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The Strange Non-Death of TikTok And The Current College Chaos Ian Oxnevad

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/the-strange-non-death-of-tiktok?utm_source=NAS+
CounterCurrent: China Edition is a monthly newsletter of the National Association of Scholars uncovering and highlighting the effects of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on American education.

Cognitive warfare is a technical term for altering the attitudes and behaviors of a specific individual or a population for political purposes by “degrading rationality” and changing perceptions of reality. At the end of last month, Joe Biden in his cognitive wisdom signed into law a bill that forces China to sell one of its foremost cognitive weapons: TikTok. Included as part of an aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the bill mandates that the Chinese company ByteDance either sell the app or face an outright ban in the United States. While TikTok’s looming legislative death sentence has upset Communist China and American libertarians alike, it will likely remain an enabler of college campus chaos under new ownership.

As a tool of cognitive warfare, China’s reasons for wanting and using TikTok are as evident as its effect. According to Congressional testimony from United States Army General Paul M. Nakasone, roughly a third of American adults get their news from the app, while one out of six children are chronic users of it. The FBI and FCC have noted that TikTok collects data ranging from a user’s history and location to biometric data and shares it with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

Regarding content, TikTok is an app parade of the ugly and horrible. Vinod Khosla, one of Open-AI’s major investors, has called the app an “AI-powered subversion weapon.” According to algorithmic studies of the app, after five hours on the platform, users are exposed to content harmful to mental health. Videos encouraging teenagers to commit suicide play alongside those enabling child exploitation. Anti-Semitism is plentiful in TikTok’s “Photo Mode,” and has faced allegations from whistleblowers over moderating content on the Middle East to favor Hamas. Osama bin Laden went viral at the end of last year, seemingly from the grave, on a viral TikTok. Add to the mix idiotic and dangerous TikTok “challenges” like cooking chicken with NyQuil, eating corn cobbs on rotating drill bits, overdosing on Benadryl, choking yourself until blackout, and eating Tide pods. Cognitive warfare not only works—it works too well. In China, TikTok is restricted to educational and patriotic content favoring the Chinese Communist Party.

ByteDance has been active in the minds of American students in more formal ways by contributing heavily to colleges and universities. In 2020, ByteDance announced it would donate $10 million to medical scholarships awarded for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” ByteDance gave much more than that. In fact, ByteDance gave in excess of eight figures in donations that universities failed to disclose. Despite Beijing’s largesse, universities in predominantly Republican states have banned TikTok.

TikTok has played its role in the recent protests of Jews and Israel playing out across college campuses nationwide. According to a survey conducted by the data firm Kaggle, spending only 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases someone’s likelihood of holding anti-Semitic views. According to the study, “TikTok users are more likely to believe that Jewish people are dishonest in business, are disloyal to America, and have too much power in the media.” Kaggle’s findings are not unique, as its conclusions were verified by an experiment conducted by the Wall Street Journal that found teenagers exposed to “apocalyptic, conspiratorial” content warped in a lopsided anti-Israel position. It is no wonder that campuses are currently overrun with anti-Semitic mobs.

While banning TikTok or forcing its sale seems a logical step to safeguard national security, it nonetheless begs the question of whether such a move would be little more than a Pyrrhic victory. There is a good chance that TikTok’s algorithms, which contain its secret sauce of subversion, would not be included in a forced sale of the app to an American buyer. Even if out of the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, there is no guarantee that the “new” TikTok would not continue to erode societal cohesion and the mental capacity of young Americans. After all, other apps such as Facebook and Instagram have fostered similar discord.

One way to determine a political slant of an app’s content is to measure its hashtags to assess how they align with or against a given cause. The Washington Post found that hashtags for TikTok were lopsided in favor of #freepalestine against those in support of Israel. At the same time, Facebook posts with the #freepalestine dwarfed those of #standwithisrael by 39 times. Instagram’s posts in favor of the Palestinians were 29 times more numerous than those supporting Israel. TikTok may be waging cognitive warfare on young Americans; however, the darker truth is that China can only be blamed so much for the societal rot exemplified in today’s surge of anti-Semitism or the broader polarization in America. Americans are perfectly capable of destroying civilization on their own.

