YOU SHOULD KNOW WHY ISRAEL IS BANNING AL JAZEERA AND AMERICA IS BANNING TIKTOK

What The Two Laws Have In Common Is That They Are Intended To Silence Israel-Gaza War Critics. But Neither Is Limited To It’s Intended Target.

The White House rightly said it was “concerning” when Israel’s parliament laid the groundwork to shut down Al Jazeera within its borders in April. On Sunday, Israel made its move. The Foreign Press Association called it a “dark day for democracy”.

If the White House remains concerned, it has a strange way of showing it. Joe Biden and his administration have supported and encouraged recent censorial laws and court cases that virtually ensure that “dark days” are ahead at home as well.

The best-known example is the bill Biden signed into law last month to ban or force a sale of TikTok. Like Israel’s Al Jazeera ban, that law relies on unsubstantiated assertions of national security concerns, ignoring Justice Hugo Black’s prescient warning in the Pentagon papers case that “the word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the first amendment”.

Another thing the two laws have in common is that it’s an open secret that those concerns are pretexts for silencing the growing backlash against the Israel-Gaza war. Senator Mitt Romney essentially acknowledged as much in a recent conversation with Antony Blinken, the secretary of state. He wasn’t the first to say the quiet part out loud.

The TikTok law, like the Al Jazeera one, isn’t limited to its initial target. It opens the door for future bans of other platforms – including foreign-controlled online news outlets – that the president deems a national security threat. But unlike the Israeli law, which requires the prime minister to obtain approval from the security cabinet or the government, the American law permits essentially unilateral executive action. It would be naive to think TikTok will be the end of it.

It doesn’t stop there. Biden also signed into law the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (Risaa). That legislation allows the government to conscript any “service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications” to help it surveil foreign targets.

The administration ignored the consensus of civil liberties advocates as well as warnings from lawmakers like Senator Ron Wyden, who cautioned that Risaa could allow the government to order “an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night”.

And that office could be a newsroom. Risaa is, after all, an amendment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had been abused to spy on journalists before Congress expanded it. It’s a safe bet foreign sources will hesitate to speak to American journalists if they think the newsroom may be bugged.

Another bill recently passed by the House of Representatives would give the secretary of the treasury unchecked power to revoke the tax exempt status of any non-profit – including non-profit news outlets – that the secretary deems a “terrorist-supporting organization”. Funding terror is already illegal, but the bill would dispense with the process needed to officially designate groups as terrorist organizations or prosecute them for material support of terrorism.

The legislation comes at a time when federal lawmakers and state attorneys general have insinuated that major news outlets like CNN, the Associated Press, the New York Times and Reuters support terrorism, for example by buying pictures from Palestinian freelancers or by merely being critical of Israel. That’s not to mention the pandering politicians claiming – based on similarly flimsy evidence – that student groups are terrorist supporters.

Some commentators have even called for the bill to be expanded to delist non-profits that meet the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The definition, also recently adopted by the House, is widely criticized for conflating disparagement of Israel with antisemitism – a tactic also employed by proponents of the Al Jazeera ban.

That would give the American government far greater power to silence news outlets – at least increasingly common non-profit ones – than Benjamin Netanyahu could dream of. The administration has not yet said whether it will support the non-profit bill, but its embrace of other censorial power-grabs is not a good sign.

Nor are its anti-press prosecutions. The Florida journalist Tim Burke faces federal charges under the vague and frequently abused Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for “scouring” the internet to find important news that corporations wanted kept secret. Press freedom advocates worry that the charges, and the lack of transparency around them, could chill online newsgathering.

And then there’s the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The administration frames it as a hacking case, despite that 17 of the 18 charges have nothing to do with hacking, and everything to do with routine news gathering methods that investigative journalists employ every day. The Biden administration hasn’t denied that a precedent allowing imprisonment of publishers of government secrets could be abused – it’s only offered assurances that it won’t do so (and, once again, cites nebulous claims of “national security” harms).

Biden and many other Democrats constantly warn that Donald Trump would behave like an authoritarian in a potential second term. Yet they insist on continuing to hand him new powers to abuse, particularly against his favorite scapegoat: the press.

Anyone who doubts that Trump or any other future president will abuse those powers should view the weekend’s events in Israel as a cautionary tale.

