Tucker looks at what’s potentially bad about our government’s bipartisan effort to ban TikTok, a move many of us would be on board with…if it weren’t another crudely disguised attempt to rush through something that gives them more vague powers in the name of national security. Highlights include:

“Every day more than 2 billion people use the 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.”

“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 bunch of garbage to kids about gender ideology and ‘twerking’. As the account ‘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.”

“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.”

“One of the bills that would ban TikTok is being pushed, as we said, by senators in both parties. It’s 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 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, okay. 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? Well, the Secretary of Commerce and the DNI, not the Congress, get to decide what foreign adversaries are.”

“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 by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States’. 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.”

“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’, lets say you oppose the war against Russia, you got to prison for 20 years. So, this isn’t about banning TikTok, this is about introducing flat out totalitarianism into our system.”

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