Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/18/24 Michael Tracey on Why the Latest Attempt to Ban TikTok is a Scam

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Michael Tracey returned to the show to discuss the bill Congress is trying to pass to ban the social video-sharing app TikTok. Tracey explains what the bill actually says and the two talk about what the government could do going forward if it passes. They then discuss the real reason Washington wants TikTok gone — it’s threatening Israel’s ability to control the narrative as it slaughters the people of Gaza. Discussed on the show: “The frenzy to ban TikTok is another National Security State scam” (Substack) Michael Tracey is a New York-based journalist. You can find his writing on Substack and follow him on Twitter @mtracey This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show hey you guys on the line i have once again michael tracy the independent journalist and he is at m tracy dot net that's his substack and this extremely important piece

It's called The Frenzy to Ban TikTok is another national security state scam. Welcome back to the show. Michael, how you doing, man? Always good to be with you. I'm doing all right. Great, great. Happy to have you here. So there's a lot to go over here. I guess, first of all, just basically tell us what does this bill say? That's a thing. People should really read the bill. It's not the most entertaining read, but if you want to have a better sense of the details,

of what the government is apparently getting ready to impose on the public. You'd be well served to read. The bill requires that, I mean, let's be clear about something up front. And this is something I tried to document pretty thoroughly. The legislative intent of the bill is as clear as day, meaning the chief sponsors of the bill, the chief drafters and the ones who ushered it to Swift's expedited passage, they're on the record as saying that their intent is to ban TikTok. But they crafted this particular legislation in such a way where they could have plausible deniability. I don't even think it's plausible, but they could claim

that the bill is not expressly targeting TikTok for immediate termination or banning. Because what the bill does is it says that there must be this forced divestiture of TikTok from its parent company, bite dance, which Congress is in a frenzy about because they say that bite dance is the conduit between TikTok and the Communist Party of China. And the Communist Party of China is using TikTok to infiltrate the brains of unsuspecting vulnerable American youth. and therefore Congress has to remedy this by imposing some of the most severe and far-reaching federal censorship action that it's ever instituted in history as far as I'm aware. People are more than welcome to correct me if I'm not remembering a precedent for this, but I don't think this has any clear precedent in terms of government censorship action. I think it's basically a threshold being crossed into new,

new terrain. So the bill says the bill establishes the mechanism by which to prohibit TikTok. So when you'll see politicians as they have over the past week, meaning members of Congress say it's disinformation to say that this is a ban of TikTok. It's not actually a ban of TikTok. TikTok has an option now to divest or the power company of TikTok can simply divest of TikTok and therefore TikTok will never be banned and use will never be interrupted. That's a total canard because The bill sets up the means by which TikTok can be prohibited by the federal government. And it is a government prohibition. It's like how the government prohibited alcohol for a while and how it prohibits certain other controlled substances now.

It's establishing a prohibition of TikTok. It's just a matter of how it will be enforced. So if after six months, TikTok does not comply with these radical demands by the government to divest. and there's a pretty solid consensus that even if TikTok wanted, corporately wanted to do that, it'd be next to logistically impossible within six months. And that's the time frame that's established. And, oh, six months from March of 2024 just happens to be about two months before the presidential election, which is a potentially interesting side issue.

But either way, the fundamental thing that this bill does, if it were to be enacted, It says it would establish that within six months, TikTok is hereby banned in the United States if it does not comply with these widely seen to be obviously unfeasible requirements. So the net result is that would be that 170 million Americans, which were told is the number that uses TikTok, would find themselves all of a sudden having their access or ability to access TikTok, tournament. And this is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, though. And for the government to, by brute force, thwart or stymie, the ability of American adults, not just kids. And another misnomer is that this is limited to, this is somehow about saving children from nefarious social media usage. That's also a deflection and non-accurate because one out of three American adults reportedly uses TikTok.

