The frenzy to ban TikTok is another National Security State scam

On November 20, 2023, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote in a joint letter to the CEO of TikTok that the platform was guilty of “stoking anti-Semitism, support, and sympathy for Hamas” after the October 7 attack on Israel. “This deluge of pro-Hamas content is driving hateful anti-Semitic rhetoric and violent protests on campuses across the country,” McMorris Rodgers charged. A year ago, in March 2023, she had already declared: “TikTok should be banned in the United States of America.”

This week the plan came to fruition, with McMorris Rodgers and her colleagues orchestrating what could be best described as a legislative sneak attack: suddenly the House of Representatives, a notoriously dysfunctional body — particularly this Congressional term, with all the Republican leadership turmoil — took decisive, concerted, expedited action to pass legislation banning TikTok before most of the public would have even gotten a chance to notice. The bill was introduced March 5, 2024, advanced by a unanimous committee vote on March 7, 2024, then approved for final passage March 13, 2024. Almost nothing ever passes Congress at such warp-speed.

McMorris Rodgers facilitated the unanimous 50-0 vote out of the Energy and Commerce committee, a development which took many in DC off-guard, even those keenly attuned to the TikTok policy issue. As someone familiar with the process explained to me, before introducing the bill, the key sponsors “wanted to keep it quiet all around,” as they correctly surmised that once the details of the bill gained wider public exposure, opposition would mount — just as happened in March 2023 when a precursor bill got derailed after public awareness grew of provisions delegating enormous new powers to the President to control speech online.

This week, last-minute opposition continued to grow even during the final floor debate Wednesday morning, thanks to the quick-thinking of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who organized the opposition and later reported that the number of Republican House members voting no may have tripled as a result of the 40-minute floor debate he triggered — a rarity in the annals of Congress.

Republican opposition was still paltry though — just 15 voted no, compared with 50 Democrats. Even among the few no votes, some, like Matt Gaetz, made sure to clarify that on principle he was totally in favor of banning TikTok — he just objected to the particulars of this bill. The fact that Trump tentatively came out against the bill would also likely have been a factor for Gaetz, who likely would not have been so keen to stake out a different position from Trump on a major national policy issue. Whatever his precise stance, Trump has evidently not taken a major lobbying interest, as he has before with other legislative items. The little he’s said about the TikTok bill has been lukewarm and muddled — which makes sense given that it was Trump who first attempted to ban TikTok by executive fiat in 2020, and got held up by the courts. This current bill enumerates the powers Trump had unsuccessfully sought and codifies them in federal statute as a newly-assigned, discretionary presidential authority.

There is also the issue of what someone familiar told me was the “technical assistance” provided by the “Intelligence Community” during the reportedly “quiet” formulation of this bill — led by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL). The ranking member counterpart of McMorris Rodgers on the Energy and Commerce committee, Frank Pallone (D-NJ), said unnamed members of the so-called Intelligence Community had “asked Congress to give them more authority to act,” and this bill was intended to grant that request. As such, the bill was expressly crafted to enhance the power of the “Intelligence Community” to restrict Americans’ ability to consume and express speech online — as always, in the alleged name of “national security.”

The purveyors of TikTok-related fear within this vaunted “Community of Intelligence” also prefer to keep the underlying evidence for their claims hidden from public view, opting for highly confidential briefings with compliant members of Congress, most of whom emerged from these secret Pow-Wows in the past week excitedly eager to vest the Executive Branch with extensive new powers to Keep Us Safe from designated foreign foes. And not just China, as with the TikTok prohibition — but also an enormous array of other potential “applications,” which encompass everything from mobile apps to websites, that can be claimed as “foreign adversary controlled,” with “adversaries” defined as the standard rival bloc of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

To fight this great civilizational battle against China and its satellite states, the citizens of America must gratefully accept the abridgment of their own speech, and patriotically acquiesce to the government seizing the power to block a massive range of potential online applications and websites, so long as they can be claimed by the President to be “directly or indirectly” controlled by an official foreign adversary. What it means to be “controlled by a foreign adversary” is so malleable per the legislative text that it can include “a person” who is “subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity,” whatever that might mean in today’s parlance, when spurious charges of “Russian asset” and “Chinese influence” can be flung left and right like nothing. Given the subjective discretion that would necessarily have to be exercised in the making of such a determination, the president is being vested here with a huge amount of subjective, unilateral discretion.

