Chap 17: Taking Back Trump's America Serialization

My TikTok Aaron Sorkin West Wing Moment

Enjoy the read! The entire book is available on Amazon.

President Donald Trump was furious with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over the way the TikTok Global agreement was sold to him, two current Trump administration officials ... confirmed to the Daily Caller.  Mnuchin has been

the administration’s lead official in searching for a U.S. company to purchase TikTok from parent company ByteDance, despite some administration officials

— including White House Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director Peter Navarro — pushing Trump instead to ban the social media app entirely....

Mnuchin knew the TikTok Global deal undercut national security by failing to force ByteDance to turn over critical pieces of technology, including TikTok’s central content algorithm, and not including an enforcement mechanism to ensure user data security.

The Daily Caller, September 23, 2020

The Trump Administration’s attempted ban on the Chinese social media app TikTok started with a Communist Chinese invasion of India. What’s that you say?

Yes, the Trump TikTok gambit all started with this geopolitical reality: The Chinese Communist Empire has a long and particularly nasty habit of using periods of uncertainty and chaos in the world as opportunities to advance their imperialistic agenda. A case in point is the ChiCom’s sneak invasion of India during the chaos and confusion of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

At that time of nuclear brinksmanship between two superpowers, India was a client state of the Soviet Union. With Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviets otherwise preoccupied with an eyeball-to- eyeball showdown with John F. Kennedy and the Americans, Chinese military troops poured into India.

With nary a peep or missile from Khrushchev, Communist China then bit off a nice little chunk of Indian territory known as Aksai Chin, which is located in the eastern portion of the larger Kashmir region. Small though it is, Aksai Chin is no small piece of territory strategically. The distance between Aksai Chin and New Delhi is only about the same distance as between Boston and Washington DC – think lightning Chinese blitzkrieg in a war with India rather than a slow, Long March slog.¹²⁷

Fast-forward now to May 2020; and, in a new fog of pandemic war, the ChiComs were back to pouring across the Indian border. At least this time, the Indians were able to fend off the Chinese invasion – but not before Chinese death squads slaughtered over 20 Indian soldiers in what newspapers described as “gruesome” and “bloody hand-to-hand combat.”¹²⁸

In retaliation for China’s aggression, the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, on June 29^th, 2020, banned more than 50 Chinese social media apps, most notably WeChat, Weibo, and TikTok itself. When the Boss saw the decisive courage of Modi, a “Tough on China” light bulb immediately went off in the East Wing. With a late night order from on high – or at least from the second floor of the East Wing – the National Security Council quickly went to work on an Executive Order that would impose a similar type of ban on select Chinese apps – including both TikTok and WeChat.

Banning Chinese social media apps like TikTok and WeChat was not just good “Tough on China” politics. It was very good policy. From both an economic and national security perspective, these Chinese social media apps pose an intricate and interrelated set of threats.

Most obviously, these social media apps collect a tremendous amount of personal and financial information from American citizens and businesses and routinely transfer that data over servers on the Chinese Communist mainland. By law, this data is accessible to the Chinese government and, by extension, China’s large cadres of Chinese government hackers.

Now most internet users tend to log on to multiple applications using the same username and password. So let’s say you do that, and you log into TikTok. China’s hackers can then access any other applications for which you may use that same username and password combination, including your bank accounts and credit cards.

Note: These hacker scum don’t even have to know if you use these applications; they can simply go through a universe of such applications – or just have a bot do it – to see if they can hit a jackpot that will hit you like a jackhammer.

Beyond these dangers, social media apps can also archive all manner of photos and videos that can be used for nefarious state activities like facial recognition tracking. Travel to China, for example, and the government may already have a whole dossier ready to review on you as you step off the plane on your way to passport control.

For all these reasons, it was very good policy for the White House to swiftly move on an Executive Order that would, as Modi’s India had boldly and swiftly done, ban a large number of social media apps within the Communist China cyber universe.