So this affects adults, not just minors. And it would be a termination of the ability of these adults to use their preferred social media outlet as a platform through which to consume speech, including political speech, which gets extra protection under the Constitution, and also express their own speech. So it's like standing on a soapbox on a street corner and the government taking away. the soapbox, you know. Um, so that's the, that's the basics of what it does. It does institute a prohibition on TikTok. It's just a matter of certain steps having to be taken before that prohibition is instituted, but people should be aware of that up front when, when politicians and members of Congress and others try to deny that this is a TikTok ban because they want to allay some of the public pushback. Just know that they're engaging in a knowing strategy,

uh, political deception, because, If they didn't deceive the public and the public were aware in mass about the deliberately crafted effects of this bill, you could see there being a pretty sizable pushback because, you know, lots of people enjoy TikTok, make their livelihood off of it, express their political speech through it, connect with friends over it, et cetera, and they're not going to be huge fans of the government all of a sudden prohibiting their use on fairly spurious grounds just because everybody is supposed to be having a, you know, hysterical meltdown over the Communist Party of China. And if you just repeat the words Communist Party of China in the mirror three times, then I guess the First Amendment is no longer applicable. Yeah. Well, and it sounds like there's a restriction from Article 1, Section 9 here against Bills of Attainter that's coming into question. And it sounds like you're saying that they've written the law to be so vague that, no, we're not just picking on TikTok. We could pick on anybody with this thing if we want. So you can't accuse us of singling out

TikTok. Is that right? Right. Right. So you have multiple components of the bill. One is that there is a specifically targeted ban of TikTok, right? I mean, TikTok is singled out by name in the text of legislation. So that's another issue that might be contested or almost certainly will be contested or challenged about this bill, which is that they're singling out TikTok for like one company for punishment or for excess regulation or monitoring or control. But separately, the bill also does establish a new unilateral power that Congress is affirmatively according to the president, to wield unilaterally, which is that now, after this bill comes into effect, the president will have the power.

to make a, quote, determination that any application, and application is defined as any app or website, so almost anything on the internet can potentially qualify as an application, it seems. The president makes the determination that any so-called application is a, quote, significant national security threat and is also, quote, controlled by a foreign adversary or in the control of, of a foreign adversary, with the foreign adversaries being defined as the standard of litany, the official American enemies of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

So just imagine some future president, maybe even imagine Biden doing it this year, saying that, I don't know, telegram or some other website or outlet, is quote a significant national security threat, which is incredibly subjective, right? and also that it's, quote, controlled by or under the undue influence of some foreign adversary, and to prove that an application is under sufficiently, you know, worrisome control by a foreign adversary, the president is now given the ability to merely point to specific individuals within the platform who work for the corporation potentially or affiliated with that who themselves are individually under the influence of some foreign state.

And we know that just in the very recent past, for politically expedient reasons, there's been no shortage of logically and evidentially questionable attempts to paint political rivals as in the thrall of Russia, right, or in the thrall of, you could say China or Iran because they were trying to do something diplomatically with the, you know, nuclear dealer. You know, there's a, there's no end to how this could be manipulated and leveraged for politically cynical reasons. But the, but this legislation now transfers to the executive, the unilateral ability to make much more far-reaching determinations about this that are clearly going to have a political

component because it's leading to the discretion of the president to determine what constitutes the significant national security risk and people of different political persuasions have different perspectives on that right so it's inherently a political designation but they're trying to frame it as somehow non-political or in the national security realm because people don't think of that in terms of the political salience in the same way they might think about other issues and now is there any evidence that the communist party of china dictates anything regarding this company whatsoever or you're just supposed to know that Well, you think that evidence of that would be presented, but it hasn't.

I mean, I'm open to evidence of that being the case, right? I mean, I don't exclude the possibility. I don't know the ins analysis of every detail of the Chinese surveillance state system, and to what extent the governing party uses the surveillance state apparatus to achieve certain geopolitical objectives. you know, it's not that implausible, but they don't present any evidence for it. They'll come up with these very tendent, tendentious, poorly reasoned statements that are usually speculative. They'll say China could use this to manipulate the American electorate, or they could use this to do some kind of intervention in our elections. There was a Republican Congress,

woman, Ashley Hinson, I just want to make sure I have that name, because I don't want to unfairly impugn anyone who didn't say this stupid thing. Yes, Ashley Hinson, she's a Republican from Iowa, who is saying that for all we know, TikTok could, in the fall, send out push notifications or push alerts on election day saying the election is canceled. And that would, I don't know, doom American democracy or something. So they conjure up these speculative scenarios where TikTok does something really, you know, drastic and, uh, and malicious. But it's all in the realm of speculation. Like, don't you think that they could supply some tangible concrete evidence of China

ever doing this? I mean, Ted Cruz was ranting in a Senate hearing not too long ago about TikTok where he had the CEO in front of him who, by the way, seems like he's the chief pinata for everybody in Washington, D.C. You got to have to feel bad for him. even though he's kind of like an extremely, I'm sure he's an extremely wealthy guy. He doesn't really need pity. But still, I mean, to have this much single-minded vitriol disputed him is very odd. He's clearly being scapegoated as this geopolitical tactic against China, right?

