TikTok: The Phantom Menace

They're Not Really Afraid Of China

The ostensible reason liberal journalists want to ban TikTok is that it's a "Chinese propaganda app", 

The Phantom Menace of Chinese Propaganda 

I have yet to see any Chinese propaganda on TikTok, but I can't imagine anyone is honestly worried about Chinese propaganda.

• China simply can't compete with American mass media (when's the last time you watched a Chinese movie?); the idea that they'd be effective at propaganda in America strains credulity. 
• Chinese propaganda, like Russian propaganda, echoes the American establishment's own antiracism, and is aimed at the third world, not the U.S.

  You can tell George Floyd’s death was not accidental. Do you have to arrest an unarmed man like this? The “vicious dogs” Trump dispatched in his tweet are out?

  — Chen Weihua （陈卫华） (@chenweihua) June 4, 2020

The reality is that the success of TikTok, like that of the original Twitter was an emergent property, driven by talented users, not the social media savvy of its Chinese inventors. 

Twitter founders were posting boring stuff like this initially, 

And it's likely TikTok's Chinese founders were doing the same. 

The Phantom Menace Of TikTok As A Threat To Our National Security

The other claim about TikTok is that it's somehow a threat to American national security to have a social media app owned by a company from a "hostile" foreign power. 

This is obviously bullshit for multiple reasons. Consider: 

• The same liberal politicians and journalists who want to ban TikTok had no issue with us outsourcing our manufacturing to China.
• They also have no problem with immigration from China, both legal and illegal.

  NEW: This group of migrants from China, Ecuador, and Colombia just crossed illegally into Jacumba, CA. There was no Border Patrol on scene yet. We later used a translator app to talk to the Chinese, who told us they flew into Tijuana from Turkey & came for economic reasons. pic.twitter.com/8uCfAzUoAQ

  — Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 21, 2024

• None of them, as far as I know, have called for banning Chinese immigrants from serving in the military or in sensitive positions in the civilian world. 

Is China Really Our Adversary? 

My view is that there's no reason for the U.S. to be enemies with China, or Russia, for that matter. We could just respect their backyards the way we expect them to respect ours (the Monroe Doctrine). Neither China nor Russia is trying to export a radical ideology, like the Soviets were during the Cold War. The Cold War is over, and capitalism won. If anything, we're the ones pushing the radical ideology today (transgenderism). 

The Incoherence Of Liberal Hawkishness Against China

The same liberals and RINOs who now claim TikTok is a Chinese Trojan Horse also believe that America is "an idea", and anyone can walk off a boat from China and become an American. America's Founders didn't believe this, and neither do China's leaders. 

As John Jay said in Federalist No. 2 (emphasis mine):

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

To current-year liberals, that may sound like an anachronistic view of nationality, but it's not anachronistic to current-year Chinese. Chinese aren't bound by vague ideals; they are bound by ties of blood and history going back millennia, ties that have transcended different ideologies and forms of government. Last year, two Chinese-American sailors in the U.S. Navy were arrested for spying for China. 

In America, our reigning ideology is that everyone is the same, so when someone named "Wenheng Zhao" raises his right hand and swears allegiance to a document signed by bewigged WASPs in 18th Century America, our ideology implies he's no more likely to spy for China than a descendant of John Hancock. The Chinese government, of course, sees this differently.

Of course, our government spies on China too, albeit less effectively, but liberals are deluding themselves if they think they can continue to saber rattle against China and while running America on rootless cosmopolitanism. 

Why They Really Want To Ban TikTok

The American left wants to ban TikTok because they can't use it to censor you the way they did with pre-Elon Musk Twitter. 

This raises the question of why any Republicans would want to ban TikTok, when American social media companies infamously censored America's last Republican President. One possibility is that they see faux nationalist hawkishness as a cheap way to distract their voters from the decline in their standard of living. Another possibility is that they're morons. 

While We Can Still Invest In Chinese Companies

Who knows if this current anti-China sentiment will spread to Chinese stocks listed in the U.S. In the meantime though, we currently have two bullish China trades in our trading Substack. One is an options trade on an undervalued Chinese large cap you can read about here. The other is an undervalued Chinese small cap that doesn't have options traded on it. You can read about that one by clicking on the image below. 

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