DV Journal

On December 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a law — by a vote of 3-0 — that could lead to a ban on TikTok as soon as January 19. 

The law, Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, signed by President Biden in April, was the culmination of a years-long effort in Washington over the short-form, video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat because of its connections to China. 

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”

TikTok has petitioned the Supreme Court to prevent the Biden administration from enforcing the ban provision in the act.

In a May 2024 Pew Research Center survey of 3,600 American adults, 43 percent of Americans view China as an enemy of the United States, the highest level since 2021 when Pew first began to ask this question. Moreover, 81 percent of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of China, a view that has held relatively steady for the last five years. 

With such strong negative American public opinion about China, it is not surprising that there was such strong bipartisan support for the enactment of the act. While Donald Trump, in his first administration, made attempts to restrict TikTok, he has recently campaigned to oppose such a ban if the company loses its appeal to the Supreme Court. 

Judge Ginsburg noted that, while the court’s decision had “serious implications” for TikTok users, “that burden is attributable to (China’s) hybrid commercial threat to U.S. national security, not to the U.S. government, which engaged with TikTok through a multiyear process to find an alternative solution.” 

The opinion noted that the Chinese government could use TikTok to assemble structured data sets on Americans, such as through Chinese-hacking operations against the Office of Personnel Management, or to track the locations of U.S. federal employees and contractors, or build dossiers for extortion purposes. 

As of 2020, the U.S. military banned its members and civilian employees from using TikTok on government devices, as subsequently did the Transportation Security Administration and other federal agencies.

Chinese laws — specifically, the National Intelligence Law of 2017, Data Security Law of 2020, and Cryptology Law of 2020, require Chinese businesses, investors, academic institutions and citizens to support and facilitate China’s government access to the collection, transmission and storage of data requested by Chinese government officials — laws that violate the letter or intent of U.S. and international law and accepted policies. 

Moreover, Chinese companies may be required to store data within China’s borders and to permit access by the government of data under the pretense of national security. U.S.-based internet companies are all blocked from operating in China by the government’s “Great Firewall” censorship regime.

How could TikTok be conceivably used to undermine the democratic election process — and “freedom of speech” — in the United States? A recent example illustrates how Romania has canceled its democratic election results because the front-runner, Calin Georgescu, a pro-Russian, NATO-skeptical candidate who had been polling 5 percent voter support before the election, won the first round of voting. However, Romanian authorities uncovered that Russia — a Chinese ally — used 25,000 TikTok accounts to operate a coordinated online campaign to influence Romanians to vote for Georgescu, in this case, with an initial successful outcome. 

When the United States and the Soviet Union were “Cold War” adversaries, would the U.S. government have tolerated a Soviet communications-related company operating freely in our economy? If not then, why now?

It’s been a few months since Target and Anheuser-Busch set billions of dollars of shareholders’ money on fire because someone convinced them pushing transgenderism on kids is “the right thing for society” — but you may still be trying to understand what went wrong at those companies in the first place. To provide some relevant perspective, consider the following.

First, note what Paul Kengor said about the Marxist roots of attacks on traditional family values:  “Marx and Engels … realized that you had to take down the most element things: God, private property, marriage and family.”

Second, note the following from The Nation: “Arguably the most infamous demand of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ is the ‘abolition of the family.’ … Radical queer politics … added … their critique … when activists challenged the heteronormativity of familial relations.”

Third, note that in “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,” Stephen Soukup relates the following about the indoctrination practices of Gyorgy Lukacs, “the deputy people’s commissar for education and culture in the new Hungarian Soviet Republic” of the 1910s:

“Special lectures were organized … to ‘instruct’ children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children (were) urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority.  …  Are you starting to sense a theme? If so, that’s arguably because you are seeing the specter haunting America right now — the specter of radical leftism. This specter’s ideological roots trace back to the specter of communism that haunted Europe and much of the rest of the world from the Bolshevik revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Though tens of millions of people have been murdered, imprisoned and tortured under the banner of communist ‘equity’ — nonetheless today’s specter of radical leftism again promises utopian outcomes because we’ll finally have the ‘right’ experts in charge.”

But the specter of radical leftism today, just like the specter of communism that gave birth to it, is doomed to fail. It is doomed to fail because what it seeks is so contrary to human nature that only by concentrating all power of force into the state (or perhaps the right corporations) and terrorizing all who don’t comply can it force behaviors it deems socially just. This is true whether we are talking about demanding equality of outcomes in the face of natural individual differences, or demanding society ignore nature’s biological difference between men and women.

The believers in this radical leftism actively seek the complete destruction of all things that can divert a person’s loyalty from the God of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. With what can only be described as religious fervor, they assert unfalsifiable articles of faith about systemic racism, patriarchy, sexism and the ever-expanding list of intersectional identities oppressed by “Whiteness” or tradition. 

They expressly seek the destruction of traditional religion, traditional family and traditional capitalism (“stakeholder capitalism” is not capitalism).

The useful idiots in this revolution genuinely believe they are on the right side of history. They fail to realize that the ever-expanding circle of “oppressors” will inevitably swallow them. One example of this group may be the suburban moms who threw their support behind “antiracism” only to find that there is a direct line from the antiracism they were supporting to their daughters being forced to share locker rooms with biological males and their elementary schoolchildren being groomed for gender transformations behind their backs.

The opportunists include many corporate executives who — as Vivek Ramaswamy describes it in his book “Woke, Inc.” — saw an opportunity to avoid the pitchforks of Occupy Wall Street by exchanging support of wokeness for a redirection of the mob’s ire. Other corporate opportunists include the hucksters comprising the ESG industrial complex, pocketing profits from selling funds and services under the banner of “environmental, social and corporate governance.”

And finally, we have the cowards. They are afraid, and this is understandable. The cancel culture mob is no joke. It will try to destroy you. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that any cowards who failed to stand up to the radical leftist terrorists who preceded our current incarnation of the neo-Marxist mind virus would choose cowardice again.

Regardless, when the tide turns and the common sense of the common man inevitably prevails, all these types should expect to be held accountable for their role in the attacks on our country, our institutions and our children. Those who see the specter of radical leftism for what it is and who are willing to man the barricades against it are paying attention. While you won’t think of us as Santa Claus, we are keeping a list. The time to choose your side is now. Choose wisely.

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