Beijing wins in TikTok deal, Dems culture-war addiction and other commentary

The new TikTok deal allows China’s ByteDance to keep 19.9% of the company, gripes National Review’s Jim Geraghty, a “complete violation of the law” that aimed to force a total sale.This is “selling out American national security interests,” since it still lets Beijing use the app “to spread anti-American propaganda and suppress criticism of the regime in Beijing.” Any “deal that merely has the U.S.

‘license’ the algorithm doesn’t address the heart of the problem,” as “licensing is not ownership and monitoring is not control.” This deal “may sound like a compromise, but it is in fact a capitulation.” It seems that, since President Trump “wants to be loved by the young Americans who use TikTok,” he “shoved through this deal which hand-waves away the national security concerns.”“For years,” marvels Drew Allen at the American Spectator, “Europeans have been fed a story” that America “is reckless, declining, morally unserious” and “driven by crude nationalism,” while China is “pragmatic, inevitable, sophisticated.” Remarkably, Europeans who call America “authoritarian” can’t “bring themselves to utter a harsh word” about the world’s “most powerful authoritarian regime.” This is “is not ignorance.It is incentive,” as China “does not challenge Europe’s ruling class,” but “flatters” it.

America “does the opposite,” refusing to “submit quietly” to Europe’s supposed moral ‘authority”; that’s “intolerable” to continental elites who “are not acting in the interests of European citizens, but in their own.” Beware, Europeans: It’s “very hard to regain freedom once lost.”“Democrats, it turns out, just cannot resist the siren call of culture denialism,” snarks The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira.E.g., they still can’t say if “transgender youths under age 18 should be able to be placed on puberty blockers and hormones.” It seems embedded int...