Mar 14, 2024, 16:31

The majority of House Republicans, amazingly, just aligned with the Biden administration on one of its top priorities to ban the social media app, TikTok. This amounts to the most far-reaching act of censorship in the history of the United States. It's an attack on the right of American citizens to receive their information from any source they choose. Most of us believe that was a fundamental right. But of course, almost no one in Washington will admit that that's happening. That's not at all what's going on, they tell us, no. Instead, they're framing what's very obviously censorship as an act of self-defense against a foreign adversary. And if that sounds familiar, it should be. It's the same rationale they used to spy on Donald Trump, among other things, once they designated him a tool of Russia. And as always, they're doing all of this in the bluntest, least restrained terms, because it's your fault, actually. Quote, voting against the bill is a vote for the Chinese Communist Party, proclaimed neocon congressman Dan Crenshaw, the Nikki Haley of Texas. Quote, the opponents of this bill aren't defending free speech, they're defending Chinese access to American data and American minds. Not a good look. You're a bad American if you don't agree with me, says Dan Crenshaw. And the rest of the liars said similar things, and maybe some of them believed it. That is possible, given the median IQ in the Congress. But just for a moment, let's consider their argument rationally. Let's just assess it for a moment. The federal government very much wants to protect us and our children from China. That's what they're telling us. Now let's assume for a moment that that's true. And let's further assume that the Chinese government is in fact a greater threat to our happiness and wellbeing than our own government is. That's a stretch if you think about it. In fact, it's totally unsupported by evidence of any kind. But for the sake of argument, let's just stipulate that that is in fact true. So if you were in charge, how would you go about protecting the United States from China? Let's see. The first thing you would do is prevent the CCP from buying American farmland and controlling our food supply. That way, the Chinese government, a government they claim is our greatest enemy, would not have the power to starve our population to death. That would be key. You'd get right on that. Of course, you'd also want to make sure that the CCP had zero control over our water, or energy, or communications infrastructure, basic elemental things, things you couldn't live without. You wouldn't want the Chinese anywhere near those things. You would not allow it. Those would be the first priorities on your list. And then you would make certain that the Chinese didn't control your economy. You would not, for example, export your entire industrial base to China, simultaneously making them rich and you poor. You would not do that. Nor would you allow them to hold a meaningful portion of your debt. That would be reckless as hell. You wouldn't allow the Communist Party of China to send billions to your most prestigious universities, thereby gaining control of the minds of the next generation of your leaders. And needless to say, you would not allow Chinese citizens by the tens of thousands to invade your country over your southern border. That would be insane. You would furthermore keep Chinese citizens out of medical, scientific, and R&D facilities. You definitely would not fund their bio labs or cover up for them when they unleashed killer viruses on the world. No, you wouldn't. Why would you do that? And then on questions of foreign policy, you would not spend a ton of time worrying about Taiwan. It's far away. And honestly, who cares? No, because you don't have all the money in the world or all the time in the world, you would narrow down your priorities and you would spend your energy and military might on your own hemisphere, where you and your population actually live. The people you want to protect, they live in the Western hemisphere. So you would not allow the Chinese government to colonize pretty much every country in the Americas, including Canada and Mexico. No, and you certainly wouldn't let the Chinese of all people build the infrastructure in places that you directly control, like the supposedly American Virgin Islands where the roads are paid for by China. That would be crazy and humiliating and very easy to stop. You wouldn't have to put up with that, so you wouldn't put up with it. Not for a second. And just to make sure that China understood you're doing all you could to protect your own people, because that was really your goal, because being Dan Crenshaw, you really care about your own people and your own country. Because of that, you would immediately shoot down any spy balloon from China that floated over Montana. Obviously, that's some of what you would do. And yet somehow the US government, even Dan Crenshaw, who really cares about your children, protecting them from China, has done none of that and has no plans to do any of that ever. So China still makes our antibiotics and our vitamins. But what Dan Crenshaw is doing is banning a social media app and probably not the first social media app Dan Crenshaw will call for banning or the Biden administration, with the help of Republican leaders, will try to ban. So what is this about? Well, it's not about China. It may be about other foreign countries. It's definitely not about China because pay no attention to what they say. Watch carefully what they do. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who's of course a sitting United States Senator, seems to be one of the very few in Washington who's watching what they do, not what they say. And so he is opposing this effort to ban a social media app, not because he is a tool of China, though of course they're doubtless calling him that now, but because he is a dot connector from way back. And we are honored to have him join us now. Senator, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Tucker. I'll go ahead and presume to speak for you too. I don't think most people are really that in favor of TikTok or the Chinese government. I assume you're not. I'm definitely not. But Republican leaders seem to believe two things that contradict one another. One, they believe that, on some evidence, that Joe Biden is kind of controlled by China and that Joe Biden is pushing transgenderism. And yet, and that is true, but they're aligning with Joe Biden who is suddenly claiming that TikTok is bad because it's too Chinese and it's pouring filth into the minds of our children. Now, he can't be sincere about that, obviously, so why would they be joining him in this? Do you have any idea? You know, my concern has always been with the centralization of power, with giving up power. I don't care whether it's a Republican or a Democrat president. I don't want any president to have the power to ban apps that are sold on an app store. And that's essentially what this is gonna happen. 180 million Americans put dance videos up and whatever else is on TikTok, and they choose the terms of those services the same way people on Facebook do. And does Facebook scrape your data? Sure, does Google scrape your data? Do all of these giant tech companies scrape your data? They all take your data. But the thing is, is there are now accusations. They say, oh, TikTok's owned by the Chinese government. The Chinese communists own it. Well, that's not even true. You can't say stuff just over and over again that's not true. TikTok is owned by about 60% of its own by international investors from all over the world. 20% is owned by the two Chinese software engineers that created the app. And 20% is owned by the employees of TikTok, which 7,000 of them are Americans. So there's a significant nexus of Americans in the ownership. And then there's a significant nexus of Americans using this. And they say, oh, well, the Chinese government owns it. It's just frankly not true. Now, the company that owns TikTok also owns something like TikTok that is censored and the Chinese let that be broadcast throughout China. The Chinese government does have a member of the board. It's called Douyin. It's the Chinese TikTok. But they don't have a member of the board of ByteDance. They don't control ByteDance. And the data is now kept in Oracle Cloud centered in Texas. And this has been done because the company wants to try to exist. It's a very popular app. It has a great deal of value. So they're doing anything they can to comply. And yet the hysterics in the house are just, shut them down, shut them down. Communism this, communism that. Look, I've written two books about Chinese communism and what it does both during the COVID leak and also what it did during Mao's reign. So I am no fan of Chinese communism. But at the same time, we can't sort of like, you know, emulate the Chinese to try to protect our way of life becoming like the Chinese and banning things. TikTok is banned in China. They don't have TikTok. They have a censored version in China that the Chinese government does control, but they don't control TikTok over here. If we ban TikTok, we're simply becoming and acting like the Chinese. So there is a hysteria afoot, but in America, there are things that protect. You can't just take people's stuff in America. If you have a company, I can't come take Tucker Carlson Network just from you because one of your investors is from China. I have to go to court. I have to prove that somehow you're a Chinese communist and that you're giving data to them. These are all allegations. They may or may not be true, but you can't take someone's company worth billions of dollars without proving it in a court of law. Likewise, you can't take the rights of freedom of speech of 170, 180 million people who want to express themselves. So I think the courts will rule against this. They did twice in the last four years in federal court, and they just recently overturned the Montana ban. So I think there's a very good chance this is unconstitutional, but that doesn't seem to be deterring any of my colleagues in the house. But their argument doesn't even make sense. I mean, they're saying that TikTok is foreign-controlled. I'm willing to believe that, and that they're spying on us. I definitely believe that. But Google and Facebook are spying on us on a much greater scale, and they're foreign-controlled too. They're run by people who hate the United States. Demonstrably, they say so. So Google and Facebook are not a threat, but TikTok is. So if you're making that case, I know you're lying immediately. Right. And the thing is, is that the bill is written such that if 20% of ownership is foreign, that's about what TikTok is, or if you're controlled by a foreign entity. But that's someone's opinion. They're just saying it's controlled by a foreign entity. I think it's probably controlled by profit. Like most things in the marketplace, they want to make a profit. They've spent about a billion dollars trying to comply through this organization called CFIUS, which has to do with companies that have some foreign ownership trying to comply and have an American board, have the data kept over here. They've done nothing but try to comply, and the hysteria goes on and on and on. But the First Amendment's more important than anything they're talking about, and so is the Fifth Amendment. But there are many people, including some of your former colleagues at Fox, who believe that there's an exception to the Constitution, that it doesn't apply when there's national security. The problem with that is there's always a national security excuse for anything you want to do. And so I don't think you throw out the Constitution when there's allegations of some kind of connection. You have to prove that before you take someone's stuff and before you take someone's First Amendment privileges. Well, and of course, so we know it's not what they say it's about, obviously. And I know there's a furious lobbying campaign