But, you know, Ted Cruz was, you know, in this exchange with this CEO, and he said, you know, he tried to make some, I mean, I have to look this up, actually. to give you the exact numerical details. But he was setting some bogus, you know, like online misinformation or online threat detection study from one of these shady NGO groups who was saying that, you know, the ratio of, you know, hashtag Tiananmen Square on TikTok is like out of lack. We're at the ratio of Tiananmen Square on other platforms and therefore that shows that China's is manipulating this. Meanwhile, I mean, people who haven't used TikTok, which I haven't been a user of, really.

I mean, I've been aware of it. I've seen it. I've done very cursory, just looking at it just to get a sense of how it works. But, you know, I've been, for the past couple, you know, past week or so, looking at it more than I normally would because it's just not much within my personal area of interest for the most part. But you can easily type in anything you want, and, you know, Uighurs comes up. And this idea that there's this really top heavy or brazen censorship going on or brazen manipulation going on, it's not evident to me by the searches that are possible on the platform. So it seems like what this comes down to is that they're trying to use brute legislative force or brute governmental muscle to basically to muscle out a the most popular Chinese affiliated.

social media platform for the sole reason that it's Chinese. Yeah. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some, at least, into precious metals.

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which was in 1989, this is all about Israel and their right to murder with impunity, isn't it? Well, that's part of it. Now, I don't think it's exclusively due to the Israel Gaza war that this TikTok ban was ushered through Congress or usher through the House of Representatives anyway at warp speed. But it definitely has been an accelerating factor. Because remember, in March of 2003, so about a year ago, there was a fairly serious legislative push from some of the same exact same people to ban TikTok, but that got derailed because the version of the bill that was being bandied about then as the vehicle for banning TikTok was even more expansive than this one that they've settled on a year later. But it's true. I mean, after October

7th, the pro-Israel commentariat in the media, in the think tank world, in philanthropic organizations, etc., determined, or they concluded that the reason why younger people were increasingly sympathetic toward Gazans or increasingly critical of Israel was that they were being tricked into believing this way by nefarious TikTok algorithms, which China is, I guess, surreptitiously manipulating to make people anti-Semitic. I mean, it never adds up to anything that's logically coherent, but that's the scapegoat that they came up with around at that time.

And, yeah, so you had, especially Republicans, not exclusively, but I mean, Republicans are actually almost 100% united on this, more so than Democrats. But the chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Kathy McMorris Rogers, the Republican from Washington State, I pulled up a letter and I quoted this in that article from her in November where she's sending this joint letter to the TikTok CEO, and they're basically just outright accusing TikTok, or they're accusing the CEO of TikTok of deliberately fomenting anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bile pro-Hamas attitudes on TikTok without citing any tangible evidence other than that young people are more and more inclined to be skeptical

of Israel and supportive of Palestinians. But that's a long-term trend. Like I remember covering the 2014 Gaza War, which was on a much smaller scale than this current one. But at the time, it was the biggest yet. I think it was, you know, maybe three or 400, if memory serves, minors were killed in that war, which seemed like a lot of the time, but now it's like it pales in comparison to the current war. But even then, I mean, there was, there was an abundance of polling data, which showed the same thing that polling shows now,

which is that voters like age 18 to 24 or 18 to 29 or 35 or under or something like that. were the most Israel critical or Israel skeptical demographic, whereas voters that were the oldest were the most pro-Israel. So you would expect that to continue. Now they're just trying to, again, scapegoat a particular piece of technology that happens to be especially popular among that age cohort and saying, oh, it must be because these people are all being brainwashed and they're too stupid to think critically for themselves.

