Is TikTok ban to stop kids learning about Gaza? | Will Bunch Newsletter

This Sunday is Mother’s Day, which seems to sneak up quickly every spring. My own mother has kind of shocked everybody (her own parents died fairly young) by making it to age 91. That’s the good news; the bad news is she’s been in the hospital with a broken femur, and it’s been up and down (which is partly why my column writing has been somewhat sporadic). It’s always a good year to tell your own mom what she’s meant to you, because you never know when that opportunity will be gone.

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If you follow politics, you’ve surely heard the expression about “saying the quiet part out loud.” But when the conversation turned to the looming possible government ban of TikTok at a recent forum featuring two of the most powerful men in America — Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and departing Sen. Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential candidate — the once quiet part about one of the reasons behind the move became a deafening scream.

At the McCain Institute, Romney voiced his frustration that more Americans seem angry about Israel’s actions in Gaza — where an offensive has killed more than 34,000 people, many of them women and children — than at Hamas, whose brutal Oct. 7 attack started the war in the Middle East.

“The Israelis are good at PR — what’s happened here?” an exasperated sounding Romney asked. Blinken, who has devoted most of the last seven months to diplomacy around the war, mentioned the ability for Americans to see bloodshed in real time on their phones. “And you have a social media ... environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact dominates, and it has a very challenging impact on the narrative.”

“Some wonder why there was so much support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok, or entities of that nature,” Romney replied. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians compared to other social media sites, it’s overwhelming”

Really?

Romney was one of 79 U.S. senators who voted late last month for an urgent $95 billion aid bill for Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza humanitarian relief that folded in a measure that will turn off TikTok, the wildly popular social-media app with close to 150 million U.S. users, if its Chinese owners don’t sell the company by the first half of next year. Supporters insist a TikTok sale or ban is a national security issue, because the current owners — a technology company called ByteDance — are believed to have ties to the Chinese government, prompting fears it could abuse Americans’ personal data, or promote propaganda.

But Romney isn’t the only top D.C. politician to suggest that TikTok is to blame for young people’s views on the Middle East. One third of Americans under 30 told Pew they solely support the Palestinian cause, while just 14% only back Israel, a stark contrast with their elders. Romney admitted this was behind the stunning speed with which a normally gridlocked Congress enacted such a major law.

U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, one of Israel’s most vocal supporters on Capitol Hill and a sponsor of the TikTok measure, claimed recently that the app is linked to the rapid spread of pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. college campuses. He said his belief in outside coordination “highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package, because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.”

It’s worth noting that the substance of what Lawler is alleging here is utter baloney. But his words, and those of Romney and some others who voted for the TikTok clampdown, matter quite a bit. Here’s why. The notion of China’s dictators using TikTok to steal our personal information, or pull a Putin-style disinformation campaign, is a very real problem, even if an outright ban targeting just one social media player isn’t the best way to address it.

But if the real motivation for zapping TikTok from your phone is to silence legitimate political speech, just because a lot of members of Congress don’t like it, then this bill is the worst attack on the First Amendment since the government was sending World War I critics like Eugene V. Debs and Kate Richards O’Hare to prison, more than 100 years ago.

“Banning a social media platform that hundreds of millions of Americans use to express themselves would have devastating consequences for all of our First Amendment rights,” Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said last month when the bill passed the House — while also predicting the courts will find the TikTok provision unconstitutional. Maybe ... but has Leventoff met the current U.S. Supreme Court?

The TikTok debate is fascinating for several reasons, including the huge generation gap. With a boomer, it’s a lot easier to explain the latest Kendrick-Drake diss track then to get them on the app. But many Gen Z folks or Millennials spend hours watching videos on the site. The most recent Pew survey found about a third of Americans in the 18-29 age bracket get their news from TikTok.

While brings us back to Romney’s panic about Israel’s PR failures and Blinken’s agreement that the U.S. government, where support for Israel has been deeply rooted for decades, and the mainstream media has lost control of the narrative. Because the pro-Israel narrative is the backbone of unwavering U.S. support for Israel at the U.N. and our billions in arms deals.

During the war in Gaza, most mainstream Western journalists have been blocked from entering the war zone. The best source of real-time information is often the phone video of airstrikes and their aftermath either shot by Palestinian journalists — more than 90 of whom have been killed — or civilian bystanders. Look, there’s disinformation about every issue on social media — it’s a serious problem. I’m a clueless boomer myself about TikTok, but I do spend way too much time on X/Twitter and I can tell you exactly what is radicalizing young people about Gaza.

The reason so many under-30 folks have adopted the Palestinian cause isn’t disinformation, from Hamas or China or anyone else. They’ve been radicalized by the truth — daily videos of young children, some of them bloodied, some of them already dead, covered in dust and targeted by 2,000-pound dumb bombs made right here in America.

Remember just four years ago, one video of a Minneapolis cop killing George Floyd with his knee caused millions to take to the streets. What did you expect would happen when U.S. youth are hit with a new George Floyd-level outrage on their phone every few hours? How old do you have to be to believe you can still control that narrative?

