Month: January 2025

Tomorrow, Tiktok will go dark in the United States.

Well, kind of.

Americans can still use the app if they have it already installed, and no one will be coming after them for using it. Tiktok will just become unavailable on the Apple and Google Play store. Unconfirmed reports are circulating that incoming President Trump might extend the deadline 90 days.

The one “out” Tiktok has is to sell the platform to someone with no ties to the Chinese government. Yesterday (Friday), “Shark Tank” billionaire Kevin O’Leary put an offer on the table to buy the platform for $20 billion in cash, but as of yet he has received no response.

However, as a response to this ban, Gen Z users across America are downloading another Chinese owned social media app called Red Note, which ironically is named after Chinese totalitarian dictator Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, which launched the Chinese rebellion into Communism resulting in the slaughter of millions.

That’ll show us.

Now, I am against censorship in all forms. (One could argue that no individual user is being “censored”–there’s a swamp of social media platforms out there. The business itself is deemed a threat to national security.)

Part of me is uncomfortable with this ban. However, the outcry of the banning of Tiktok has me more than a little puzzled.

A little over a year ago, Tiktok was seen as very dangerous to national security. To this day, all federal and state government devices cannot have the app installed because of those ties to China.

This is the same China that flew a spy balloon the size of a school bus over all important military bases across the United States, collecting and transmitting God knows how many secrets back across the Pacific.

This is the same China buying up land bordering United States’ military bases, including Minot Air Force Base, and even Malmstrom Air Force Base here in Montana, which by the way, happens to control the launches of ICBMs in the northern plains states. Nothing suspicious there.

It is also the same China that, according to NBC News, have hacked our infrastructures—including but not limited to the Treasury Department and Office of Personal Management—and building dossiers on tens of millions of Americans. Apparently, they have done this under our noses since 2014.

Surely, there is nothing nefarious going on in back doors of the Tiktok app which, under communism’s economic structure, is ultimately owned not by ByteDance but by the Chinese government itself.

Then, to add fuel to my suspicion, no one seems to remember that following the Hamas invasion of Israel and the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Tiktok’s algorithms showed clear favoritism toward pro-Palestinian posts nearly 10-to-1 over pro-Israeli posts.

I also remember listening to Podcaster Joe Rogan “going down the rabbit hole” reading the Tiktok Terms of Service live on-air.

These included, according to Rogan, Tiktok’s right to collect the user’s “mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purpose, model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types.”

Of course, the average naïve Gen Z user responds with a shrug and a flippant, “So what. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Rogan continues, ‘So all your apps and all your file names, all the things you have filed away on your phone, they have access to that…File names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms. So they’re monitoring your keystrokes, which means they know every f***ing thing you type. [Including passwords].” If you login to multiple devices, Tiktok “will be able to use your profile information to identify your activity across devices…We may also associate you with information collected from devices other than those you use to log into the platform.”

Tiktok possesses enough information on you to even “shut down people’s accounts [including financial].”

How quickly we’ve forgotten.

Knowing this level of manipulation, I am not necessarily sad to see Tiktok placed under pressure to sell or go away.

I am troubled that, knowing all this information, many Americans just don’t care. It seems Tiktok users and highly misnamed “influencers” are willing to sell their souls for seconds of meaningless entertainment and cash.

China doesn’t need to invade us. We are willing to give ourselves over to the threat solely on our own.

China is using our own nation’s strengths against us.

Honestly, Tiktok shouldn’t need to be banned. Americans should be much smarter and wiser.

TikTok users in the United States should have the presence of mind to know that a nation that hates everything we stand for is leading us right off a cliff.

In a matter of days, the United States will swear in a new leader, the 47th President of the United States. Of course, this also means another presidential term will thankfully shuffle awkwardly off the stage, probably in the opposite direction of the door.

I have never been more relieved the current president’s term is over. The last four years, historically speaking, have been an unmitigated disaster. Afghanistan, out-of-control inflation that everyone but the wealthy would understand, gas prices are down, DEI, a Ministry of Truth–I mean a Department of Misinformation, pressuring social media companies to censor points-of-view, lawfare, the border is closed, there is no mental decline, and the making of the nation’s crack intelligence agencies look more like the Keystone Cops.

Most of all, his administration absolutely and completely destroyed trust in the institution of the federal government. To borrow from a tired, old joke: how do you know when the federal government is lying? Their lips are moving.

The White House and their faithful messengers, the media, was all about maintaining the narrative. We were told that everything’s fine—there’s nothing to see here. All the bad things you see is all in your head. It’s the fastest growing economy in history. You just can’t see it.

Truth didn’t matter, only the narrative. The narrative was god. The narrative must be defended at all costs. Loyalty to the narrative was all that was to be worshipped.

I am not saying that the incoming president will be this bastion of truth. He is human. I pray he doesn’t take on the tactic of making a narrative.

The left seems unwilling to let the idea of narrative go. CNN’s Jim Acosta insisted “the press is not the enemy of the people.

The press is the defender of the people.” Ideally, yes. In reality, no. They lied, spun, and covered up the truth. Personally, it will be a long time before I trust anything they say.

During Biden’s farewell address last night, he threw another possible narrative against the wall hoping it might stick: the country will led by billionaire oligarch. Today, on nearly every news outlet, journalists echoed that their biggest fear was the nation being ruled by billionaire oligarchs. (Never mind the fact that day before Biden awarded thr Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, a billionaire whose only action was donating millions to liberal causes and candidates.)

Given the public trust in the media, I highly doubt it will stick.

This whole idea of narrative-as-truth has got to be thrown out onto the ash heap of bad ideas.

I am so thankful the American people made the statement on the narrative of the last four years. I am thankful we have seen the truth the narrative worked so hard to hide.

I honestly don’t know what the future will bring. My main prayer is that America can breathe a brief sigh of relief that the narrative of the last four years.

Perhaps (?) normalcy might return.