This brings us to the strange “non-death” of TikTok. With or without its algorithms, potential American tech investors buying TikTok will obtain an amazing tool to sway popular opinion for political purposes. In 2018, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place.” While major figures in the high-tech sector such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have shifted rightwards in recent years, there is no guarantee that a TikTok under new management would be any less conducive to societal fragmentation. TikTok may be the next leftwing app used by protest groups and promoting dangers to mental health. In other words, TikTok’s effects will likely never die, even if the app is effectively banned.

China’s strategy to make America angry and stupid with an app has proven remarkably successful. Still, it must be stressed that China’s efforts to sow discord only add momentum to cultural fracturing due to existing domestic dynamics. TikTok may help make students more anti-Semitic, but it only adds to what is heard in campus classrooms across the country where Western civilization is repeatedly condemned as illegitimate and Israel an oppressive, racist state. For those looking to Beijing’s app as the cause of today’s campus chaos, a mirror would suffice.

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The Eurovision hurricane The tantrums over Eden Golan epitomised the childishness of performative protest Melanie Phillips

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/account

This is an expanded version of my column in The Times of London (£) today.

When the Irish Eurovision contestant, Bambie Thug, failed to bully Israel’s competitor out of the contest being staged in the Swedish town of Malmö, Thug did what today’s culture warriors feel is an appropriate reaction when they don’t get their way. The singer had a meltdown and burst into tears.

Thug, a “non-binary” individual who performed a pagan satanic routine as a kind of goblinesque Goth, had demanded that Israel’s entrant, Eden Golan, be barred from the contest because… well, because of course all Israelis everywhere should be shunned and hounded and cancelled by the entire human race because of the war in Gaza.

Asked how it had felt when Golan qualified for the contest’s final, the goblin replied, choking back the tears, “I cried with my team”.

Of course! Because the protest was all about them, to demonstrate their virtue as victims of… well, Israel’s existence, not to put too fine a point on it; and to demonstrate the frankly intolerable human cost to themselves of their principled stand of resistance. “The world has spoken!” cried Thug triumphantly, gulping back principled sobs.

Except the world hadn’t quite said what Thug —  speaking from within the alternative universe where Israel’s fight for its life against a genocidal enemy is itself denounced as an act of genocide — thought the world had said.

Because in the real world people had seen something rather different. They saw a vast mob on the streets of Malmö supporting the “Palestinian resistance” —  ie terrorism against Israeli Jews — and besieging a young Israeli singer to force her out of the contest.

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Secretary Blinken Throws a Tantrum Over Israel Matt Vespa

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/05/13/secretary-blinken-to-israel-get-out-of-gaza-n2639025

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday delivered one of the Biden administration’s strongest public rebukes of Israel, amid its war with Hamas in Gaza. 

During a pair of TV interviews, Blinken said the United States wants Israeli forces to “get out of Gaza” amid what he described as “a horrible loss of life of innocent civilians.” He also said Israel’s tactics in the war have failed to neutralize Hamas and could create a power “vacuum” in the Palestinian territory. 

[…] 

“As we look at Rafah, they may go in and have some initial success, but potentially at an incredibly high cost to civilians, but one that is not durable, one that’s not sustainable. And they will be left holding the bag on an enduring insurgency because a lot of armed Hamas will be left, no matter what they do in Rafah, or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do. Then you’re going to have a vacuum and a vacuum that’s likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy, and ultimately by Hamas again.” 

[…] 

…Blinken praised President Biden’s support for Israel — saying “no one has done more than Biden” — despite the apparent shift in tone. 

“No one has done more to defend Israel when it mattered than President Biden,” the Secretary of State said. “He was there in the days after October 7th, the first president to go to Israel in the midst of a conflict when Iran mounted an unprecedented attack on Israel. Some weeks ago, 300 projectiles, including ballistic missiles, launched in Israel. The United States, for the first time ever, participated in its act of defense, and President Biden brought together a coalition of countries that helped defend Israel.”

