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Trump opposes TikTok divestiture
We may be seeing the GOP becoming pro-China in real time.
Recently there’s been a bill advancing through Congress that would force a divestiture of TikTok from its Chinese parent to some sort of Western company. Many are abbreviating this as a “TikTok ban”, but that’s not accurate. It’s more of a forced severing of the app from ByteDance in particular, although the precise details following the bills passage remain to be seen.
The TikTok Question
You could list all the typical issues that social media creates and they’d almost certainly be true for TikTok like they are for Facebook or X. But in addition to this, TikTok has two unique issues from being beholden to the CCP.
The first, less pressing issue is data security. China has a law that allows their government to require any Chinese company to give them any personal information they request. ByteDance has been caught a number of times doing bad things with American users’ data. They spied on journalists who criticized the company. The American arm forwarded data to the Chinese arm, which forwarded it to the Chinese government.
The second, bigger issue is of propaganda. Nearly a third of Americans age 18-29 regularly get news from TikTok. This news is subtly and invisibly controlled by a foreign adversary government. Noah Smith summarizes the broader implications:
So why does this matter? Suppressing Americans’ access to videos about Tiananmen Square might or might not sound like that big of a deal, but consider what TikTok would be able to do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. would have to make a very rapid, highly consequential decision about whether to come to Taiwan’s aid. Imagine anti-Taiwan videos flooding TikTok, threatening to send the President’s poll numbers plunging. Imagine the U.S. government hesitating in the face of that concerted flood of manipulated public opinion, and thus losing a critical confrontation with its most powerful foreign adversary.
Trump Opposes Divestiture
As a result of the above issues, forcing ByteDance to sell the app to a Western company is one of the few issues that has broad bipartisan support. Well, it did have bipartisan support until Trump did a 180 and suddenly opposed the bill. This was after Trump met a wealthy TikTok investor who promised to support his campaign.
Now, a politician changing his views wouldn’t normally be that much of big deal. After all, voters generally choose people whose views align with theirs, so for a normal issue Trump would usually either be forced back to his initial position or risk a fall in the polls. We recently saw this with his Social Security reform proposals. However, foreign policy is unique in that the public largely takes its cues from trusted partisan elites. This is a broadly replicated finding that basically translates to “the people are sheep”. Most individuals know that foreign policy is really important, but it doesn’t affect their lives that much, so it’s harder for them to get an intuitive understanding of how things are going compared to something like, say, the economy. Thus, they look to people they trust to get their views, and then say they formed their views by “looking at the evidence”.
An example of this is Russia. There has been a pro-Russian undercurrent in the GOP for the past decade or so, but it was mostly limited to a few fringe individuals. It started becoming more mainstream when Trump feted Putin during his presidency, and then it became even more pronounced in 2023 when Trump used Ukraine aid as a cudgel against Biden. Republicans were quite hawkish towards Russia as recently as the 2012 election when Obama told Romney that “the 80’s called, they want their foreign policy back”. Now here we are a decade later, with Tucker Carlson sniffing chocolate cake in a Moscow parking lot to prove the superiority of the Russian political system and how it’s a “bastion of conservative values”. Russian propaganda about the villainy of NATO is repeated as mainstream conservative talking points, and the Republican base largely goes along with it.
Could the same happen vis-à-vis China? I don’t see why not. Granted, it wouldn’t happen all at once, but I believe a gradual shift in that direction is certainly possible. China is an orderly society with a strongman leader. It doesn’t recognize same-sex unions. As an opponent of America, it could be presented as an opponent of vaguely defined “globohomo”. Simply ctrl+c, ctrl+v the standard talking points used for Russia, as most of them fit just as well if not better for China.
Trump has been hot or cold on China just like he was on Russia. He criticized both countries if he thought the democratic president was doing something that “made us look weak”. But then he quickly changed his tune after having a few inconsequential meetings with Putin/Xi. Eventually, the forces of negative partisanship pushed him to become clearly pro-Russia, and presumably it could happen with China as well. Trump’s clout means much of the Republican elites are following him:
• Tucker Carlson has long been against anything that would hurt TikTok, and could very well be where Trump is getting his views.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene is against the bill.
