Dear Weekend Jolter,
The threat of Russian bots swaying our elections could be trifling compared with the influence a Chinese-owned app has in this country.
I’m talking about TikTok (owned by ByteDance), of course. Lawmakers and parents, and lawmakers who are parents, have been raising the alarm about the app for so long that the complaints start to sound like background noise. But a bipartisan Senate bill introduced this week aims to treat TikTok and other tech tied to foreign adversaries as potential threats. It deserves a serious look.
Jim Geraghty talks a lot of sense, as usual, as he examines here the question whether Washington should take the extraordinary step of banning TikTok from private phones — something the bill would allow, even if it doesn’t overtly target the app.
Some data points to consider: It’s already banned from devices owned/operated by the federal government, a majority of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 use it, and data-security concerns are rampant. FBI director Christopher Wray spoke to several of these at a Senate hearing this week. (Jimmy Quinn also has assiduously covered every twist in the TikTok saga; for its part, the company blasted the idea of a ban and maintains it would not hand over U.S. user data to the Chinese government, as some fear.) But perhaps more compelling is the reality of what TikTok is piping into American teenagers’ eyeballs, daily. From Jim:
Back in 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a terrifying exposé about how its reporters logged into TikTok as underage users, and were gradually exposed to more and more sexual material, outright pornography, and drug-related content. . . .
This led to strong suspicions that the TikTok algorithm aims to steer people toward salacious content, because the numbers indicate that keeps the user’s attention the longest. Oh, by the way, apparently the Chinese version of TikTok shows kids completely different material — wholesome, educational material.
Funny, that. Caroline Downey also reports on a new filter that could be a teen mental-health crisis waiting to happen, a program that removes facial imperfections and renders users flawless. Photoshop at the speed of social media. Add to this the various “challenges” on TikTok that encourage kids to perform Jackass-caliber stunts, and the libertarian in you (or at least in me) starts to come around to the idea that there’s a government role here.
Speaking of: Senator Mark Warner (D., Va.) joined with Senator John Thune (R., S.D.) and other senators this week to introduce their RESTRICT Act, which would give the Commerce Department power to review “information communications and technology transactions that pose undue risk to our national security,” and mitigate that risk. The White House has endorsed it.
The lawmakers behind this bill focus heavily on the data-security angle, essentially warning of digital Chinese spy balloons across our cyber-airspace. Which is fascinating, considering that dozens of Democratic members of Congress continue to use TikTok, or did until recently. Here’s Jim (again) on the disconnect between the freak-out over Russian disinfo and the somehow more nuanced and textured response to China’s app:
Think about all the people who loudly announced they were no longer going to use Facebook, because those users believed the country didn’t do enough to stop Russian disinformation efforts during the 2016 presidential election . . . and who then turned around and installed what is basically an extension of the Chinese Ministry of State Security onto their cellphones that they carry with them everywhere.
FBI director Wray, in explaining this risk to the Senate Intelligence Committee, stressed that “the most fundamental piece . . . is that something that’s very sacred in our country, the difference between the private sector and the public sector — that’s a line that is nonexistent in the way the CCP operates.” As for the drastic differences between the TikTok content China’s and America’s users are being shown, Wray said: “Those are among many telling indicators that we should be looking at in assessing the national-security concerns this poses.”
To be fair, some of what’s wrong with TikTok is what’s wrong with social media generally. Brad Wilcox and Zach Whiting wrote for NRO last weekend about the horrible story of a teenager who killed herself apparently after coming across an Instagram video on suicide — despite her parents’ best efforts to shield her from such apps. There’s a strong case — Christine Rosen made it — for keeping kids and young teens off social media, using the force of law.
And there’s a strong case — NR’s editorial board made it — for banning TikTok from operating in the U.S. entirely.