Didn’t Biden also tell Iran that its ballistic missile salvo should be within “certain limits?”  

The United Nations and even Hamas have revised their death toll figures downward. Shocker: a terror group inflated the number killed. As Spencer wrote yesterday, the UN reduced civilian deaths by 50 percent. Biden has been wrong about every major foreign policy venture for the past 40 years, and we’re going to trust him advising Israel on how to execute their war. Israel has defended itself from annihilation three times. Speaking of civilians, I can’t help but notice, along with others, that the Biden administration no longer cares about the American hostages. 

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Egypt’s Duplicity, the World’s Silence by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20638/egypt-duplicity-world-silence

“A one-hundred-dollar bill does wonders with an Egyptian police officer at a Sinai roadblock who intercepts a truck packed with ‘pipes.'” — Efraim Inbar and Mordechai Kedar, BESA Center, January 22, 2009.

This is just another example of how, when Palestinians become victims of oppressive measures taken against them by their Arab brothers, the world does not care a bit. About a decade ago, when Egypt demolished dozens of houses and buildings in Rafah as part of a campaign to combat terrorism, no one said a word against the Egyptians — or even bothered to look.

If the Egyptians actually cared about the Palestinians, instead of blocking the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip, they could easily coordinate with Israel though alternative border crossings such as the nearby Kerem Shalom terminal.

Evidently the Egyptians would rather see the Gazans starve; then, the international community, as usual, would hold only Israel responsible.

That is the real problem: Where is the demand from the international community for Egypt to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip? Where are social media posts, the US college campus protests, and the op-eds condemning Egypt for deliberately withholding aid from Gaza’s Palestinians?

Why doesn’t the Biden administration pressure Egypt, and not just Israel, to allow aid to enter Gaza for the Palestinians?

Egypt has, in fact, been imposing a blockade on the Gaza Strip for the past 15 years…. Where are the protestors calling to stop the billions in aid to Egypt? They do not, of course, exist. The protests were never about helping Palestinians. They were always only about attacking Jews.

This is the same Egypt that been displacing thousands of Palestinians from Rafah after demolishing their homes and is now blocking aid to the Palestinians, that has piously decided to join the South African case against Israel at the ICJ.

Now that Israel is attempting to dismantle a terrorist group whose primary objective is the elimination of Israel, the Biden administration and many in the international community suddenly claim they are “outraged.”

If they really want to help the Palestinians, they could begin by filing cases against Egypt and the Arab states in the region that, for many decades, have turned their backs on the Palestinians and paid billions to their governments to keep on mistreating them.

On May 12, Egypt announced that it will support South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel is accused of “genocide” for defending its citizens against Hamas’s murderers and rapists who invaded Israeli communities on October 7, 2023. The announcement came in response to the ongoing Israeli military operation against Hamas terrorists and bases, especially in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

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Jews cannot afford to be divided over Israel Solidarity with the Jewish State has never been more necessary. Joel Kotkin

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/14/jews-cannot-afford-to-be-divided-over-israel/

Jews, like elephants, tend to have long memories. We see in the past warnings of the future. As Israel marks its 76th birthday on 14 May, perhaps the most relevant and terrifying precedent comes from the days of the Roman Empire.

After the First Jewish-Roman War ended in 74 AD, the Jews lost control of Palestine. Their temple was destroyed. Following a second rebellion, they were largely expelled from their promised land. They would not return in force for almost two millennia.

The most thorough account of those times was written by Josephus Flavius, a well-born Jewish priest who first joined the insurrection against Rome, but later embraced the imperial cause. The Israel Josephus describes sounds oddly familiar: a small country with a large diaspora, deeply divided about whether to accommodate the dominant Roman Empire or embrace various strains of zealotry. Many of these zealots spent at least as much time attacking each other as they did the Roman legions. He describes them as ‘falling upon the people as upon a flock of profane animals and cutting their throats’.