Indeed, PR and spin and controlling the narrative is so central to the power of the lobbyists and the elite Beltway media and the billionaires and Congress and the White House that their only solution for their TikTok dilemma to ban the whole thing, regardless of the First Amendment. Voters should be outraged, and I suspect they will be. President Joe Biden signed this terrible bill just weeks after his reelection campaign — so desperate to win back young voters — opened its own account on TikTok. What on earth is Biden thinking?

Question: President Biden has ‘ghosted’ some ‘major players’ in media. These ‘major players’ have retaliated. Who will win this battle? — observe_ct (@CtObserve) via X/Twitter

Answer: This question largely refers to the strange state of relations between the Biden administration and the New York Times, which — according to a recent report in Politico — is so peeved that the 46th president won’t sit down with “the Paper of Record” for an interview that contempt is bleeding into negative coverage around Biden’s age and other topics. I’m concerned about that, and also this weekend’s interview that NYT executive editor Joe Kahn gave Semafor, in which his defense of balanced coverage of Biden and Trump suggested that the paper should emphasize coverage of issues like immigration and the economy, even when that voter sentiment is fomented by Fox News-style hysteria. Kahn seems scared of the kind of stirring defense of democracy this moment requires — a problem that many in the mainstream media won’t understand until it’s too late.

You gave me a lot of great responses to last week’s open-ended question about how President Biden could win back younger voters, who so far have been less likely to support him than in 2020. The top answer, by far, was to shift course in Gaza and stop supplying American weapons to Israel as long as the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is killing civilians. Daniel Hoffman expressed exasperation that Biden won’t consider a solution “that involves getting tough with Israel by making any aid to them contingent on a permanent Gaza withdrawal, demanding a two-state solution, and otherwise delegitimizing the Netanyahu administration.” But Barry Rosen argued for “making it clear that the option of a return to office by Donald Trump is the worst thing that could happen to both the United States and the world.”

📮This week’s question: Donald Trump’s hush-money trial is plodding forward in Manhattan. Do you think the jury will find him guilty or not guilty, and why? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Trump trial” in the subject line.

County Judge Sydney Murphy — the top elected official in Polk County, Texas — is finding that a big part of her job is responding to the frequent floods inundating her rural landscape north of Houston. After the latest batch of wet weather dumped as much as 23 inches of rain on parts of the Lone Star State, Murphy told the Associated Press she’s tired of dealing with epic weather events, but “whatever happens, whatever Mother Nature sends our way, then we will deal with.” The latest missive from Mother Nature killed three Texans, including a 4-year-old boy swept away in raging floodwaters, and forced overworked responders to make hundreds of water rescues of desperate homeowners, clinging to their cats and dogs. “It has been heart wrenching to see our fellow Texans be literally inundated with record water fall,” said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, expressing thoughts and prayers that apparently weren’t on his mind when he promised in 2021 he’d use all his powers to fight any federal action on climate change.

But it’s getting harder and harder for officials like Abbott to deny the existence of global warming, which, according to a new Texas A&M report, has caused precipitation in East Texas to rise by 15% over the last century, and could increase it another 10% in the next decade, even as the sea level along the Gulf Coast continues to rise. On Monday, scientists reported that the earth just experienced the hottest April on record, the 11th consecutive all-time monthly record. The scary part is that right now we are seeing the effects of such a hot planet everywhere. In southern Brazil, the latest wave of extreme flooding has killed at least 83 people, with many more still missing in communities under water or caked in mud. In the Middle East, Dubai just experienced two years worth of rain in 24 hours, while Kenya’s rainy season, exacerbated by climate change, has seen at least 38 deaths.

Yet on the TV news, the shocking images of entire towns under water and dramatic rescues have barely made a dent, in a nation consumed with the first criminal trial of Donald Trump. If it seems like Americans are caring less about climate-induced extreme weather, that’s because apparently we do care less. A Monmouth University poll out just this week found the number of Americans who think climate change is a serious problem is actually falling — now below 50% — and thus support for government action has also dropped. The biggest falloff, also surprisingly, is among young voters. This as Trump — who has pledged to halt and possibly roll back climate action — remains in a dead heat to become our next president. It was once assumed that news about killer floods and scorching heat waves would finally shock the world into dramatic action. Instead, we have become comfortably numb.

I used to attempt satire in the early days of my Attytood blog in the mid-2000s before giving up. This rare modern effort at funny writing from May 7, 2019 might help explain why most of my humor these days is unintentional. Five years ago, I was so appalled by the entry of then-New York Mayor Bill De Blasio into the ridiculously overcrowded Democratic presidential primary field that I declared in these pages that I myself would also run — since as a mediocre white man, I had impeccable qualifications. The highlight of the column is the graphic, which buries my image in a mix with 11 other forgettable candidates. Well, some of you might recognize the mediocre white man at top left. Anyway, check out: “I’m a mediocre white man — so I’m thinking about joining the Democratic primary field.”

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