THE TOTAL HYPOCRISY IN CONGRESS EXPOSED BY THE TIKTOK BAN

Biden’s Campaign Will Continue Using The Popular Social Media Site TikTok Even Though The President Supported A Bill He Recently Signed Forcing TikTok’s Parent Company To Sell TikTok.

If ByteDance does not sell TikTok within the required time, TikTok will be banned in America. Biden’s continued use of TikTok to reach the approximately 150 million American TikTok users, is not the only example of hypocrisy from politicians who support the TikTok ban.

The TikTok ban was driven by claims that, because ByteDance is a Chinese company, TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government and, thus. is helping the Chinese government collect data on American citizens. However, the only tie ByteDance has to the Chinese government is via a Chinese government controlled company that owns a small amount of stock in a separate ByteDance operation. Furthermore, ByteDance stores its data in an American facility not accessible by the Chinese government.

Just days before passing the TikTok ban, the same Senate that is so concerned about TikTok’s alleged violations of Americans’ privacy passed the FISA reauthorization bill. This bill not only extended existing authorities for warrantless wiretapping and surveillance, it made it easier for government agencies to spy on American citizens. It did this by requiring anyone with access to a targeted individual’s electronic device to cooperate with intelligence agencies.

Supporters of banning TikTok also cited concerns over the site’s “content moderation” policies. These policies reportedly forbid postings embarrassing to the Chinese government such as some related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square confrontation or the Free Tibet movement.

TikTok, like most social media platforms, engages in content moderation. The TikTok ban was supported by Democrats, including President Biden, who have a history of “encouraging” social media companies to censor Americans from using social media to spread “fake news.”

Fake news is defined as anything that contradicts the Democrat or “woke” agenda, including the truth about covid origins, dangers, and treatments; whether democracy was really threatened on January 6^th; and the full story of Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

One major reason behind strong bipartisan support for the TikTok ban is the wish to engage in a cold war with China. ByteDance’s Chinese connection makes it a convenient target to help foster anti-Chinese sentiment. Sadly, the anti-Chinese hysteria is a bipartisan phenomenon and has even infected some politicians who take sensible positions on American intervention in Ukraine.

Another major reason banning TikTok has strong bipartisan support is that the site is being used by many young people to share information on the Israeli government’s action in Gaza. The head of the Anti-Defamation League was actually caught on tape complaining about the “TikTok problem.” This use of TikTok made TikTok a target for the many politicians who think the First Amendment makes an exception for speech critical of Israel.

The silver lining in the TikTok ban is it is waking up more Americans, especially young Americans, to the threat the out-of-control welfare-warfare-surveillance state poses to their liberty and prosperity. This provides a great opportunity to spread the ideas of liberty and grow the liberty movement.

WHY WON’T THEY LEAVE TIKTOK ALONE?

In A Free Country The Government Would Not Force The Sale Of A Social-Media Company Or Ban Its App From The Google And Apple Stores. Would It?

Well, yes, it would, could (perhaps), and might. A bill in Congress, backed by the government’s nominal chief executive, could become law. The House of Representatives passed it last week by an overwhelming bipartisan majority — despite valiant efforts by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, plus a few others — and it is now before the Senate.

That bill would establish fuzzy criteria defining a “foreign adversary’s” alleged influence through a social media platform. It is aimed, for now, at requiring TikTok, used by 170 million mostly younger Americans, to be sold to a government-approved American buyer within a specified period. If not sold, Americans would be forbidden to get the app. One should guess the app would have to be disabled for those who have it already.

In other words, TikTok would be banned from America — you know, just as China’s communist government bans or interferes with social media over there. Knowing how the government works, we must presume that the bill’s criteria will be applied to other cases later. It certainly would exist as a standing threat to the uncooperative.

The complaint against TikTok is that it’s a subsidiary of ByteDance, a widely owned company subject to Chinese government influence or control, although this is disputed by TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean businessman with substantial roots in — the United States. But let’s assume the worst and see where that leads. After all, the Chinese government is no respecter of individual rights. If the American government is eager to interfere with social media, why not the Chinese government?