Josephus noted that such divisions made the Jews sore losers. When another, even less successful Jewish rebellion against the Romans broke out six decades later, the Jews were left largely exiled from Israel. They were often unpopular, in part due to their monotheistic beliefs, and they sometimes fought with other communities from Rome and Alexandria to Antioch. As the Greek Sibylline oracle proclaimed: ‘Every sea and land is full of you and everyone hates you because of your ways.’

The comparisons are chilling. The modern version of the Jewish State is similarly increasingly isolated. Even in the traditional liberal nations of the diaspora, including the UK, Jewish communities face renewed threats to their prosperity and even their existence. Anti-Semitic hate crimes in Britain, notes one survey, are now 10 times what they were just a few years ago. In the US, they are far more prevalent than the much-ballyhooed threat of Islamophobia.

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Christopher F. Rufo Riot Tactics Redux A veteran officer explains how police should incorporate lessons from 2020 in responding to pro-Hamas campus unrest.

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/riot-tactics-redux

The City of Seattle has long been a laboratory for the radical Left. Activists experiment with concepts, language, techniques, and policies that eventually appear in other cities. For this reason, Seattle law enforcement often gets early insight into the evolving tactics of left-wing street protesters. The city’s officers have had decades of experience dealing with Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and anarchist movements, which culminated in the George Floyd riots of 2020.

To understand the latest chaos at American universities, I spoke with Christopher Young, who served as an officer and detective for the Seattle Police Department, including working undercover for a long stretch during the season of George Floyd. Young has since retired and has greater liberty to speak about the current campus unrest and how police departments should respond.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Christopher Rufo: I sense that 2024 might play out as a variation on the theme of 2020, with dramatic political and civil unrest. From a law-enforcement perspective, what has changed?

Christopher Young: The activists are not stupid. They learned a lot during the George Floyd riots. I think the most effective lesson they learned was to pathologize safe and effective riot-control tactics. They say that it’s a “war crime” to use tear gas, but they never say that the cops shouldn’t have riot batons. The reason is that they want to provoke the cops into hitting somebody with a baton, which looks bad on camera.

I worked undercover during the George Floyd riots. I’ve been gassed hundreds of times, which is scary and unpleasant. But it’s better than getting hit with a stick or shot with pepper balls.

Rufo: What is the attitude in police departments in response to the current pro-Hamas campus unrest?

Young: For the most part, the university police can’t really remove the protesters. So, they have to get the city to do it, but the cities are not eager to step in because there’s no upside for them. The university administrations give the protesters an inch, and the protestors take a mile. Then they want the city to come in and deal with the consequences. It’s putting the municipal police departments in an impossible situation, where they’re going to get hit with litigation for routine arrests: “You put the cuffs on too tight. You didn’t read their rights soon enough.”

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A Palestinian Visits Auschwitz Tells Jews: you belong here. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-palestinian-visits-auschwitz/

The first Palestinian to have visited a Nazi concentration camp was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s to the 1940s, who spent the war years in Berlin. He had a nice chat with Hitler on November 28, 1941, captured in a famous photograph here. Al-Husseini expressed to Hitler his enthusiasm for the Final Solution. He was befriended by Heinrich Himmler, and there is some evidence, not conclusive, that the Mufti may have been taken to Auschwitz by Himmler, or possibly by another person he had befriended, Adolf Eichmann, to see how swimmingly things were proceeding there. It is certain that the Mufti visited the concentration camp at Tebbin, for there are numerous photographs of him at the site together with high Nazi officials, as can be seen here.

As his contribution to the Nazi war effort, Hajj Amin el Husseini is known to have raised several Waffen SS battalions consisting of Bosnian Muslims. He also broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda to the Arab world throughout the war.

In January 2020, in quite a different spirit to that exhibited by the Mufti, a group of 25 Muslim faith leaders visited Auschwitz, in what was at the time called a “groundbreaking” visit. “To be here… is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,” the Saudi head of the Muslim World League said during a tour of Nazi death camp with members of the American Jewish Committee.

