
And in fact, it's even the leader of the Republican caucus who's taking the lead on this bill saying it himself that that was the reason why so many people Let me ask you one last question.
I talked to somebody who was involved in the formulation of the bill And they said that it came as a surprise, even to people who were involved in this issue.
I mean, it was intentionally crafted.
I mean, the chief legislators here intentionally crafted a strategy where they did what I call a legislative sneak attack, where they just foisted this upon everyone very quickly with a strategy to expedite its passage as quickly as possible.
Because what happened in March of 2023, so a year ago?
You remember that was like the latest big flare up in terms of legislative activity behind banning TikTok.
And it got sort of derailed because there was opposition that grew to the bill that was the most likely one to pass because people saw that it had these expansive powers that it enumerated and then gave to the president to regulate the internet.
And so opposition grew.
Well, they knew that opposition, or if they weren't complete idiots, which I don't think they are, I think they were smart enough to know that the longer that this particular bill was openly debated and its provisions were openly scrutinized, the more opposition would grow.
So they had to rush it through before excessive debate hindered their efforts to get this into law.
Right.
But the thing we've been focusing on a lot on this show is that for all the Republican and right-wing opposition to censorship and all this very vocal support for free speech, there has been a tsunami of censorship after October 7th in the name of protecting Israel from all sorts of anti-Israel activism, there has been a tsunami of censorship after October 7th in the And this bill is essentially the culmination of that because this is one of the most massive attacks
Yet, on the attempt to control the flow of information online and its clear impetus, the primary motor behind it is anger in Washington on a bipartisan basis that criticism in Israel is being allowed to circulate on TikTok.
Can I tentatively, I want to tentatively quibble with that just for the sake of argument, because Kathy McMorris Rogers, she's the chairwoman of this crucial committee that passed unanimously the bill last week, right?
She's a Republican chairwoman.
She, in November, sent a letter to the TikTok CEO saying that TikTok was responsible for Being a, you know, a spigot of anti-Semitic bile, it was stoking pro-Hamas sentiment among the youth, etc.
She was making that argument, right?
But also, Kathy McMorris-Rogers, a year ago, so March 2023, was already pushing for a ban of TikTok on the ground that it was Being nefariously controlled by the Communist Party of China to manipulate our children as like foot soldiers of the Communist Revolution.
Who knows what the full theory is.
She was already on board with banning it.
I agree that October 7th was an accelerant, but it was already trending in this direction anyway, particularly among Republicans.
Even Matt Gaetz, who was one of the 15 who voted against the bill yesterday, said that on principle he's for banning TikTok.
He just had procedural qualms with this bill.
No, absolutely.
I mean, obviously, like I said, I've said this before on my show in the last couple of weeks, which is that essentially...
Russia is to liberal politics what China is to conservative politics.
It's a thing that scares everybody, that gets them to be willing to agree to anything, the thing on which they can blame anything.
So I don't mean to at all suggest that prior to October 7th, there wasn't a real push to ban TikTok because of genuine animosity toward this Chinese Communist Party, the belief that it's infiltrating American youth.
It just didn't go anywhere.
It just didn't.
That's the question.
It's been around, but it didn't make its way.
Because of October 7th.
I mean, you have Jonathan Greenblatt saying, we have to do something about TikTok in December, and lo and behold, here we are, ready to do something about TikTok.
One last point, which is the privacy point, that somehow the Chinese government is using TikTok to spy on Americans.
I've talked about this so many times before, that there's no data that the Chinese can get from having TikTok that they can't buy on the open market.
We've covered reports on how the U.S. security state, you know, the Office of National Intelligence, the Homeland Security, the CIA got caught and they actually admitted buying on the open market enormous dossiers on American citizens that they will, by their own admission, have been prohibited from obtaining without search warrants by by their own admission, have been prohibited from obtaining without search warrants All of this information is being mass marketed, it's being curated, all the things we do online, all of our behaviors,
The Chinese can easily buy information about Americans.
They don't need TikTok to do it.
And what I don't understand, and this is something that I think has been a contradiction as well over the discourse of the last seven years, is as an American citizen, What concerns me a lot more is having my own government spy on me than having the Chinese Party government spy on me.
What is the Chinese government going to do when it's spying on me?
They can't put me in prison.
They can't take my property away.
They can't take all sorts of actions.
It's the United States government that we have seen abuses from in terms of our core civil liberties, in terms of our core freedoms.
This is a point in this video, I just want to show it to you before I get your response to it.
Let's listen to this video I'm being told is extremely relevant to this point.
Hold on one second, let me just play this.
I'd like to now yield one minute to my good friend from Arizona, Mr. Schweikert.
The gentleman is recognized for one minute.
And thank you Mr. Speaker Pro Tem, and to my friends I actually am about to try to make everyone mad.
Yay!
I actually believe data is a private property right.
It belongs to you as an American citizen.
The problem with our design here, it's really well meaning, but it doesn't get at the structural problem.
So you have an entity over here, they divest.
What makes them not then take the data, sell it to a data broker, and it gets washed and ends up still in the bad actor's hands?
You've got to understand, there's even articles out this week of even our own three-letter agencies buying their data now from data brokers instead of doing the tracking.
We need to think dramatically more globally.
Your data is a private property right.
That was David Schweikert of Arizona.
And Michael, this is the thing that's driving me insane.
These people are suddenly now so concerned about privacy.
You have the FISA bill that allows the U.S.
government to spy on American citizens without warrants that has been renewed forever.
Every four years since the Patriot Act was introduced in 2001, these people have no interest in imposing reform on how the U.S.
security state spies on American citizens, and suddenly now they want to ban an app by pretending that they're so deeply concerned about the privacy rights of American citizens?
