Hunter Biden’s laptops join the GOP’s pantheon of election-eve fake scandals, along with 2018’s Honduran caravans and MS-13 freakouts, 2016’s Hillary’s emails, and 2014’s Ebola hysteria—all of them stories that conservative media amplified and hyped until the election, after which all coverage ceased.
But Hunter Biden wasn’t alone this year, as this Verge headline reminds us:
TikTok says the Trump administration has forgotten about trying to ban it, would like to know what’s up
This all started in August, when crybaby Donald Trump attempted to ban the social media network, apparently because 1) it has Chinese corporate parents, and 2) K-pop fans used the network to organize signups to Trump’s Tulsa rally—the one he and then-campaign manager Brad Parscale claimed would be attended by 1 million people. Barely 6,000 showed up in the end.
Now, there are plenty of real reasons to challenge the operation of Chinese companies on U.S. soil. China severely restricts or outright blocks U.S. social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, WhatsApp, and … well, pretty much everyone else. There is an asymmetry to access to our market versus access to China’s. So there could be a case made for restrictions to TikTok as a retaliatory tactic.
But. Yeah, that’s not what Trump was about. He was pissed the network was used to organize against him. And given that it was populated by young users, it didn’t have the conservative presence that has been cultivated on Twitter or Facebook. And finally, Trump decided that the best way to respond to COVID-19 criticisms was to simply blame China. So attacking TikTok worked great as another way to amplify his anger at China for … something. For exposing his own uncaring incompetence?
In any case, after Trump announced his ban, TikTok filed suit and has won a series of legal stays of execution in the courts. Yet Trump persisted, finally getting the company to agree to sell certain assets to Trump-backing Oracle Corp. Why? National security.
Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok
[...] TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage [...]
The United States must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security.
Wow. Sounds terrible! Our nation’s own security is at risk!
But that was then, when there was an election to try and win. Today? The Chinese government blocked that Oracle deal, and how did the Trump administration respond? Crickets. They just ... forgot.
“For a year, TikTok has actively engaged with CFIUS in good faith to address its national security concerns, even as we disagree with its assessment,” TikTok says in a statement to The Verge. “In the nearly two months since the President gave his preliminary approval to our proposal to satisfy those concerns, we have offered detailed solutions to finalize that agreement – but have received no substantive feedback on our extensive data privacy and security framework.”
So all that crap about national security? Never mind. Trump has lost interest. It’s almost as if … it was never about national security? Weird, that.