Now another Palestinian has just been in the news for his visit to Auschwitz, not undertaken In the spirit of sympathy for the victims that the delegation of Muslim faith leaders exhibited but, rather, in a triumphant mode, demanding that Jews everywhere “return” to where they belong — that is, to the Nazi death camps. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on this latest example of a Palestinian expressing murderous antisemitism can be found here: “Palestinian man visits Auschwitz, publicly calls on Jews to return there ‘where they belong,’” 

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University of North Carolina Board Slashes DEI Funding, Diverts Money to Campus Police By Caroline Downey

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/university-of-north-carolina-board-slashes-dei-funding-diverts-money-to-campus-police/

The Board of Trustees for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Monday slashed funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in next year’s budget, diverting the money to public safety and policing instead.

The measure, which the board unanimously approved, redirects $2.3 million of diversity funding to campus security, possibly precipitating the collapse of the office of diversity and inclusion. The vote, reported by the local Fox8 station, comes amid disruptive anti-Israel protests that have roiled UNC and other college campuses in recent weeks. The board passed the measure after it first cleared the budget committee.

Budget committee vice-chair Marty Kotis said law enforcement needs more investment to counteract the demonstrations disrupting the functioning and stability of the school.

“It’s important to consider the needs of all 30,000 students, not just the 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university’s operations,” Kotis said, according to Fox8.

UNC’s 24-member Board of Governors, which includes the Board of Trustees and is the school’s governing body, is expected to vote next week on changing the school’s diversity policy.

Before UNC voted to cut DEI funding, the University of Florida in March closed its diversity department, fired all of its DEI staff, and canceled DEI contracts with outside vendors to comply with a Florida Board of Governor’s regulation that prohibits funding of such programs. As a result of the policy, the college shut down the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer and eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments.

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Lawyer Cohen Testifies about Covertly Recording Client Trump Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lawyer-cohen-testifies-about-covertly-recording-client-trump/

In Manhattan criminal court today, Michael Cohen testified about a recording the jury had already heard in the criminal trial of former president Donald Trump. It was a recording of a conversation between Cohen and Trump on September 6, 2016 (about two months before Election Day). At the time, Cohen was a lawyer working for Trump and the Trump organization. (He has since been disbarred following his sundry convictions for perjury and fraud.)

It is ethically dicey, to say the least, for a lawyer secretly to record a client. An attorney has a duty of fealty to the client — one that continues even after the representation ends. It would obviously be preferable for a lawyer to inform his client that he is recording their conversation; for such recording to be proper, with or without notice given to the client, the recording would have to be in the service of the client’s interests — the legitimate purpose of the attorney–client relationship. It could not be done to undermine the client, such as to have something to hold over the client.

Cohen has testified that Trump was unaware he was being recorded on Cohen’s iPhone as Cohen sat across from him. In the conversation, they discussed the need for Trump to reimburse David Pecker, then the CEO of American Media Inc., after AMI (which then owned the National Enquirer) had laid out $150,000 for the exclusive rights to Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story about a 2006 affair with Trump.

Cohen claims that he made the recording to keep Pecker “loyal” to Trump by easing his mind that Trump did plan to reimburse him. In the accounts I’ve read of today’s testimony, it’s not clear to me that Cohen ever played the recording for Pecker, just that he now says that’s why he recorded it. It seems to me at least equally likely that Cohen wanted some protection for himself in case Trump later tried to stiff him — i.e., that Cohen, a highly self-interested operator, recorded the conversation for his own benefit, not for Pecker’s and certainly not for Trump’s.

This demonstrates in small compass the weirdness of this case.

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FT-Michigan Ross poll: Biden’s election hopes fall as prices rise again Persistent inflation means American voters do not see evidence of an improving economy

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

The recent uptick in US inflation appears to have reversed any progress President Joe Biden has made in convincing voters he can do a better job of managing the economy than Donald Trump. The poll, conducted between May 2 and May 6, finds that — after a slight uplift in April — Biden’s approval ratings on the economy fell back to levels that will make for depressing reading among the White House’s incumbents. That comes after price data showed US inflation might prove stickier than anticipated at the start of the year. The findings add to the sense that the Biden administration’s messaging on the economy — much of which has been focused on gains US workers have seen to their wages — is not convincing voters.