Do they only care about privacy rights of American citizens ending up in the hands of a foreign government, but not in the hands of our own government that has a lot more power over us than some government on the other side of the world?
They clearly don't give a flying crap about privacy rights because they would violate the privacy rights of Americans at the drop of a hat if they could then instrumentalize the data that they could acquire for some end that advances American geopolitical interests, at least as they see it.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that's pretty straightforward.
Yeah, it's just so frustrating because, you know, this is what we've been seeing.
Go ahead, go ahead.
What I wanted to make on that is, I mean, the irony, this whole issue has been framed so propagandistically, like I've seldom seen more overt lying about a piece of legislation, even by the standards of Washington, D.C.
because they know that they have to deceive a lot of the public.
Otherwise, there probably will be concerted pushback to this.
I mean, the figure that they use, they're 170 million American TikTok users.
So if even a relatively small fraction of that mobilizes politically against this bill, then that can have a real impact.
But a canard that you'll hear from proponents of the bill, like Dan Krenshaw said this yesterday, others have said it, is that, oh, this isn't a First Amendment issue or even a censorship issue.
because number one, no one's speech is being censored.
This is content neutral, right?
So they're saying, we're just shuttering the platform.
We're not singling out which speech to shutter.
That therefore makes this constitutional, which is a complete canard, because what is the government shuttering?
It's shuttering a platform by which Americans, by the way, including lots of adults, you're talking about the effect on children earlier.
One out of three American adults apparently uses TikTok.
Voluntarily!
Voluntarily!
No one forces them to.
They choose to use TikTok.
Right, and now the government is abridging the ability of American citizens to express and consume speech by way of TikTok, which they would otherwise choose to do voluntarily.
So that's, under the First Amendment, the government can't abridge the freedom of speech, and that's clearly what they're doing.
So the argument has never been, the argument among opponents or skeptics or critics of the bill, has never been that the Communist Party of China is the one that has First Amendment rights.
That's a canard that Dan Crenshaw repeated yesterday.
No, it's Americans' rights that are being abridged in the name of waging this Civilizational Cold War battle against China, which I don't know about you, Glenn, but I never voted for that or signed up for it or agreed to forfeit my core civil liberties to do it.
Yeah, and not only that, you know, for all the people who are so concerned about these three-letter agencies, if you want to empower them, there's no better way to do it than to start a new Cold War with China.
And then on top of that, you know, the idea is that it would be like if the United States government today said, No American from here on, from henceforth, shall be permitted to watch RT or any other Russian state media.
The reason it would be a violation of the First Amendment isn't because RT has First Amendment rights in the United States, it's because the American citizens have the First Amendment right to consume information from whatever sources they want, including from RT or Russian state media if they so choose.
Europe has been able to ban Russian state media and to make it a crime to platform those outlets.
The United States government can never get away with that because unlike Europe we actually have a First Amendment that we're all supposed to care about and yet here we have a bill that it doesn't surprise me that the U.S.
Security State and the establishment wings of both parties want to support it.
What surprises me and sickens me is that the people who've been waving the flag of free speech over the last seven and eight years and have been saying they're so worried about the U.S. security state seizing control of the ability of American citizens to express ourselves and to organize and to exchange ideas politically and spread information are cheering for a bill because they have been sufficiently scared by the word China
into consolidating more and more power into the very agencies that they have been depicting as the deep state, the thing that threatens American liberty more than anything.
And it's amazing to watch.
And honestly, one of the very few people who, for whatever his reasons, who is being a little bit consistent, even though he previously had supported this sort of thing, is Donald Trump.
Accuse him if you want of being influenced by a We didn't just support banning TikTok.
He issued an executive order banning TikTok in 2020.
So they're just legislatively codifying what he tried to do in 2020 now.
But he is nonetheless against it.
And like I said, I really don't care why a politician does what he does.
And his argument, which is that all you're going to do is drive people onto Facebook, happens to be an obviously true argument.
All right, Michael, tell people before we go where they can follow the reporting and the writing that you've done on this because it's actually been quite good.
I want people to read it who are interested in it.
I know it pains you to say that, Glenn, but I appreciate it.
It hurt, but I got through it. - Yeah, I have an article in Newsweek this week on the TikTok bill, which people can look up.
I have a substack coming out actually tonight that has some additional information, including some original reporting.
And Glenn, I just wanted to mention this really quickly, because this needs to be more emphasized.
I mean, it's going to be in my piece, if people are curious, mtracy.net.
Tracy with an A.
The Intelligence Committee, or anonymous intelligence officials, gave this House committee a secret briefing just before they rushed to unanimously vote 50-0 to advance the bill last week.
And Frank Pallone, who is the Democratic ranking member, so the counterpart to Kathy McMorris-Rogers, He said on the floor of the House yesterday that what happened was the intelligence community came to Congress and requested additional power to defend national security, and this bill constitutes Congress obliging and granting the request.
So this is done expressly in the name of empowering The intelligence community, quote unquote, which is why you have Biden also in the House Republican and Democratic leadership, and then presumably also the Senate Republican and Democratic leadership universally on board.
And yet the public is not even privy to what evidence was presented to members of Congress that spurred them to take such All right.
So there's layers and layers of secrecy and deprecity.
The impetus for this from the start has been the very U.S. security state that so many conservatives now supporting this bill have spent seven years depicting, not unreasonably, as the cause of most of our evils.
Michael, thank you so much.
It's great to see you.
Keep the great work, and we will talk to you shortly.
All right.
See you later, man.
All right.
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