by various investors hoping to scoop up TikTok cheap, and from competing companies that want to crush a competitor, I get all of that. And some people are really bought and paid for in Washington. I don't want to blow your mind, but that's true. But there's also an ideological battle here. And a lot of the people voting to ban TikTok object to the messages on TikTok. Like, that's true. Yeah, it's content. Once you start objecting to content, what you're objecting to is speech. And I object to a lot of it. I don't use it. I've never been on TikTok. I read about what's on TikTok, but I don't use TikTok. But the thing is, is everybody wants the government to be the parent. They're like, oh my, my teenagers, they've got phones and they're on all this stuff. I just can't deal with it. Will you help me by taking stuff off of there? But once you start doing that, there's a whole host of things that can be taken off of there. What about, you know, people who say that you should have religious liberty or that we shouldn't teach transgenderism in the elementary schools? You know, those are, you know, heretical views as well. Should those be taken down? So I think it's the opposite with TikTok. I think they're promoting a lot of left-wing things. But then there's also people on TikTok that my wife's always telling about the liberals of TikTok, these people that are exposing the liberals on TikTok. And apparently they're pretty good investigating. I think it's a woman that does this and she's pretty damn good at finding things out and exposing things. But the bottom line is the more information, the better. If you don't like it, don't use it. That's what happens in a free country. But it happens in an authoritarian country when you're connected to government, if you don't like something and you shut it down. And that's what's happening now. They don't like the content. They make an allegation that it's controlled by the Chinese government, which there isn't objective evidence of. And you probably have to go to court to prove something like that. But I don't know. I'm disappointed by the hysteria because there are some people who have been relatively good in looking at government and the Constitution who actually on this go completely insane and just throw out all rules and say, oh, we gotta do something about Chinese communism. This isn't the way. Emulating Chinese communists is not the best way to combat Chinese communists. Yeah, and they're almost exclusively neocons, which should tell you a lot. But last question. This action is supported by the left, the real left, and by the neocons. It seems to me if this precedent stands, then the next target for shutdown by the government or for sale by the government would be X, which is of course the platform they hate most because it's the freest of all the platforms in the world. And so what would stop the Congress or the next administration from saying, Elon Musk is effectively a tool of Russian disinformation, doing what they did to Trump to him, and forcing a sale of X? I mean, what would stop them? The thing is, is I don't know enough about X to know who his other investors are. Probably some of them live in foreign countries. But think of a whole list of countries that have unsavory things. I'm not a big fan of Egypt's government. They don't have elections. They have indefinite detention. They prosecute political and religious opponents. So do most of the countries in the Middle East. But I'm not about, I wouldn't give Egypt any more military money, frankly. But I wouldn't ban your ability to trade with them. If you wanna trade with Egypt, having embargoes is different than me not giving them free money. So I'm not forgiving most countries, including China, any money. I don't wanna give China research money. I don't wanna share secrets with them. I don't wanna share arms with them. There are all kinds of things I don't wanna do with China, but I'm not ready to forbid people trading with them. And that's sort of where we're headed from this. But you can see the potential of, look, a lot of people have Saudi Arabian investors. But Saudi Arabia did some things that I don't find, you know, they don't really have a free country. They killed a journalist. They chopped him up and threw him out of a plane. So these are things I object to, but I'm not sure I wanna prevent anybody from having a Saudi Arabian investor, like, you know, live golf or something. We're gonna say they can't exist because we don't approve of the Saudis. And so that's what we're headed towards, though. And there's every bit the argument that a regime like Saudi Arabia collects data on their enemies. You think any Shiite Muslims in Saudi Arabia are not followed by the police and don't have their data being collected? So all the things we accuse China of doing are being done in dozens and dozens of countries. Vietnam's a communist nation. Are we gonna say that nobody does business with Vietnam? Most people argue that it's a little better since we do business with Vietnam, even though they still don't have the basic freedoms that we have. People would actually even argue that the trade with China overall, that the people are freer than they were under Mao. It's gone backwards a little bit in recent years, but it's still way better than it was under Mao, and their level of living is better in China, and their level of freedom is probably better than it was. But to say we're gonna get rid of all that and have no trade, you can't own anything with these people, is really a recipe for war. When you quit trading with people and you forbid interactions with other people, that's when war occurs. Yeah, and we should keep our own country free. Seems like that would be a tough priority. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, thank you very much for joining us, and good luck with this. Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organization. Societies are defined by what they will not permit. What we're watching is the total inversion of virtue.