• Elon Musk is against the bill.
• Kim Dotcom is against the bill, and repeats much of the “America is bad” rhetoric previously seen in pro-Russian arguments.
From this, we’re starting to see the base’s opinions change. For instance, a UCLA Republicans group posted a picture of Trump, Xi, and Putin together, praising them as “three conservative patriots”. Something like this being posted unironically would have been a fever dream 10 years ago. The ironic force would have been so strong that it would have reanimated Reagan as a zombie, given him strength to hunt down whoever made it and punch them in the face.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that your comment completely ignores the lobbying by Jewish groups to ban the platform due to the presence of anti-semitism and support for Palestine:
If you think bipartisan support for this bill is about hypothetical scenarios involving the invasion of Taiwan and public exposure to TikToks about the Tiananmen Square I have a bridge to sell you...
This is also coming off the heels of a leaked audio of ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt in panic proclaiming "We have a major Tiktok problem" and saying that they have to work together to solve the problem... which they now are doing...
Obviously Musk is going to oppose the bill, because it's half a step beneath banning a social media company for allowing anti-Semitism.
It's about Israel/Palestine, not Tiananmen Square. The Chinese dimension to it makes it an easy target, but it's being targeted because of antisemitism, and X could be next.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised your comment completely ignores the history of attempted Tik-Tok bans in favor of once again blaming the Jews. There was a measure floated in March 2023 on a Tik-Tok ban. It was banned from all US government devices in 2022. Mike Gallagher was pushing for a complete ban in 2022. Trump tried to ban Tik-Tok in 2021. The Jews probably aren't the deciding factor here.
ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt was heard on leaked call demanding something must be done about TikTok due to declining support for Israel among young people, hundreds of Jewish organizations throw their weight behind a Tik Tok ban, a week ago Time publishes in article by Anthony Goldbloom titled Why TikTok Needs to be Sold or Banned Before the 2024 Election which hardly mentions anything about some national security threat from CCP, and instead under the heading "Why it Matters" complains about the portion of pro-Palestinian hashtags on the platform and the spread of antisemitism...
They want control over the moderation and algo, as ADL has control over the moderation of Reddit and nearly every platform except X only since Musk's takeover.
And still, in a thread where @Ben___Garrison is lobbing accusations of foreign influence against the GOP by CCP and Russia he doesn't even breath a whisper about Zionist influence. It is obvious that Zionist influence is at play here, and the fact you can pontificate about the lack of Tiananmen Square videos while ignoring the planning and lobbying by Zionists to force a divestment on behalf of Israel and to combat antisemitism, despite their explicit plans laying out their objective and motivation, says it all really.
Edit: And news that is now just breaking, looks like Jewish Zionist Steven Mnuchin is angling to buy TikTok after the bill is passed.
From CNBC:
From the JPost article earlier this year about the Liberty Strategic Capital:
It should also be noted that David Friedman, Mnuchin's business partner who co-founded Liberty Strategic Capital which is angling to buy Tik Tok, is also a Jewish Zionist and former US ambassador to Israel.
And yet if the plan to force ByteDance to sell is a "Jewish Zionist" one:
Why did noted right-wing Zionist, Bibi fan, ByteDance investor, settlement supporter and GOP donor Jeff Yass personally convince Donald Trump to completely reverse his position on TikTok, allegedly in advance of a major donation? Was he not informed of the Jewish Zionist position in advance? Would he really screw over his entire tribe just to make a quick buck? If he did defect in such a clear and destructive way, that would be a strong refutation of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy hypothesis advanced by eg. MacDonald and others.
