Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a noble speech in Seoul yesterday warning that a “flood” of disinformation was threatening the world’s democracies, fueled in part by the rise of Artificial Intelligence. The New York Times speculates that he is most worried about the U.S. elections in November.
But the war over the integrity of the American political system has already started as evidenced by the fight over TikTok. The Chinese government, which exercises total control over ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, is reaching 170 million Americans every day. It is telling them that it is wrong for the U.S. government to attempt to protect its national security by limiting TikTok’s power or by shutting it down. That strategy is clearly working. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have quoted a TikTok creator Giovanna Gonzalez, who posted in a video: “So old white people we call congresspeople are trying to ban TikTok, but I’m not having it.”
The Chinese are driving a wedge between older and younger Americans, turning the issue into a kind of generational fight, and there’s also a clear racial angle if a Latina thinks that it’s the white people trying to suppress the rights of people of color.
This is a national crisis. We are being ripped apart and cannot summon the unity of purpose to respond. The old white people need to start explaining what national security means to the TikTok crowd, who obviously have no idea what it means that they are getting their news on their phones, courtesy of the People’s Republic of China.
