Five Quick Things: Clock’s Ticking for TikTok - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Five Quick Things: Clock’s Ticking for TikTok
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Eventually, even the Left comes around. Sometimes.

It’s usually after all the horses have left the barn and been taken to the glue factory when they do, but once in a while they have their moments of receding stupidity and corruption.

We saw a small taste of that on Thursday.

1. See Ya, TikTok!

Donald Trump was the first guy in American politics who tried to do something about the Chinese espionage Trojan Horse aimed at American children and their parents known as TikTok. He called it out for what it is and tried to ban it before the Chinese communist owners of that app were able to use it to do through voluntary compliance by civilians what the OPM hack did with respect to government employees.

They’ve got all the personal data they could possibly want on some 150 million Americans because narcissistic kids and adult children wanted so desperately to create their own airtime and beg for a shot at 15 seconds of fame that nobody even cared about the grave privacy concerns the app presented.

Trump took the sound advice from people who knew and did everything he could to kill this monster. But by the time he made his push, the Democrat Party was using it to push political messages to Generation Z with the help of the ChiCom owners, and the banning of TikTok was seen as an offense against human rights.

Things have changed because sometimes reality breaks through the wall of BS. And with TikTok, that’s happening now.

On Thursday there was a congressional hearing on TikTok … and it went very, very badly for the owners and managers of the app.

Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr was on CNBC Thursday during the hearing, and he said that while the Trump administration’s effort to ban TikTok or force its divestiture away from Chinese ownership had run into some legal troubles, the privacy and espionage concerns have become so great that it’s now a bipartisan issue in Congress and things are definitely moving in that direction.

It’s a fair criticism of the TikTok hearing that Facebook has done everything TikTok has done and worse, but you can’t expect the American government to give the Chinese government permission to misbehave in the same ways it allows its own cronies to.

He can’t do that to our pledges; only we can do that to our pledges!” It’s nice to see our politicians agree on something.

But then again, not everybody is down on the app…

That’s New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who might or might not be catching bribes from TikTok.

And we’re only putting that together because…

2. We Know That Democrats Take Bribes From the Chinese, and Especially the First Family

This came up during this week’s edition of The Spectacle podcast, and Melissa and I talked about it a little (see that here), but at this point it’s quite clear that beginning with Joe Biden and his kinfolk but filtering out all over the place we’ve got a real problem with Chinese bribery and American policy and power.

As I said, in a sane America, the revelation that the president and his family had taken large payments for unspecified services rendered — or to be rendered — to a hostile foreign power would be a very grave thing indeed, almost assuredly the basis for an impeachment and removal and quite possibly a hanging offense for all involved.

Instead, we’ve got no real idea what to do about this, and one of our two major political parties thinks it’s fine.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to dodge questions about the Biden family’s connections to a Chinese energy company during her press briefing Wednesday.

Fox News’ Peter Doocy questioned Jean-Pierre on the House Oversight report from Thursday that revealed President Biden’s son Hunter, brother James and daughter-in-law Hallie all received payments from associates connected to a Chinese business.

“House Oversight says they’ve got bank records showing a Chinese energy company paying three Biden family members through a third party. What were they paid for?” Doocy asked.

“Look, I’m just not going to respond to that from here. Look, we have heard from House Republicans for years and years and years how — the inaccuracies and lies when it comes to this issue. And, I don’t even where to begin to even answer that question because, again, it’s been lies and lies and inaccuracy for the past couple of years and I’m just not going to get into it from here,” Jean-Pierre answered.

Queen Karine, the presidential spokeslesbian who has her job because she hits the intersectional trifecta of being black, female, and one of the Alphabet People and is therefore not required to perform at anything remotely near the level of “professional,” doesn’t want to answer and doesn’t think she has to.

But in a sane America, she would have to. In a sane America, House Oversight having those bank records would mean Queen Karine had damned well better come up with some details of what Joe and Jimmy and Hunter and even Hallie Biden did for their Chinese paymasters that was innocent and objectively worth the yuan.

But this isn’t a sane America, and I’ll prove it to you.

3. Welcome to the New C-SPAN

This actually appeared on the airwaves of Congress’ cable channel…

“Exterminate white people.” He didn’t just say it as a passing thing. It was the entire point of his statement. He spent a whole minute building up to what he called the “solution” to black people’s problems in America.

“I have a dream,” said someone very, very different 60 years ago. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

What would that guy think of Kamau Kambon, whose dream is to treat every white man, woman, and child the way Adolf Hitler treated the Jews?

One wonders.

4. Send In the Crooks

Hollis Day is a friend of mine. He’s running for the Louisiana House of Representatives in District 66, a heavily Republican area in the southern part of Baton Rouge. He’s as conservative as they come, and he’s a creative thinker.