TikTok worriers say that China could harvest data on Americans while feeding them self-serving democracy-subverting messages. It has reportedly been caught suppressing unflattering information. Not good, but of course, the American government has done the same thing; a lawsuit about this, Murthy v. Missouri, is now before the Supreme Court. As many critics of the bill have pointed out, the Chinese don’t need TikTok to acquire information that users readily give up to other platforms. It’s already on the market. Moreover, nobody should expect the news from any one online source to be complete; as one grows, one should learn to consult a variety of sources for a fuller picture.

Matthew Petti of Reason is right: “Competition is the strongest force keeping the internet free. Whenever users find a topic banned on TikTok, they can escape to Twitter or Instagram to discuss the censored content. And when Twitter or Instagram enforce politically motivated censorship on a different topic, users can continue that discussion on TikTok.”

Changing ownership or banishing TikTok would create a false sense of security. The problem of myopia would remain.

Moreover, as Matt Taibbi alerts us, the bill would give the executive branch “sweeping powers.” He writes: “As written, any ‘website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application’ that is ‘determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States’ is covered.’”

Taibbi continues: “A ‘foreign adversary controlled application,’ in other words, can be any company founded or run by someone living at the wrong foreign address, or containing a small minority ownership stake. Or it can be any company run by someone ‘subject to the direction’ of either of those entities. Or, it’s anything the president says it is. Vague enough?”

By this time, shouldn’t we expect the worst from letting legislators write the rules?

But those are not the only reasons for concern. According to Glenn Greenwald, the bill had been floating around for a few years but had not garnered enough support to get through Congress. That changed recently, according to Greenwald, citing articles in the Wall Street Journal, Economist, and Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Why? As Greenwald documents, anxiety about TikTok took a quantum leap beginning on Oct. 7^th, 2023, the day Hamas killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians and Israel began retaliating against the people of the Gaza Strip.

What has this got to do with TikTok? you ask. Good question. Israel’s defenders in the United States, such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, are upset that TikTok’s young users are being exposed to what he calls anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic disinformation. “It’s Al Jazeera on steroids,” Greenblatt said on MSNBC. During a leaked phone call, he complained, “We have a TikTok problem,” by which he means a generational problem. Younger people — including younger Jewish people — are appalled at what Israel’s military is doing in Gaza. (To complicate things, it looks like TikTok and Instagram have suppressed pro-Palestinian information.)

Would an American-owned TikTok be easier to control? Experience says yes. Have a look at the Twitter Files, which document how American officials, Chinese-style, pressured social media to censor or suppress dissenting views on important matters such as the COVID-19 response and the 2020 election. A federal judge likened the government’s efforts to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Do we want to become more like China?

A final word. Defenders of free speech should not argue that ill-intentioned disinformation and well-intentioned misinformation from any source can cause no harm, broadly defined. Of course, it can. The proper answer to this legitimate concern is that government-produced “safetyism,” placing safety above every other value including freedom, will do more harm than good.

CAN TIKTOK BE LEGALLY BANNED BY CONGRESS?

“Congress Shall Make No Law … Abridging The Freedom Of Speech.”~ First Amendment To The American Constitution

When James Madison set about to draft the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the American Constitution – he was articulating what lawyers and philosophers and judges call “negative rights.” A positive right grants a privilege, like a driver’s license. A negative right restrains the government from interfering with a preexisting right. In order to emphasize his view that the freedom of speech preexisted the government, Madison insisted that the word “the” precede “freedom of speech” in the First Amendment.

If the freedom of speech preceded the government, where did it come from?

Speech is a natural right; it comes from our humanity. The framers of the Constitution and the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights understood and recognized this. Congress doesn’t grant the freedom of speech; rather it is prohibited absolutely from interfering with it. In the years following the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the courts began applying the restrictions in the First Amendment to the states and their municipalities and subdivisions.

Today, the First Amendment bars all government – federal, state and local – and all branches of government – legislative, executive and judicial – from interfering with the freedom of speech.

You’d never know this listening to Congress today. The same Congress that can’t balance a budget or count the number of foreign military bases the feds own, that thinks it can right any wrong and tax any event, that has borrowed over $34 trillion and not paid back any of it; the same Congress now wants to give the President of the United States – whomever might occupy that office – the lawful power to suppress websites he thinks are spying on their users or permitting foreign governments to influence what folks see on the sites. All this is an effort to ban the popular website for young folks called TikTok and force its owners to sell its assets.

Here is the backstory.

