Last Thursday in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers gaveled in a hearing looking into the menace to national security that is TikTok. Now as invasive social media apps go, TikTok might not be the singular biggest threat posed by the Communist Chinese Party. That distinction probably goes to WeChat. Nevertheless, TikTok was on the table for this hearing, and it has more than deserved its turn under the spotlight.
The United States, Great Britain, France, New Zealand, the European Union, and Canada have already banned TikTok on government phones. The intelligence communities among the free world have assessed that the app serves as a data mining operation for the CCP, and not just for information from TikTok. It mines all other data from your phone and builds a dossier on you within the CCP’s computers in Beijing. To what end is anybody’s guess, but you know it’s not for your expressed benefit.
While Joe Biden and his cabinet have fairly quietly begun to unwind federal agencies and their phones from using the app, Biden himself has not yet called for the app to be banned. Two dozen states, however, have. It’s just too much of a national security threat to keep it on your phone, despite the pleasure it gives Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Michigan has banned TikTok on all of its government-issued phones with one explicit exemption. Whitmer likes playing on it, so the legislation gives her a carveout. The Chinese Communist Party, I’m sure, thank her for her continued window into state operations.
How insidious is the app? Even if you were to delete it from your phone, that wouldn’t stop the CCP from collecting data from every operation your phone performs. Once the app is on it, the phone is compromised permanently. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, a senior Republican on the Senate Intel Committee, said back in November, “Let me just be clear. If you have TikTok on your device, you should delete it from your device. And even better, you should go and buy a new device and not download TikTok.”
So with all that background, Thursday’s Energy and Commerce Committee hearing with the CEO of TikTok, Shou Chew, was truly astounding, for a lot of reasons. First, whoever was counseling Mr. Chew on what his responses were and how he delivered them clearly have not read the room as the country grows closer and closer to an outright ban of the app. He was evasive and condescending, which is not a good look when everyone in Washington, even the ones that are basically compromised by lobbyists and/or Fang Fang and on the CCP’s payroll already, knows they’re spying on Americans.
When asked directly about the ownership of TikTok by the CCP, Chew denied it.
Every Democrat and Republican knows that’s a lie. He was also asked about data collection, and whether the CCP had asked for data.
This is Anna Eshoo asking the question, a hard, hard leftist. She wants more government control of everything, but even she has a line for what goes too far, and the CCP’s activities here cross that line. One of the remarkable aspects of this hearing was how bipartisan it was. The key moment, however, was when Mr. Chew was asked directly whether the CCP was using TikTok to spy on Americans.
Give committee members of both parties credit here for this hearing. There was not a lot of grandstanding, just a series of pointed yes or no questions. And Mr. Chew didn’t answer one of them directly or honestly. When you’re asked whether you’re spying on Americans, the answer ought to be no. Period. Next question. If your answer is “I don’t think that’s the right word,” guess that that means? They’re spying on Americans. Game over.
If the move to ban TikTok hadn’t completely achieved critical mass before this hearing, it has now. Whether the President bans it via executive order, or whether Congress passes legislation banning it, that’s the direction we seem to be headed. And Congressional legislation banning it will be widely bipartisan. Not every Democrat will vote for the ban, to be sure, but a lot will. Perhaps even enough to override a presidential veto, were one to be issued. And that takes me to the point of this column – the politics of banning TikTok.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo recently told Bloomberg, “The politician in me thinks you’re going to literally lose every voter under 35, forever.” And that’s the trap in front of Joe Biden. If TikTok gets banned, it will largely be because of Republican action. It’s good for national security, but politically, it’s a huge problem for Biden with young Democratic-leaning voters. A Nancy Pelosi-led house and a Chuck Schumer-led Senate would not have let this issue be brought up. It would have continued to be handled quietly through federal agencies, but making this potentially a national security-related campaign issue by forcing a Congressional vote is not something either would have allowed. Republican have played their cards well on this issue, and handled the hearing with seriousness. Enough Democrats already have seen intelligence briefings and know they have to be on the right side of this for national security’s sake, and will vote for the ban. Enough will in the Senate, too, to defeat a cloture motion. The measure will head ultimately to Joe Biden’s desk for signature or veto.
If Biden signs it, he takes the blame with young people who can’t watch whatever it is they watch on it, and it deflates a chunk of the voting bloc that propelled him to office in 2020. If he vetoes it, the Joe Biden-is-compromised-by-China meme will move from the fringe-for-now Hunter Biden’s business connections scandal to a full-blown crisis of confidence. I don’t care who the Republican nominee is for president in 2024. Every single one of them will take a veto of the TikTok ban by Biden as a 2-by-4 and use it to bludgeon Biden the entire campaign cycle as being soft on China and soft on national security. And it will have the added benefit of being true.
The Boss (Ed) and I discussed whether Biden would veto legislation like this or not last Friday on our Week in Review podcast. We both surmised that Biden would probably veto it. My attitude is even if Republicans were to pay a price with angry younger voters because they were the true drivers behind a ban, I’m willing to pay that price. National security is more important than pandering to voters. If we knowingly allow the CCP to data mine every person’s phone that has the app on it, and every phone that phone touches, simply because we don’t want to offend possible voters, then we as a political party and movement don’t deserve to be in power. We’d have become just like Democrats. Pandering isn’t leadership. Taking national security and doing what’s right for the good of the country regardless of whether it’s popular or not is what should be done, and not a moment too soon.