* * *
In other news: Thank you to all who participated in our webathon. The support was tremendous, as it often is, and its success also spares this email list from having to endure another appeal (for now!). Happy reading.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
They said a $10 trillion budget couldn’t be done. But this White House has a vision to get there: Biden’s Unserious Budget
Why universities should not scrap standardized-testing requirements: Keep the SAT
Congress might consider reminding the executive branch that it, too, has a say in judicial nominations, starting here: Senate Should Show More Spine on Biden Judges
ARTICLES
Wilfred Reilly: The ‘Honest Conversation about Race’ That We Never Have
Wesley Hottot & Daryl James: Time to End the Fake Crime of Carrying Cash
Rich Lowry: Our Dickensian Border Policy
Charles C. W. Cooke: Donald Trump’s Recipe for Electoral Failure
Ryan Mills: The Results Are In: Oregon’s Free Community College Program Failed to Deliver
Jimmy Quinn: House GOP Suspects Biden Admin ‘Censorship’ of Voice of America over Favoritism Scandal
Caroline Downey: TikTok’s New Filter Will Exacerbate Girls’ Mental-Health Spiral, Experts Predict
Marsha Blackburn & Mitch McConnell: The Supreme Court Should Reject Joe Biden’s Student-Loan Socialism
Madeleine Kearns: The Real Women’s-Rights Campaigners
Noah Rothman: Tucker Carlson’s January 6 Revisionist History
Jay Nordlinger: Angels and Demons
Luther Ray Abel: Biden’s Bureau of Indian Affairs Mess
Christian Schneider: The True Value of Good Cash Money
Jeff Zymeri: ‘We Were Ignored’: Marine Corps Sniper Testifies Kabul Suicide Bombing Could Have Been Stopped
Mike Pence: Biden’s Budget Denies Reality
CAPITAL MATTERS
Casey Mulligan raises a rather practical concern: We Cannot Have EVs without E
The fact that the country is looking at $46 trillion in debt and $3 trillion deficits in the not-too-distant future ought to get lawmakers’ attention. From Brian Riedl: America Is Ignoring Its Bulging Budget
Dominic Pino, with the public-service journalism: How to Give the Government Your Two Cents about Gas Stoves
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
At last, Chris Rock responds — and Armond White responds to the response: Chris Rock, Court Jester for the End of Civility
Brian Allen is back on the cemetery circuit, looking West: Forest Lawn in Glendale: Life, Death, and Resurrection among Palm Trees and Movie Stars
THESE EXCERPTS ARE YOUR RETRIBUTION
NR’s editorial breaks down what’s really going on with Columbia and other universities’ decisions to scrap SAT requirements:
To be clear: Everyone in the world of academia understands this to be a pretext, and a shabby one at that. What Columbia is doing, and what more elite universities may do in the immediate future, is preparing itself for the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, cases argued jointly before the Court last October. The upcoming decision is expected, given the composition of the Court, to either strike down or severely limit the sorts of explicit affirmative-action regimes employed by college admissions ever since 2003’s egregious Grutter v. Bollinger decision. At stake here is the possessiveness elite universities (both public and private) feel over their ability to directly shape the racial and social (and now even political) demography of their matriculating classes. Choosing the composition of tomorrow’s new elite — which is what admissions committees understand themselves to be doing — is a privilege these institutions guard jealously.
The self-evident value of standardized testing is not something that National Review should have to rise to speak in defense of (but then we could say the same about much else these days). And why? Because testing is the great equalizer. This is not mere supposition; clinical studies have shown that standardized testing does exactly what you expected it would: It identifies intellectually gifted children from all strata of society, but even more crucially allows talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds (whether economic or minority) to shine in a way their local educational opportunities (or a chaotic home life) might never have permitted. It forms the essence of what any just conception of America as a so-called meritocracy was supposed to be about: You might have gone to Phillips Exeter Academy and had the best SAT tutors available to you — but this kid over here living above his parents’ corner store and studying when he doesn’t have to mind the shop? He took it once and scored a 1590.
But alas, that teenager is Asian, you see. And the unstated premise (by university admissions committees, at least) is that Asians are simply overperforming on these tests, and their presence is, well, glutting elite universities: too many successful Asian students, distorting the perfectly balanced multihued racial rainbow that DEI administrators insist makes for a properly “equitable” university. The grotesqueness of playing favorites on racial lines has always offended conservatives, but we cannot help but be even more outraged by noting that Columbia cares so much about this issue that they were willing to forgo standardized testing before they gave up legacy admissions.
Luther Abel pays a visit to another part of his state, where a tribal dispute has resulted in a complete mess for locals and the Biden administration isn’t appearing to help things much:
Imagine waking up for work, pulling out of your driveway, and then coming to the end of your block to find the road closed by, say, the French government. When you ask why, the gendarme informs you that between the American road before you and your equally American driveway behind you is a patch of French territory. Because of a dispute with the township, the local French consulate has decided to bar the road until such a time as it deems fit. The mayor and the governor are powerless, as this is a foreign-diplomatic matter — the legal province of the federal government. How ridiculous!