Throughout American history, we have suffered from mass fears. In the 1790s, it was fear of the French and of Native Americans. In the 1860s, it was fear of African Americans and fear of Confederates. In the 1900s, it was fear of anarchists, Nazis and Communists. In the first quarter of the present century, the government has whipped up fear of terrorists, Russians, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin and now the Chinese.

In his dystopian novel, “1984,” George Orwell analyzed the totalitarian mind and recognized the need that totalitarians have for fear and hatred. They know that when folks are afraid, they will bargain away the reality of liberty for the illusion of safety. Without fear and hatred, totalitarians have fewer tools for control of the population.

What is the government’s problem with TikTok? The feds want to use fear and hatred of the Chinese government in order to regulate the sources of data and information that Americans can consult. They have projected upon the government of China the very same unlawful and unconstitutional assaults on natural rights that the feds themselves perpetrate upon us.

Thus, in order to gain control over the American public, the deep state – the parts of the government that do not change, no matter which political party is in power – and its friends in Congress have advanced the myth that the Chinese government, which commands the loyalty of the owners of TikTok, might use the site to pass along misinformation or to spy on its users. The key word here is “might,” as the intelligence officials who testified to Congress on this were unable to produce any solid evidence – just fear – that the Chinese government is doing this.

You can’t make this up.

Remember the bumper stickers from the 1970s: “Don’t steal. The government hates competition!” I thought of that line when analyzing this. Why? Because the federal government itself spies on every American who uses a computer or mobile device. The federal government itself captures every keystroke touched on every device in America. The federal government itself captures all data transmitted into, out of and within America on fiber-optic cables. And the federal government itself told the Supreme Court earlier this week that it needs to be able to influence what data is available on websites in order to combat misinformation.

The federal government basically told the court that it – and not individual persons – should decide what we can read and from what sources. What the federal government did not reveal is its rapacious desire to control the free market in ideas.

Now back to the First Amendment.

The principal value underlying the freedom of speech is free will. We all have free will to think as we wish, to say what we think, to read what we want, to publish what we say. And we can do all this with perfect freedom. We don’t need a government permission slip. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to guarantee this freedom by keeping the government out of the business of speech – totally and completely. This is the law of the land in modern Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Were this not the law, then the government could suppress the speech it hates and fears and support the speech of its patrons. And then the values that underlay the First Amendment would be degraded and negated. The government has no moral or constitutional authority to spy on us or to influence our thoughts. Period.

Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Have we consented to a nullification of free speech in deference to whomever might be living in the White House? Why do you repose the Constitution into the hands of those who subvert it?

It is past time for American’s to face reality and escape their indoctrination.

THE ATTEMPT TO BAN TIKTOK IS JUST ANOTHER SECURITY STATE SCAM

There Is A Lesson To Be Gained From The March 2023 Version Of A Tiktok-Related Banning Frenzy, Which Lost Momentum When The Details Of The Main Legislative Proposal Became More Widely Known.

On November 20, 2023, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote in a joint letter to the CEO of TikTok that the platform was guilty of “stoking anti-Semitism, support, and sympathy for Hamas” after the October 7^th attack on Israel. “This deluge of pro-Hamas content is driving hateful anti-Semitic rhetoric and violent protests on campuses across the country,” McMorris Rodgers charged. A year ago, in March 2023, she had already declared: “TikTok should be banned in the United States of America.”

This week the plan came to fruition, with McMorris Rodgers and her colleagues orchestrating what could be best described as a legislative sneak attack: suddenly the House of Representatives, a notoriously dysfunctional body — particularly this Congressional term, with all the Republican leadership turmoil — took decisive, concerted, expedited action to pass legislation banning TikTok before most of the public would have even gotten a chance to notice. The bill was introduced March 5, 2024, advanced by a unanimous committee vote on March 7, 2024, then approved for final passage March 13, 2024. Almost nothing ever passes Congress at such warp-speed.

McMorris Rodgers facilitated the unanimous 50-0 vote out of the Energy and Commerce committee, a development which took many in DC off-guard, even those keenly attuned to the TikTok policy issue. As someone familiar with the process explained, before introducing the bill, the key sponsors “wanted to keep it quiet all around,” as they correctly surmised that once the details of the bill gained wider public exposure, opposition would mount — just as happened in March 2023 when a precursor bill got derailed after public awareness grew of provisions delegating enormous new powers to the President to control speech online.

