TikTok’s a Chinese Communist Party spy shop, a vector for gender and race extremism and a tool for whiny left-wing journalists to spread disinformation: No wonder progressive Democrats in Congress love it!
They’re pumping the brakes on the House-passed, bipartisan bill to force a sale to owners who aren’t an arm of the Chinese government — or ban the app outright if the CCP won’t budge.
Like Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), the youngest member of Congress and its first zoomer.
Frost is a hard leftist: a prison abolitionist, a Supreme Court packer and a Green New Dealer among other things.
His response as the House voted on the bill to force divestment? “I’m a ‘hell no.’”
Wow, what a cool, awesome badass! This guy totally doesn’t care about what those old square dudes he works with think of him!
Despite his cheesy fake bravado, Frost and the other Dem No’s on the House bill lost big time: It was a huge, and rare, bipartisan win with a 352-65 vote.
But that’s not stopping the Senate’s brain-dead leftists from taking up the battle to help make the world safe for Chinese communism.
Take Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.).
Cantwell’s a hardcore prog from waaaaay back. She was a No on confirming John Roberts for the Supreme Court; more recently she pushed to include an insane $15 hour federal minimum wage in the American Rescue Plan.
Now she’s publicly hemming and hawing about the House bill: “It’s important to get it right,” she said (congressese for over my dead body.)
Cantwell’s colleague Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) sang the same tune: “I want to be certain we are weighing the merits of alternative proposals that would deal with the larger issues at hand in a systematic way . . . rather than singling out one company.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore. and another old-school lefty nutjob) flailed strategically too: “You can do a lot of damage by moving too quickly or without the facts.”
No doubt the fact this trio all got campaign bucks from TikTok lobbyists has nothing to do with this.
On the East Coast, mega-woke NJ Sen. Cory Booker furrowed his brows: He has “a lot of concerns about targeting one company for violating standards that other apps and social-media companies have done as well.”
This, like Murray’s, is a nonsensical argument; yes, other social-media companies capture user data.
And Congress should have a robust debate about legal limits on that as well.
But only one platform serves as an effective soft-power espionage and propaganda arm of the Chinese government, and it’s not Instagram.
Look, we get it.
Dems like Booker have zero arguments for their terrible policies on the economy, the border and social issues.
That’s why they have to rely on cheap, addictive appeals to emotion and the mental malleability of the young.
Without a TikTok primed to surface anti-US content (Algebra is white supremacy! Kids need sex-change surgery!), the American left loses one of its own most powerful recruiting tools.
Of course Senate Democrats are going to do their damndest to water down the House bill, even though it commanded such high across-the-aisle support.
When the Easter recess ends Monday, get ready to notch up yet another victory for Beijing.