Actually, the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, and I quoted that in this article as well. He was doing an interview with some English language station in November, where he was saying that, you know, the Americans are being brainwashed by TikTok, especially American youth, not to be insufficiently appreciative of Israel fighting in Gaza on behalf of secular humanistic values.

or something like that on behalf of like progressive society um which is a hilarious canard um but rather than reckon with like the actual substance of reasons why people are becoming more and more opposed to Israel or sympathetic to the Palestinians um it's easier to ignore the substance of why that trend is observable uh and just to focus on some technological adaptation, which is just an incredibly tangential issue, I think. Well, and, like, maybe the kids, maybe the, maybe the 18, maybe the 20 year olds are actually like seeing images of rubble and, like, you know, and, and limbs blown to bits and stuff and not having the most favorable opinion on what they're seeing, which just seems reasonable

to be. Yeah. Well, and, you know, the lack of self-awareness here where the, you quote, the heads of the Jewish federations of North America demanding this. censorship, the head of the Anti-Defamation League in leaked audio of a private meeting saying we really have this TikTok problem and all that. They're just willing, obviously, to risk any increase in anti-Semitism caused by building a reputation as the greatest enemies of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the country. On behalf of Israel's ability to continue, to

continue to murder innocent people en masse. Yeah, it was interesting. The Jewish federations of North America is the organization that sent the letter that I quoted in the article. And that's a very influential organization. I mean, it's, it's one of these umbrella groups for philanthropic giving to Jewish organizations, social services organizations, and college scholarships. And it's just very influential.

And by the way, people, I mean, there's a segment of people on the internet who like hear me say that and like snicker something about, you know, world jury or something else with like a sinister connotation that it's just like not necessary to just impartially analyze the influence of an organization like Jewish federations of North America. But anyway, I don't want to get sidetracked. The point is a day after Congressman Mike Gallagher, who's a Republican of Wisconsin, who's co-chairing this select committee on this Chinese Communist Party, quote-unquote, in this congressional term, alongside Raja Krishna-Morthy, who's a Democratic congressman from Illinois, who's also running this Communist Party of China Congressional Scare Committee, which has produced just a never, a very regular slew of sheer hysteria since January of 2023 when Kevin McCarthy instituted this committee. Speaker Mike Johnson has retained it. But that bill was introduced as like part of their legislative sneak strategy, sneak attack strategy that they employed on March 5th. And then lo and behold, on March 6th, the Jewish federations to North America already has a letter ready,

you know, a comprehensive letter ready to the relevant committees of jurisdiction endorsing fulsomely this First Amendment abridging legislation. It's just interesting how that was coordinated. as a, I think a plainly orchestrated strategy to voice this upon the Congress very quickly before the ramifications or the full implications of the bill were widely known and then usher it to passage because the longer that this legislation was debated openly and its provision scrutinized, I do think the more opposition clearly would have grown. It's similar to what happened in March of 2023. I mean, there was a bill that was proposed that had a lot of bipartisan

and support to ban TikTok, but then people got wind of some of the more expansive government empowering provisions, and the bill started to generate opposition, and that it was kind of tabled. But now this one's, this one sailed through thanks to a very deliberate legislative strategy by the sponsors and by the party leadership in both, the party leadership in the house in both parties. I mean, think about it. The Democratic Party leadership, so. Hakeem Jeffries was completely in unison

or completely in sync on this issue with the Republican leadership in the House. So Steve Scalese, Mike Johnson, Elise Hispanic. And what does that tell you? And what does it tell you that one of the astonishingly few things that Congress

is ever able to act upon with efficiency and speed is to radically abridge the free speech protections that Americans is doing under the First Amendment to ban an entire social media platform

because they can scream that it's supposedly in the control of the communist Chinese. I mean, it tells you a lot that that's what Congress could actually get its act together to act on so swiftly and expeditiously.

Yeah, well, and it also goes to something that you mentioned earlier about this thing is going to kick in and be a huge controversy right around the time of the election. And it just goes to show that the Democrats, led by their party leader, President of the United States, Joe Biden. He says that, you know, the risk of Donald Trump

being elected is the end of the Republic and all of this stuff. And yet he is willing to completely sink and destroy his own candidacy on behalf of Israel, even though two-thirds or three-quarters of Democrats are absolutely opposed to his support for the ongoing slaughter there. And as you said here, the use of TikTok skews young and therefore Democratic here. And he's willing to just absolutely stomp on these people's feet and outrage them within weeks of the election in November when this bill would come into force. This sounds like electoral suicide on behalf of a foreign nation. Well, one thing I think you have to recognize with Biden is that he clearly has a sincere. ideological conviction in the issue of Israel and also other foreign policy issues. Remember, Joe Biden spent, I mean, people kind of don't really appreciate that Biden, even at his advanced age and even at his questionable mental capacity, can still have decades-long ideological convictions that he spent an entire career cultivating, right? And being.