This week, last-minute opposition continued to grow even during the final floor debate Wednesday morning, thanks to the quick-thinking of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who organized the opposition and later reported that the number of Republican House members voting no may have tripled as a result of the 40-minute floor debate he triggered — a rarity in the annals of Congress.

Republican opposition was still paltry though — just 15 voted no, compared with 50 Democrats. Even among the few no votes, some, like Matt Gaetz, made sure to clarify that on principle he was totally in favor of banning TikTok — he just objected to the particulars of this bill. The fact that Trump tentatively came out against the bill would also likely have been a factor for Gaetz, who likely would not have been so keen to stake out a different position from Trump on a major national policy issue. Whatever his precise stance, Trump has evidently not taken a major lobbying interest, as he has before with other legislative items. The little he’s said about the TikTok bill has been lukewarm and muddled — which makes sense given that it was Trump who first attempted to ban TikTok by executive fiat in 2020, and got held up by the courts. This current bill enumerates the powers Trump had unsuccessfully sought and codifies them in federal statute as a newly-assigned, discretionary presidential authority.

There is also the issue of what someone said was the “technical assistance” provided by the “Intelligence Community” during the reportedly “quiet” formulation of this bill — led by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL). The ranking member counterpart of McMorris Rodgers on the Energy and Commerce committee, Frank Pallone (D-NJ), said unnamed members of the so-called Intelligence Community had “asked Congress to give them more authority to act,” and this bill was intended to grant that request. As such, the bill was expressly crafted to enhance the power of the “Intelligence Community” to restrict Americans’ ability to consume and express speech online — as always, in the alleged name of “national security.”

The purveyors of TikTok-related fear within this vaunted “Community of Intelligence” also prefer to keep the underlying evidence for their claims hidden from public view, opting for highly confidential briefings with compliant members of Congress, most of whom emerged from these secret Pow-Wows in the past week excitedly eager to vest the Executive Branch with extensive new powers to Keep Us Safe from designated foreign foes. And not just China, as with the TikTok prohibition — but also an enormous array of other potential “applications,” which encompass everything from mobile apps to websites, that can be claimed as “foreign adversary controlled,” with “adversaries” defined as the standard rival bloc of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

To fight this great civilizational battle against China and its satellite states, the citizens of America must gratefully accept the abridgment of their own speech, and patriotically acquiesce to the government seizing the power to block a massive range of potential online applications and websites, so long as they can be claimed by the President to be “directly or indirectly” controlled by an official foreign adversary. What it means to be “controlled by a foreign adversary” is so malleable per the legislative text that it can include “a person” who is “subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity,” whatever that might mean in today’s parlance, when spurious charges of “Russian asset” and “Chinese influence” can be flung left and right like nothing. Given the subjective discretion that would necessarily have to be exercised in the making of such a determination, the president is being vested here with a huge amount of subjective, unilateral discretion.

There is likely a lesson to be gained from the March 2023 version of TikTok-related banning frenzy, which lost momentum when the details of the main legislative proposal became more widely known. Surmising that opposition could very well mount again, the House sponsors decided this time around to preempt the inconvenience of open debate, and hustle through the bill on a “quietly” expedited schedule before the provisions became widely known, which could prompt the always-annoying phenomenon of constituents contacting their representatives to express an opinion on the issue. This deliberate evasion of public scrutiny was unfortunately necessary for national security.

Another running theme in this mad legislative dash is the extent to which the Israel/Gaza war and hysteria over the October 7^th attacks was a main driver. In November 2023, Israeli president Isaac Herzog blamed TikTok for “brainwashing” Americans who didn’t understand that Israel was pulverizing Gaza to defend not just Israeli security, but also the freedom of Americans to “enjoy decent, liberal, modern, progressive democratic life.” Apparently this logic would make more sense to people age 18-29 if they didn’t spend so much time on TikTok.

The heads of the Jewish Federations of North America, an agglomeration of American Jewish philanthropic interests, concurred with the need to terminate TikTok in a March 6^th letter timed almost perfectly to the bill’s introduction just the previous day. Writing to Rodgers and Pallone, the authors said: “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in anti-Semitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.”

