Does anyone believe that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agreed to let Apple sell iphones in China without being given access to all customer data? C’mon people, of course the CCP has had unlimited access to your information for years. They don’t need Tik Tok to spy on you. They have multiple intelligence gathering tools including but not limited to Confucius Institutes, Chinese students and professors at all major Universities, U.S. based CCP police stations (and of course the Biden family, but that’s a story for another day).
A large portion of the $65 billion in annual foreign funding gushing into US university coffers comes from the CCP giving them outsized influence throughout academia and by extension public policy.Clearly Tik Tok is the apocalypse du jour but in the long term the CCP funded Confucius Institutes will prove the more virulent threat.
While Tik Tok has a broader and more visible short term impact on society its real purpose has always been to create mass hysteria among the public that will result in neutering the 1st Amendment and manifest in unchecked government censorship. We are watching that plan come to fruition in real time. Well played China.
The hastily ill conceived bill careening through Congress gives the government the power to censor any information source at any time for any reason under the evocative rubric of ‘national security’. A phrase so devoid of meaning and context that the only limitation is human imagination.
Anyone familiar with the renowned Chinese General and Philosopher Sun Tzu recognizes the proclivity for misdirection and subterfuge versus kinetic battle in the Chinese warfighting catechism. The wholly predictable outcome will be China turning the US into a Hong Kong like vassal state without firing a shot. As Justice Ketanji-Jackson correctly observed, the 1st Amendment “hamstrings” the Government. So eliminating Tik Tok, with no measurable benefit, by disemboweling the 1st Amendment we can return to those glorious days of tyranny before that pesky Constitution was ratified. Where is George III when you need him?