ardently pro-Israel is definitely one of them. I mean, on one of his very rare interviews that he's done in the past a couple of weeks, he was on Seth Myers at this late-night comedy show, and he, unprompted, went on this whole soliloquy about how he is a Zionist. I mean, he actually used the word, again, without being asked, because he was addressing the fact that there are occasionally clips circulating of him from the 80s and 90s or whatever going on these furious pro-Israel rants where he declares himself committed Zionists despite not being Jewish. And he reiterated his conviction in that just a couple of a week or two

ago. So I don't know. I kind of take him at his word on that score. Oh, sure. Yeah, he's always believe in that. Sacrifice the votes of, you know, Michael, I mean, I believe him too when he says that he believes that Donald Trump is the greatest threat, that he's not just a Republican, that he's a potential fascist dictator who's going to overthrow everything and destroy everything. I think he probably believes that his election at Trump's expense last time was the greatest achievement of his life. And he's desperate to prevent Trump from winning again, but not so desperate that he's willing to stop murdering Palestinians and not so desperate that he's willing to not censor his

own constituents within weeks of his reelection campaign coming to fruition here. Another thing is that in 2020, banning TikTok was more seen as a Republican issue, right? I mean, in 2020, Trump for the first time issued an executive order where he attempted to ban TikTok on similar grounds as what's in this new legislation, but the legislation got held up in the courts and it never went through, right? And at the time, TikTok was seen as a platform that was more. more conducive to a Democratic-aligned interest because he was younger, because it was people maybe who were into social activism. Remember that was around, it was, this was just after the flare-up of the George Floyd protests and so forth. So, but Biden now has converged with Trump on TikTok and also on China writ large. I mean, that's another trend that I think underlies

why there was such bipartisan unanimity on this. The Democratic position and the Republican position on China are virtually distinguishable at this point. Biden and Trump, even in 2020, had no major substantive difference on China foreign policy-wise, even though they tried to like invent stuff that they could accuse each other of. And so Biden is essentially willing to adopt the Republican position on this, even if it alienates aspects, elements of their Democratic base, which it clearly does. I mean, part of the reason why there were 50 Democrats in the House who, did vote against this bill as opposed to only 15 Republicans, although it should be said,

Thomas Massey, the Republican is the one who organized the entire opposition on the floor of the House. And he actually did a really good job, made a lot of great points. And Democrats were much more, I don't know, subdued, unassertive about stating their opposition to this, perhaps because Biden did come out and declare his support for it. He said that he would sign the bill. So, you know, maybe that's Democrats not wanting to. necessarily showcase their disagreement with with Biden. But 50 Democrats did vote against it because they probably are going to be more closely connected to constituents who use TikTok to, you know, for social activism or for different kinds of politically adjacent activities

that they're going to be aware of like with creator economy types and so forth. Anyway, yeah, I don't want to, I feel like I was ranting on a little along there. No, that's all right. And I'm sorry because we're out of time too, but I just wanted to tell you that you're one of the worst things about quitting Twitter, man. I had to quit to get back to work on this book, but I miss seeing all of your stuff all the time and really appreciate you joining us on the show here to keep us updated on this stuff. Did you quit for good or are you just taking like a timeout? No, I just got to take a time out. I'll have to get back on there to sell the dang thing when it's done if I can ever get it done.

but um i just can't afford to divide my tension that badly anymore i just you know and the whole israel gaza thing kicked me in the stomach and just destroyed everything for you know put a giant hold on all my progress for like four months there and i just got to break away no choice but i'll be back well uh solidarity yeah well thank you for uh holding down the fight for free speech there for us man appreciate you yeah no problem good chatting with you All right, you guys, that is the great Michael Tracy. He is at M. Tracy.com. The frenzy to ban TikTok is another national security state scam.

And, of course, follow him on Twitter at M. Tracy as well. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, ScottHorton.org, and Libertarian Institute. org.