“We have a major, major, major generational problem,” complained Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, in leaked audio of a private meeting last year. “And so we really have a TikTok problem.”

In this telling, the “TikTok problem” seems to boil down to TikTok’s insufficient alignment with American geopolitical interests, and the inability of the American regime to exert the same coercive pressure on TikTok that it’s been able to exert on the likes of Google, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Twitter/X, and so on. TikTok therefore makes for a scapegoat on which to blame the increasingly “anti-Israel” and “pro-Hamas” attitudes of the youth, who supposedly absorb these malign beliefs in between synchronized dance videos, recipe tips, and makeup guides.

While it’s always difficult to assign precise causality in a multi-variable confluence of factors, here’s what we do know. There was a growing clamor to ban TikTok for the past several years. A bicameral legislative push was made almost exactly one year ago, in March 2023, but got derailed after public awareness grew of the main proposal’s speech-curtailing and executive-empowering provisions. Then after October 7^th, another round of scapegoating burst onto the scene, with TikTok furiously singled out and blamed by American and Israeli officials for fomenting impermissible discontent with Israel’s war of pulverization against Gaza — the naive youth could only view Israel’s military action in a negative light if they were having their brains nefariously infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party. Certainly if they watched CNN, MSNBC, or FOX NEWS instead, their brains wouldn’t be turned to microwaved mush, and they’d be super well-informed and not at all propagandized.

“China is our enemy, and we need to start acting like it,” blustered Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) on the floor of the House before the vote this week. “I am proud to partner with Representatives Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi on this bipartisan bill to ban the distribution of TikTok in America.”

You should ask yourself who these politicians really represent.

AMERICANS WILL NOT BECOME SAFER BY BANNING TIKTOK

Giving The American Regime More Power To Control What Information Americans Are Allowed To See Online Is Not Something To Be Unconcerned About.

The House passed a bill banning TikTok. The bill is based on concerns that the Chinese Communist Party effectively controls ByteDance, the app’s parent company. Last Friday, President Joe Biden endorsed the legislation and promised to sign it into law if Congress passes it.

The vote comes nearly a year after the RESTRICT Act, the last major congressional attempt to ban TikTok, fell apart. While it was framed as a TikTok ban, a closer look at the RESTRICT Act revealed that the bill would grant the executive branch extensive powers to monitor and suppress many legitimate activities that Americans conduct online.

The RESTRICT Act’s “expansive and unspecific” language made the bill a threat to the property rights of American citizens. While the language of Representative Gallagher’s bill is more precise, it still gives the government room to expand far beyond TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. So, many of the threats to Americans’ rights remain.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that granting the United States government more power to control what information Americans are allowed to see online is not something to be concerned about. Will this bill actually make Americans safer? After all, wouldn’t a small additional rights infringement on a population whose rights are already heavily infringed upon be worth it if it fends off a much larger threat to the rights of Americans from a foreign adversary?

Perhaps. But that is certainly not an accurate characterization of the current situation.

There is no evidence that the Chinese government has any intention or desire to invade and conquer territory claimed by the United States. No serious geopolitical analyst makes this claim. And even when the most fervent China hawks cite China’s “imperial ambitions,” they refer not to some imminent military threat to America but to the ongoing struggle for control of China’s region.

For decades, the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, DC, have decided that they are the ones who ought to control the waters surrounding the Chinese mainland.

The Chinese Communist Party relies on a growing economy to maintain its legitimacy in the eyes of the 1.4 billion people living under its regime, and the modern Chinese economy is almost entirely reliant on maritime trade. However, because China’s coast is surrounded by other island nations, Chinese vessels need to navigate through and around waters claimed by other governments to access the world’s oceans.

So, any competing territorial claims off China’s coast will already be a source of tremendous anxiety for the Chinese government. On top of that, however, Washington has decided to maintain a heavy naval presence in the region, in addition to hundreds of heavily armed American military bases. The American regime has also made numerous weapons deals and defense agreements with nearby island nations, including Taiwan.

The struggle for political control over Taiwan is widely considered the top flash point in the region today. The dynamic can best be understood as a stalemate in an almost century-old Chinese civil war. As Brad Pearce stated in an article last year, Washington holds a bizarre official position on the conflict:

“Since Richard Nixon adopted the “One China” policy 50 years ago, U.S.-China policy has been based on an inherent contradiction. The United States views the People’s Republic of China as the sole government of China, including Taiwan. However, it has given what amounts to a security guarantee to the so-called “Republic of China,” the government of Taiwan, which itself claims all of China.”