Hollis and I came up with something that would work toward a goal I’ve talked about a lot lately — coming up with ways to impose consequences on the Left for the destructive things they do. In this case, giving the deep blue cities under the control of the Hard Left and particularly those Soros district attorneys like Kim Foxx, Alvin Bragg, and Larry Krasner something they seem to be asking for. Hollis wrote an op-ed at the Hayride talking about it:

I’m running for the Louisiana House of Representatives in District 66. One of the things I intend on doing if elected is to author legislation that would create and fund a program transporting illegal aliens and criminals to cities the state’s attorney general designates as sanctuaries for the lawless.

The intention is to make this a voluntary program. Leave Louisiana for good in lieu of a criminal sentence. And we’ll treat a breach of that promise the way we’d treat a violation of parole – get arrested in our state again and you’ll serve the sentence we suspended when you agreed to the free trip to the criminal sanctuary.

Louisiana has more criminals than almost anywhere else in the world, after all, and it’s quite obvious we aren’t going to incarcerate and rehabilitate our way out of this terrible threat to our public safety. We have a cultural problem and it’s time to take it on.

And by their actions it appears that New York, and the other Soros-dominated criminal sanctuary cities, are more than happy to help us. San Francisco is even discussing the payment of reparations to the descendants of slaves. As many of our hardened, chronic criminals fit that description, it seems like we have an obvious solution for both sides – that city’s politicians have guilt to assuage, and we have a ready supply of unfortunate undesirables they can practice on.

Voluntary banishment will create space in our jails for the criminal class to serve their full sentences and create more deterrence of crime. It will allow a rebalancing of our society in favor of the lawful and productive, particularly in cities like New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport where that balance is badly out of whack.

Banishing criminals went out of favor a long time ago because it was seen as cruel and unusual punishment, but that isn’t something you can say about a program that offers a choice to a convicted criminal. Besides, if it’s cruel and unusual to drop somebody off in San Francisco or Philadelphia, that doesn’t say good things about the leftists who run those places, does it?

This isn’t a semi-serious proposal. I’d say Hollis’ tongue is only 20 percent or so in cheek. And he tells me that since the op-ed ran he’s gotten dozens — now hundreds — of messages essentially saying “Hell Yeah!” and nothing much in opposition.

The one thing that gets in the way of this is that red states do contain blue cities that are also sanctuaries for criminals. You’ll need to fix that, mostly by setting up state law so that the state attorney general or the governor can fire a Soros DA who refuses to do his or her job, before you start exporting crooks to other states’ sanctuaries.

It’s clear this works where illegal aliens are concerned. Make it work for criminals. My guess is it’ll be the end of the Alvin Braggs in almost no time flat, and if it isn’t, then you might very well have much safer streets in places like St. Louis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, and Houston in a pretty short time.

5. It’s Dark, But Dragged Across Concrete Is an Underrated Show

Even the low-budget stuff Mel Gibson makes is interesting to watch, and one of those diamonds in the rough, a 2018 movie starring Gibson and Vince Vaughn called Dragged Across Concrete, has now exploded onto Netflix after half a decade of obscurity. It has left-wing movie critics like Decider’s John DeVore screeching hysterically, but that isn’t stopping it from topping the streaming app’s movie charts.

Watching Dragged feels almost like going to an anti-woke protest. It helps that the movie’s got a good story.

It’s a cop show, but not exactly. Gibson and Vaughn play a couple of detectives in the fictional city of Bulwark, which appears to be somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area, and the film begins with an arrest of a Mexican drug dealer who specializes in running smack to school kids. But the arrest ends up on film, and because the partners were a bit impolite to the perp, they’re now suspended for six weeks without pay.

Vaughn is on the verge of proposing to his girlfriend, so the suspension is bad enough for him. For Gibson it’s a disaster. He’s 27 years on the force and lacks the political skill to have moved up in rank despite being known as a good cop and the suspension might be it for him. Worse, he’s got a wife suffering from multiple sclerosis, massive money problems, and a young daughter who’s a frequent target of bullies in the crappy neighborhood he lives in.

Gibson decides he’ll spend his suspension robbing a drug dealer or some other ne’er-do-well, and he gets a tip on a slimeball named Vogelmann who’s in from out of town to do some sort of nefarious deed. He talks Vaughn into coming along, and they begin surveilling the target, only to find out they’re enmeshed in something far bigger and more awful than they could ever have imagined.

This is a brutally dark show, and it bombards the audience with a neo-noir dialogue that sometimes lands and sometimes doesn’t, but it’s fascinating — and it’s utterly, marvelously anti-woke. It’s being called a racist film, but it really isn’t — unless you think, for example, that Pulp Fiction was a racist film. What Dragged really offers is an unapologetic thumb in the eye to pantywaists like DeVore who think that wokeness equals politeness, and the fact that it’s No. 1 on Netflix this week is one more data point in showing the American people have had it with lectures from our elite betters.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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