That’s close to what has happened in northern Wisconsin — the Lac du Flambeau tribe has blocked small but vital sections of the roads, making it impossible for non–Lac du Flambeau tribal residents to access public throughways. Beginning on January 30, restricted access to the wider world has been an aspect of normal life for dozens of families.
“When you look at the larger area of the tribe of the reservation, there’s roads like this all over the place that squirt on and off tribal lands,” says Dave Miess, a local landowner. “It’s just the way it’s set up. We’re kind of wondering, are we just the first low-hanging fruit [for such pressure campaigns against the federal government]?”
Simply put, the tribe wants money in exchange for allowing nonmembers to access their patches of road, and the bill hasn’t been paid in ten years. The conflict came about and has been sustained by deeply contradictory resolution structures. Local problems between the tribe and non-tribal landowners are made a federal concern, and the process for legal resolution is expected to begin in the lowest courts and then travel upwards — in a matter of months and years. . . .
Most frustrating of all, the one agency that can force the end of this standoff refuses to act or speak.
“[We’re] very, very, very worried,” adds Miess. “For one, our house is worth nothing. Right? . . . We’re all thinking what happens when the lake melts. Well, we have boats, but we’re relying on the continued good graces of our neighbors across the lake.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has the authority, granted it by Congress, to make the ten-year dispute end — this makes it a failure starting under Obama and continuing during the Trump administration and now, most palpably, the Biden administration.
Senators McConnell and Blackburn call on the Supreme Court to slam the brakes on “student-loan socialism”:
Since last summer, President Biden has been trying to unilaterally redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars to a group of Americans who already out-earn the average worker. With the Democrats’ inflation already crushing blue-collar families, the president wants to make our nation’s cashiers, construction workers, waitresses, truck drivers, tradespeople, and veterans absorb student-loan debt that was voluntarily taken on by fellow citizens including doctors and lawyers who make six figures.
President Biden’s stab at student-loan socialism is wildly unfair to millions of families who chose to make different kinds of sacrifices to avoid debt. But the problems with the policy do not stop there. The president’s gambit also has fundamental legal problems that we and 41 other Republican senators detailed in a brief we submitted to the Supreme Court. These issues came to a head last week when the Court heard oral arguments concerning some of the most consequential separation-of-powers questions it has ever considered.
Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative powers in Congress. Our Founders knew the central aspect of those powers would be Congress’s control over spending — the power of the purse. Yet the president is trying to wave a magic wand and wipe away a staggering half-trillion dollars in debts owed the United States without any approval from Congress whatsoever. Even then-speaker Pelosi, less than two years ago, admitted that this level of presidential overreach would be impossible: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not . . . that has to be an act of Congress.” . . .
Like Speaker Pelosi said less than two years ago, President Biden lacks the power to take this lawless and regressive step. The Court should stop him.
Real-world accounts of civil forfeiture in action are always infuriating, and a piece by Wesley Hottot and Daryl James, with the Institute for Justice, is no exception:
Drug couriers carry cash, so the police assume the worst when they find money in a trunk, suitcase, or closet. Yet people use physical currency for a variety of legitimate reasons. Marine veteran Stephen Lara simply trusts himself more than banks.
When he drove from Texas to California to see his two teenage daughters in February 2021, he brought his life savings with him for safekeeping. A backpack in the trunk of his rental car contained about $86,900, along with receipts showing three years’ worth of bank withdrawals.
The money came from honest labor, and carrying cash is not a crime. So Lara had nothing to hide when the Nevada Highway Patrol pulled him over on suspicion of making an unsafe lane change near Reno, Nev. Bodycam video shows that Lara complied with police orders, answered questions, and remained calm. He even consented to a vehicle search, which produced no drugs, weapons, or contraband of any type.
Ultimately the officers released Lara without arresting him or issuing a citation. He was free to go, but not with his money. The agency seized the full amount and handed it over to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for civil forfeiture, a moneymaking scheme that allows the government to take and keep assets without convicting anyone of a crime.
What followed was silence. The DEA sat on Lara’s life savings for months, never accusing him of a crime and ignoring federal deadlines that require the government to proceed with forfeiture or return the money.
Shout-Outs
Andrew Kerr, at the Washington Free Beacon: Meet the Anti-Semitic Spiritual Guru on Cori Bush’s Payroll
Joel Kotkin, at UnHerd: The ghost of Ancient Rome haunts America
Peter Baker, at the New York Times: Inside the Panic at Fox News After the 2020 Election
CODA
In keeping with the top of this newsletter, I can’t help but toss in this music video, all for the chorus. R.I.P. Stevie.
Thanks for reading.