Beyond the security guarantee, Washington has armed the Taiwanese military and stationed American troops on the island. Last month, it was revealed that the American regime has deployed military advisers—likely Green Berets—to the Kinmen islands. While controlled by Taiwan, these islands are located right off the coast of mainland China. The American government clearly sees itself as a main combatant if this stalemated Chinese civil war were to again turn hot.

The American political establishment and their friends and donors in the weapons industry get plenty out of this militarization of China’s region. The rest of us, who are forced to fund all this, gain nothing but unnecessary risk.

A hot war over Taiwan would be devastating for all involved. It would likely be impossible for the American regime to win outright, and it will almost certainly not stay contained in the area surrounding Taiwan. War games trying to predict how the war would play out frequently accelerate to the point of intercontinental missile strikes, sometimes nuclear, on cities in the western United States.

That is the danger Americans face from this conflict with China. It is not in the interest of the American people to continue this aggressive posturing when the stakes are this high, as the very presence of American troops has the potential to kick off the fighting. Just look, for instance, at the way John Bolton reacted to the news that China might someday try to build a military training facility in Cuba. There’s no reason to believe that Chinese hardliners are any different.

Banning or forcing the sale of TikTok is, at best, a distraction. If the safety of the American people is truly the goal, then Washington must urgently rein in its provocative and unnecessary posturing on and around China’s coast.

THE ANTI-TIKTOK “RESTRICT ACT” IS REALLY INTENDED TO ELIMINATE FREE SPEECH FOR ALL

We Live In An Era Where The World Has Become More Orwellian Than Orwell Himself Could Have Ever Imagined As The American Regime Creates Chinaphobia To Repress The People.

It should come as no surprise that the American government is once again attempting to expand its stranglehold on individual liberty. Enter Senate Bill 686, also known as the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act (RESTRICT Act). Far from being the limited TikTok ban it purports to be, the RESTRICT Act represents an unprecedented expansion of government power and surveillance, reaching into nearly every aspect of our digital lives.

Make no mistake, this piece of legislation is the “Patriot Act on steroids.” The RESTRICT Act would seemingly grant the American government total control over all devices connected to the internet, including cars, Ring cameras, refrigerators, Alexa devices, and your phone. It goes beyond the pale, with the end goal being nothing short of a complete invasion of your privacy.

Under the guise of national security, the RESTRICT Act targets not only TikTok but all hardware, software, and mobile apps used by more than one million people. This means that anything from your Google Home device to your smartphone could be subject to government monitoring and control.

Should you dare to defy the RESTRICT Act, you’ll face devastating consequences. Violators can be slapped with a 20-year prison sentence, civil forfeiture, and denied freedom of information requests. All this, mind you, for simply trying to maintain some semblance of privacy in your own home.

The insidious nature of the RESTRICT Act doesn’t stop there. As reported by @underthedesknews, the bill’s proponents are also seeking to undermine Section 230 and limit free speech. The implications are clear: this legislation is not about protecting Americans but rather about stripping away our rights and liberties.

The list of supporters for this draconian bill reads like a who’s who of Big Government cheerleaders and like all attacks on freedom, it has bipartisan support. Among them are Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, Sen. John Thune, R-N.D., National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and nine Democratic co-sponsors such as Hillary Clinton’s former VP pick, Tim Kaine, and Senator Tammy Baldwin.

It’s time to call this bill what it truly is: an all-out assault on individual freedom and privacy. The RESTRICT Act would usher in an era of unparalleled state control over our digital lives, a nightmare scenario that even George Orwell would have struggled to imagine,

We must stand united against this abomination of a bill, lest we allow our government to transform the internet into a dystopian surveillance state. The RESTRICT Act represents the antithesis of the free and open web we have come to cherish, and it must be stopped before it’s too late.

In the past, it was outraged citizens who rose to the challenge and struck down this huge step toward the police state. And we can do it again.

Share this article with your friends and family and ask them to call their representative now, and tell them to oppose this Orwellian legislation. Give peace and freedom one last chance.