Every day, more than 2 billion people use a social media app called TikTok. Many of them are young people under the age of 24. If you had kids, you probably know already how TikTok works. TikTok lets users upload short videos. Usually, they're under 30 seconds.
What's interesting is that the content of these videos varies a lot depending upon what country you're in. If you're in China where TikTok is headquartered, you tend to get more educational content, but if you live in this country, you get an awful lot of filth and propaganda tailored for kids. We're not guessing about this. We ran an experiment to prove it last summer. Watch.
CARLSON: The TikTok Chinese residents, children in China, get to see is very different from the one your kids are looking at here. Now in China, where TikTk is known under a different name, videos like these are very common.
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Well, that's kind of weird. Can you see what's going on here? Well, China does. They run TikTok and China knows. If you want a productive society that extends beyond, say, next week, you teach your kids about hard work and creativity and personal responsibility, respect for authority, but if you want to destroy a society, you funnel a ton of garbage to kids about gender, ideology and twerking. aAs the Libs of TikTok has documented extensively, that's exactly what TikTok is doing here. There's a whole genre of videos of teachers boasting about indoctrinating kids.
FIRST TEACHER: I have had multiple students come out to be not just with their sexuality but also with their gender identity. It's one of the reasons I think it's so important to be out and loud and proud.
SECOND TEACHER: I teach my elementary school students about gender identity. Some people are girls. Some are boys. Some are both, some are neither.
THIRD TEACHER: I tell this kid we do have a flag in the class that you can pledge allegiance to and he looks around. He goes, "Oh, that one?"
It goes without saying that net-net, as they say, TikTok is not a positive influence on American society and right now, in response to criticism of TikTok, China's government and the company itself are doing the same thing they did when they responded to allegations of a lab leak in Wuhan. They're saying anyone who raises questions is a racist. And they're doing that everywhere across the media and they can because a lot of the news that you consume is paid for by TikTok.
Politico, a completely, completely ideologically corrupt organization in Northern Virginia, has a so-called playbook that is sponsored by Tik Tok every other week. CNN, meanwhile, just put its tech reporter on the air to inform you that criticizing TikTok opens up Chinese Americans to "hate and violence." If you criticize TikTok, you're killing Asian people.
So, confronted with all this, you might support efforts in the Congress right now to ban TikTok altogether and a lot of people do, not just on the right, but also on the left, which is kind of interesting. This is one of those weird moments where there is or appears to be some kind of bipartisan consensus and that alone might want to make you pause for a second. If everyone in power is saying the same thing, is it really a good idea? Well, let's take a closer look. and again, this is not a defense of TikTok, merely an acknowledgment of what's actually happening in Washington right now.
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So, one of the bills that would ban TikTok is being pushed, as we said, by senators in both parties is called the Restrict Act. Mark Warner of Virginia and John Thune of South Dakota, Democrat and Republican, introduced this legislation. Now, the bill is ostensibly a protecting American national security and ending "foreign adversaries" from interfering in our elections through apps like TikTok because, of course, election interference by Twitter and Facebook is no problem at all. But election interference from TikTok is totally unacceptable. OK. But in reality, and you should know this, if you're opposed to TikTok as we are, This bill isn't really about banning TikTok. It's never about what they say it is.
Instead, this bill would give enormous and terrifying new powers to the federal government to punish American citizens and regulate how they communicate with one another. For example, the bill would regulate "certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries." Now, what's a foreign adversary and who gets to decide? The secretary of commerce and the department and the DNI, not the Congress, get to decide what foreign adversaries are. Well, that ought to trip a switch in your brain and then the transactions with foreign adversaries would include "any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in or use of any information and communications technology, product or service, including ongoing activities such as mandated services, data transmission, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services." Well, that's pretty broad.
Under this bill, if you engage in any of that with a so-called foreign adversary as determined by, in this case, the Biden administration, that would allow the Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimando, and the director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, to decide whether you're acting in the "interest of a foreign adversary."
Again, that's another term that the executive branch, the secretary of commerce, gets to define without the interference of Congress. So, if the Biden administration decides that you're doing this, then the secretary of commerce can then enforce "any mitigation measure to address any risk arising from any covered transaction with any person or with respect to any property subject to the jurisdiction of the United States." Oh, these covered transactions can involve "current past or potential future transactions" and the mitigation measures include, but are not limited to, throwing American citizens in prison for 20 years.
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Think about that for a minute. So, you would be allowing the executive branch, the Biden administration, to regulate speech on the Internet and if you are somehow involved with a "foreign adversary" or let's say you oppose the war against Russia, you're going to prison for 20 years. So, this isn't about banning TikTok. This is about introducing flat out totalitarianism into our system.
Now, just because TikTok is so unappealing, just because it's a creepy low IQ Chinese plot designed to make your kids trans and it is, that does not mean that the people trying to ban Tik Tok have your interests in mind. Oh, it definitely doesn't or America's. Keep in mind, these are exactly the same people who drained our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and in fact promote China at every turn. Now, they're telling you they're against China. They're not.
This is not an effort to push back against China. It's part of a strategy to make America much more like China, with the government in charge of what you read and see and with terrifying punitive powers at their fingertips.
Now, we've seen this before from the national security state again and again. Confronted with a foreign adversary, for example, after 9/11, the federal government uses the opportunity to expand their police powers over the American population, and they do it under false pretexts, and they do it quickly by whipping people into a panic.
Usually that's rooted in some truth. TikTok is bad, sure. Al Qaeda was terrible, of course, but these measures are not aimed at stopping the foreign threat. They're aimed at controlling the American population. They rush it through, and they do it so quickly that no one ever explains how exactly this preserves American national security. Now, according to Sandy Cortez (we rarely quote her), Congress is not even briefed on any of this. Watch.
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REP, ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Usually when the United States is proposing a very major move that has something to do with significant risk to national security, one of the first things that happens is that Congress receives a classified briefing and I can tell you that Congress has not received a classified briefing around the allegations of national security risks regarding TikTok. So, why would we be proposing a ban regarding such a significant issue without being clued in on this at all? It just doesn't feel right.
So again, in case you think we've gone crazy, we're defending Sandy Cortez, we should point out that she is a tool of the national security state. She's out promoting a war against Russia and anyone who ask questions is an ally of Putin, and she's probably acting for motives that we find, well, abhorrent.
But the question that she raises is real and we want to be honest enough to say that. This may be one of those times and they are comment in Washington where the solution has nothing to do with the problem and in fact degrades our free country and makes it something unrecognizable.
