As previously reported, the US House passed a bill on Wednesday requiring Chinese tech giant ByteDance to sell TikTok or else the infamous media app will effectively be banned in America. Specifically, the bill gives TikTok “six months to eliminate foreign adversary control – which would include ByteDance divesting its current ownership – to remain available in the United States.”
The vote passed with strong bipartisan support 352-65 with one voting member present.
Tucker Carlson interviewed Senator Rand Paul on Thursday following the vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rand Paul fears that this will lead to greater discrimination and censorship of viewpoints by our political leaders.
Tucker Carlson: The majority of House Republicans, surprisingly, simply aligned with the Biden administration on one of its top priorities, banning the social media app TikTok. This amounts to the most far-reaching act of censorship in US history. It is an attack on the right of American citizens to receive their information from any source they choose. Most of us believe it’s a fundamental right, but of course hardly anyone in Washington will admit it’s happening. That’s not what’s happening at all. They tell us no. Instead, they are framing what is obviously censorship as an act of self-defense against a foreign adversary. And if it sounds familiar, it should be. It is the same logic with which, among other things, they spied on Donald Trump, once designated an instrument of Russia. And as always, they’re doing all of this in the bluntest and least sober terms, because it’s actually your fault…
Tucker introduces Senator Rand Paul.
Tucker Carlson: …I’ll go ahead and assume I speak for you too. I don’t think most people are really that supportive of TikTok or the Chinese government. I assume you are not. Surely not. But Republican leaders seem to believe two things that contradict each other: They believe that, based on some evidence, Joe Biden is in some sense controlled by China and that Joe Biden is still pushing, and that’s true. But they’re aligning themselves with Joe Biden, who is suddenly claiming that TikTok is bad because it’s too Chinese and is pouring dirt into the minds of our children. Now, he can’t be honest about that, obviously. So why should they join him in this? Do you have any idea?
Late. Rand Paolo: My concern has always been the centralization of power, the renunciation of power. I don’t care if it’s a Republican or Democratic president. I don’t want any president to have the power to ban apps sold on the App Store. And that’s essentially what will happen. 180,000,000 Americans post videos of dancing and everything else on TikTok. And they choose the terms of those services the same way people do on Facebook. And does Facebook collect your data? Safe. Does Google recover your data? Are all these giant tech companies scraping your data? They take all your data. But the fact is that now there are accusations. They say TikTok is owned by the Chinese government. The Chinese communists own it. Well, that’s not even true. You can’t say one thing over and over again. It is not true. TikTok is approximately 60% owned by international investors from around the world. 20% is owned by the two Chinese software engineers who created the app. And 20% are owned by TikTok employees, of which 7,000 are Americans. So there’s a significant nexus among Americans in ownership, and then there’s a significant nexus among Americans who use it.
And they say, oh, well, it’s owned by the Chinese government. Frankly, that’s not true. Now, the company that owns TikTok also owns something like TikTok which is censored and the Chinese let it be broadcast all over China. The Chinese government has a member of the council. His name is Doyan. He is the Chinese TikTok. But they don’t have a Bytedance board member. They do not control Bytedance and the data is now held in the Oracle cloud centered in Texas. And this was done because the company wants to try to exist. It is a very popular app. It has great value, so they are doing everything they can to comply. Yet the hysteria at home simply turned them off. Turn them off. 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’m not a fan of Chinese communism, but at the same time we can’t emulate the Chinese to try to protect our way of life by becoming like the Chinese and banning certain things. TikTok is banned in China.
If we ban TikTok, we simply become and behave like the Chinese. So there’s a hysteria going on. But in America there are things that protect. You can’t just take people’s things. In America, if you have a company, I can’t just come and get the Tucker Carlson network from you because one of your investors is from China. Do I have to go to court. I have to prove that you are somehow a Chinese communist and that you are giving them data. These are all accusations. They may or may not be true, but you can’t take the company of someone worth billions of dollars without proving it in a court of law. Likewise, you cannot take away the free speech rights of 100 and 7180 million people who want to express themselves. So I think the courts will rule against this. They’ve done so twice in the last four years in federal court, and just recently overturned Montana’s ban. So I think there’s a very good chance that this is unconstitutional. But this doesn’t seem to discourage any of my colleagues at home…
…But the First Amendment is 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 is an exception to the Constitution, that it does not apply when there is national security. The problem is that there is always a national security for any excuse, for anything you want to do. And so I don’t think you throw away the constitution when there are accusations of some kind of connection. You have to prove it before you take someone’s stuff and before you take someone’s first amendment privileges.
If you don’t like it, don’t use it. This is what happens in a free country, but it happens in an authoritarian country when you are connected to the government. If you don’t like something and close it. And that’s what’s happening now. They don’t like the content. They claim it is controlled by the Chinese government, of which there is no objective evidence…
…Emulating the Chinese communists is not the best way to fight the Chinese communists.
Are the people who handed over our country to China banning TikTok to protect you from China? Probably not. So what’s really going on? Rand Paul joins us to explain. pic.twitter.com/XRe7fvqoOw
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 14, 2024