Where's the evidence that TikTok has remained unbowed by eg. the ADL's pressure? A large majority (more than 60%) of TikTok's parent, ByteDance, is owned by global institutional investors. Many of these investors, from Yass (who owns 15% of the company, almost as much as the cofounders), to Yuri Milner, to other large institutional investors like Blackrock, to venture capitalists like Sequioa that have major stakes, are owned, operated or led by prominent Jews, pretty much all of them Zionists, several actual Israelis. If TikTok's investors wanted to pressure TikTok into pro-Israeli positions, why wouldn't they be able to? In addition, TikTok's western moderation is all handled from the US and performed by Americans and their contractors. No policy in China, likely not even any Chinese executives, would need to be involved in such an effort. And indeed TikTok has already thoroughly supported and joined the global pro-woke content policy movement in the US and Western Europe. The only reason this wouldn't work is if the CCP exerted political pressure on TikTok to specifically avoid kowtowing to these prominent investors. But then...
Why would China be opposed to censoring pro-Palestinian views? In addition to China's own troubles with Islamism, China has a long and productive relationship with Israel. Israelis and Jews are generally liked in China, indeed you yourself have accused Israel of repeatedly selling the Chinese 'top secret' American technology. China has resisted any full-throated condemnation of Israel beyond the boilerplate ICJ statement against colonialism, and certainly has resisted the idea of any sanctions or restrictions on trade with Israel. The pan-Islamist sentiment often promoted by Palestinian boosters is itself a threat to Chinese minorities living in Muslim lands like Malaysia and Indonesia, where ethnic Chinese (whom the CCP has previously tried to protect from native depradation) have been arrested for publicly opposing some anti-Israel policies. Radicalizing Muslims populations in an explicitly Islamic fervor for Palestine does not serve Chinese foreign policy goals, especially when Israel is increasingly neutral on the US-China question.
In summary, the argument that this censorship is about Israel-Palestine doesn't really make sense. It misunderstands ByteDance's own corporate structure, TikTok's management and political stance (if any) and China's relationship to Israel, which is largely friendly and no more hostile than that of, say, Macron's France. Israel itself has not protested TikTok's moderation with China, and therefore the support of some American Jewish groups for the ban is more about jumping on a general societal bandwagon and flailing around because they're supposed to be 'opposing antisemitism' and don't really know how.
Obviously, that one Jewish investor opposes it (as far as we know) due to his own bottom line. You are continuing the time-honored tradition of "You can't relate something to Jewish influence unless literally every single Jew is involved" even though that standard is never held in analysis of other group-organized activist behavior.
We have ADL, Jewish Federations of North America, media pieces like Goldbloom's and others advocating for the forced divestment because of antisemitism and not because of CCP security concerns. This includes various stories pointing out that the antisemitism and Israeli concerns are what has united what have been previously failed efforts. But you'll point to one Jew with a financial stake. And the sourcing of that entire story is extremely thin, there is no chance we have any idea what conversations are happening between closed doors with Jeff Yass and potential buyers. The entire basis for your claim is this fact: "According to Politico, Trump praised the investor at a Club for Growth retreat at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida." That's it.
Did you not listen to the leaked audio of Greenblatt I linked from November? How is that not evidence when it is coming right from the horse's mouth?
How is this not evidence?
Tik-Tok is not censoring pro-Palestinian views. So the ADL wants to change management.
The story broke this morning that Steven Mnuchin is looking to lead a purchase of Tik Tok through his investment group, which has an office in Tel Aviv, and co-founded by the former ambassador to Israel.
It's amazing how this entire constellation of evidence, including a comically on-the-nose detail like Tik Tok being potentially purchased by an investment group with an office in Tel Aviv and co-founded by the former US ambassador to Israel, and you still deny what is happening, all because Yass gave $16 million to the Club for Growth action which is defending Tik Tok.
I'm gonna regret asking this, but when you keep pointing to Jew Conspiracy Theories because Jewish groups are generally against anti-Semitism, is it not possible that this is because... people generally don't like movements that are directed specifically against them? And have rational reasons to oppose them?
Your take is obviously that Jews really are a malignant coordinated network of bad actors acting against non-Jews and that we should Name the Jew whenever possible, and that Jews complaining about this are just Jews upset at being caught being Jews. But for people who don't see Jews as an existential threat, yes, pushing anti-Jewish propaganda does look like a threat to Jews, it should hardly be surprising that rich Jews and Jewish organizations oppose anti-semitism. Even excluding the Holocaust there is plenty of historical evidence of Jews having good reason to consider themselves actually under threat of violence. If there were a large movement of people trying to convince the world that Chinese people are evil bugmen we should view as an existential threat, I would expect Chinese organizations and rich Chinese to have an interest in opposing these groups.