There is likely a lesson to be gained from the March 2023 version of TikTok-related banning frenzy, which lost momentum when the details of the main legislative proposal became more widely known. Surmising that opposition could very well mount again, the House sponsors decided this time around to preempt the inconvenience of open debate, and hustle through the bill on a “quietly” expedited schedule before the provisions became widely known, which could prompt the always-annoying phenomenon of constituents contacting their representatives to express an opinion on the issue. This deliberate evasion of public scrutiny was unfortunately necessary for national security.

I still have not been able to locate the Chinese mind-control content in my searches on TikTok

Another running theme in this mad legislative dash is the extent to which the Israel/Gaza war and hysteria over the October 7 attacks was a main driver. In November 2023, Israeli president Isaac Herzog blamed TikTok for “brainwashing” Americans who didn’t understand that Israel was pulverizing Gaza to defend not just Israeli security, but also the freedom of Americans to “enjoy decent, liberal, modern, progressive democratic life.” Apparently this logic would make more sense to people age 18-29 if they didn’t spend so much time on TikTok.

The heads of the Jewish Federations of North America, an agglomeration of American Jewish philanthropic interests, concurred with the need to terminate TikTok in a March 6 letter timed almost perfectly to the bill’s introduction just the previous day. Writing to Rodgers and Pallone, the authors said: “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in anti-Semitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.”

“We have a major, major, major generational problem,” complained Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, in leaked audio of a private meeting last year. “And so we really have a TikTok problem.”

In this telling, the “TikTok problem” seems to boil down to TikTok’s insufficient alignment with US geopolitical interests, and the inability of the US government to exert the same coercive pressure on TikTok that it’s been able to exert on the likes of Google, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Twitter/X, and so on. TikTok therefore makes for a scapegoat on which to blame the increasingly “anti-Israel” and “pro-Hamas” attitudes of the youth, who supposedly absorb these malign beliefs in between synchronized dance videos, recipe tips, and makeup guides.

While it’s always difficult to assign precise causality in a multi-variable confluence of factors, here’s what we do know. There was a growing clamor to ban TikTok for the past several years. A bicameral legislative push was made almost exactly one year ago, in March 2023, but got derailed after public awareness grew of the main proposal’s speech-curtailing and executive-empowering provisions. Then after October 7, another round of scapegoating burst onto the scene, with TikTok furiously singled out and blamed by American and Israeli officials for fomenting impermissible discontent with Israel’s war of pulverization against Gaza — the naive youth could only view Israel’s military action in a negative light if they were having their brains nefariously infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party. Certainly if they watched CNN, MSNBC, or FOX NEWS instead, their brains wouldn’t be turned to microwaved mush, and they’d be super well-informed and not at all propagandized.

“China is our enemy, and we need to start acting like it,” blustered Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) on the floor of the House before the vote this week. “I am proud to partner with Representatives Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi on this bipartisan bill to ban the distribution of TikTok in the US.”

I’m sorry, but I don’t recall ever agreeing to the proposition that China (or any other country) is my “enemy,” and I certainly would never have agreed to relinquish my core civil liberties to wage this allegedly existential battle. I have no particular fondness for the Chinese government’s speech-suppression practices, but the issue posed by this pending legislation is the power of the US government to control the speech of Americans. Being a citizen of the US, not China, that strikes me as the more pressing concern.

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Here is an article I wrote for Newsweek on the TikTok ban bill. I was initially hesitant about using the term “Deep State” in the headline, because that’s automatically interpreted with a partisan slant now, even if you’re just trying to neutrally refer to the National Security State. But I eventually gave in, because what’s the point of going through life always trying to avoid being misconstrued by idiot partisans. I also discussed details of the bill in a customarily jovial and good-natured appearance last night on Glenn Greenwald’s show.

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