None of this is to say I personally think TikTok should be banned because it allows anti-Semitic content. But you don't need sinister conspiracies of Jews trying to keep the goyim from Noticing to explain why they have a problem with it.
Obviously I accept Jewish neuroticism and paranoia over antisemitism as axiomatic, not something that is a "conspiracy," and I have never related that as a conspiracy. But that neuroticism and paranoia expresses as group-organized behavior in culture, academia, social media.
I have a problem with it, obviously, because it affects me and my nation. That group-organized behavior is used to direct public consensus in a way that is favorable towards Jews and unfavorable towards non-Jews, with stifling criticism of Israel being one example. Another example of course is the question of White identity politics, which has always most vehemently been opposed by organized Jewish behavior precisely because they are afraid of antisemitism.
Jewish groups are at the forefront of fighting any sort of political rhetoric that is oppositional to demographic change, associating "Racism" with antisemitism.
So they get identity politics, White people do not, and Jews use their power in various cultural institutions for their own benefit, often at the expense of White people.
I do not think it's a "Jew Conspiracy Theory" that Jews oppose antisemitism. But their behavior in using their influence to direct public perception and stifle, using increasingly authoritarian tactics, criticism of themselves is what I take issue with. Do you see the distinction?
So the Jewish lobby is trying to ban or force divestment of TikTok to further stifle criticism of their behavior, obviously I don't take issue with that because I think it's illogical for them to oppose antisemitism. I take issue with it because it's hostile to non-Jews by stifling the speech of non-Jews and not allowing them to express their own ethnic interests which is something Jews do vehemetly. I also think the criticisms being made on platforms like TikTok are valid and important for the public to hear.
You think it's understandable for Jews to signal-boost complaints about antisemitism (re: the behavior of non-Jews as it relates to Jews), can't you understand why I believe it's important for non-Jews to be able to express and signal-boost valid, true complaints about Jewish behavior (re: the behavior of Jews as it relates to non-Jews)? And why I would oppose the efforts by Jews to outlaw any expression of the latter in all arenas of the public square while demanding the former is held as sacred in all those spaces? I understand why they are doing it all too well, it doesn't mean I can't oppose it.
Only if I agreed with you that "Jewish behavior" means the same thing as "Anti-white behavior," which I do not. Your argument is basically that antisemitism is rational because Jews are our enemies so we should be "antisemitic." Obviously I don't expect to change your mind on this, but this being the Motte, you should at least entertain the possibility that you are wrong, and that Jews oppose antisemitism because they genuinely would prefer not be targeted for harm as a race, and not because it's a cynical move to control the discourse in an anti-white race war.
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TikTok’s original Western investors were, as I noted, substantially Jewish. Milner, Moritz, Yass and others all were/are. And again, frankly, even if TikTok had nothing whatsoever to do with anything related to Israel, a group of private equity investors looking to buy a media business is probably going to be pretty Jewish anyway, so Mnuchin’s involvement (what, could he not call Trump to support the bill last week?) isn’t surprising.
What annoys me is that in any other case, the fact that Trump happened to speak to a well-known billionaire Jewish Zionist and campaign donor before making a radical policy u-turn would be a big deal to you and you’d no doubt speculate as to what influence the Jews continued to bring to bear over him and US politics in general. But because Yass’ actions are a strong indication that the TikTok sale isn’t solely or primarily the product of organized Zionist activism and that this wouldn’t even be necessary to algorithmically censor anti-Israel content on TikTok, it’s just some minor, barely relevant single-case anecdote.
Yes indeed, look at the quote itself:
Greenblatt is transparently talking about the “TikTok generation” ie Zoomers, which is why he literally clarifies that he means “Gen Z” immediately after saying TikTok. The ADL has criticized all social media since 7/10, and again this entire theory relies on the suggestion that TikTok is actually being less harsh on pro-Palestine content than Instagram, for which there’s no evidence (any discrepancy is most likely just the result of demographic differences in userbase).
No. Yass isn’t just ‘a Jew’; now that Adelson is dead he might well be the most prominent Zionist donors in American politics, perhaps even the most prominent. He’s closely related to the ‘entire constellation’ of Zionist lobbying in the US - including to Mnuchin and Friedman. Why are you even taking this position, when you could just as easily argue that the effort to prevent a TikTok ban is the result of Jewish-Zionist lobbying in concert with the CCP to destabilize American state control over the media its people consume and so Jewish investors and venture capitalists can extract themselves at higher profitability after the inevitable IPO? There is the same volume of evidence in that direction too, and it might even be the argument you’d make if the attacks on Israel hadn’t happened last year.
Why do you assume that powerful Zionists (who are both friends of China and substantial shareholders in TikTok) need it to be banned or transferred to US ownership in order to pressure it into censoring pro-Palestinian views?
The more likely option is that the Palestinian content was just another argument used by China hawks to persuade more congressmen to support the bill, and that a few major Jewish American organizations signed on because its literally a letter and they need to justify their funding.
The whole TikTok ban debate is actually between China hawks and longstanding PE/VC investors who want to cash out on one of the (very) few winning lottery tickets the tech market has printed in the last few years and will be damned if Joe Biden prevents them from doing so. Everything else is kayfabe and/or whatever argument looks good at the time.
I'm sorry, but I just find your response completely absurd. We have leaked audio, we have Jewish journalists putting pen-to-paper identifying why they support the divestment, and it's because of antisemitism and not concern over CCP national security, we have Jewish lobbyists representing hundreds of Jewish groups explicitly saying they support the divestment because of antisemitism, we have other journalists openly admitting that Jewish lobbying over antisemitism concerns which has brought unity and priority to this issue whereas it stalled before Oct. 7, it comes out that two Jewish Zionists including former US Ambassador to Israel are lobbying to purchase it, and you are still trying to cast doubt over the motives that they are completely open about. I don't know what else to say, why don't you believe them when they say what they are lobbying for and why they are doing it? Why don't you believe the journalists who are publishing pieces supporting it because of antisemitism and admitting that this issue has changed the political landscape of the topic?
Yes, the consensus and prioritization of this issue is primarily the product of organized Zionist activism. A single investor who is lobbying based off his financial interests does not change this fact. I will again point out you are engaging in an isolated demand for rigor with your "you can't identify something as group activism unless literally every single member of that group is on board", like we can't attribute BLM to organized black activism because of Candace Owens or something. This is something you and everyone always does when Jewish group activism is identified.
Come on, 2rafa, he is talking about Tik Tok, there he is calling it "Al Jazeera on steroids, amplifying and intensifying antisemitism, anti-Zionism with no reprecussions."
You have the ADL, you have Jews in the media apparatus, you have Jewish Federations of North America, you have Jewish Zionists including former US ambassador to Israel lobbying for a purchase at a discount, don't tell me this is about Taiwan or CCP influence in the GOP.
So when Yass, who isn’t a ‘random Jew’ but an extremely prominent lobbyist (“organized activist” in your language) for Zionist causes, lobbies against the ban, he’s just doing it for the money. But when Friedman and Mnuchin, who has decades of experience as a private equity investor in media, gear up to bid for TikTok’s US operation and lobby for a sale it’s definitely not just about the money and must be about them bravely and nobly sacrificing their own wealth so that they can make adjustments to TikTok moderation policy?
We can attribute the timing of the ban to China hawks in Congress using some neuroticism by some Jewish organizations (often themselves influenced by reports from neocon China hawks in foreign policy and geopolitical lobbying groups) about Chinese gommunists pushing pro-Hamas material on the youth to get enough of their fellow reps on both the right and left to get the previously stalled bill across the line. The Jewish organizations are just happy to be seen doing something in front of their donors that might supposedly reduce antisemitism by whatever convoluted logic. But I don’t think this means that most powerful Zionist lobbyists in the US consider an ownership transfer of TikTok away from the Chinese in any sense a major policy priority for them.
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