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tiktok ban
America's Darkest Comeback Tour: From Racehorse Theory to Resistance
Throughout American history, in moments of darkness (and there have been plenty), people have found ways to forge solidarity across difference.
Jan 23, 2025
As we enter U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, a chilling convergence of digital theater and eugenic ideology is unfolding before our eyes. Two days before the inauguration, millions watched their TikTok accounts flash warnings across their screens—only to see them restored hours later with Trump positioned as their digital savior.
This orchestrated crisis wasn't just political theater; it was a test run for what was to come. Millions of Americans, including young people whose identities have been shaped by endless scrolling, saw their dopamine withdrawal weaponized into a demonstration of power, foreshadowing a presidency that would soon explicitly embrace the pseudo-scientific theories that once fueled the darkest chapters of American history.
The choreography continued at Trump's pre-inauguration rally on Sunday, January 19, where the aesthetic was deliberately carnage-red: red banners, red caps, red lights casting a deep red glow over the crowd speckled with cowboy hats. Against this blood-tinged backdrop, Trump spliced scenes from Full Metal Jacket with TikTok clips of drag queens, weaponizing confusing and false contrasts to signal his vision of "restored masculinity." Ever the entertainer, Trump showed scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket to represent a past that never existed, feeding his audience a hollow nostalgia for an America that never was. Kubrick had made that film for the exact opposite reason that Trump chose to flash the scenes across the screens. Full Metal Jacket makes graphically visible the brainwashing of young men by hyper-masculine expectations of war.
The tension between America's ideals and its realities has always been the space where change happens, where communities have pushed against boundaries and reimagined what's possible.
But it was his moment with Elon Musk and Musk's young son that revealed something more chilling. When Trump praised the child's inherited intelligence, invoking "racehorse theory," he wasn't just expressing admiration for the person who is arguably the greatest influence on the sequel of his presidency—he was broadcasting a eugenic worldview that has haunted American history since the 1920s. This was not the first time that Trump has evoked this pseudo-scientific theory at the root of the Holocaust. For a nation built by immigrants and by enslaved persons, his rhetoric about "cleansing" the country of what he terms "criminal illegals" from countries like Congo and Venezuela represents an existential threat to the very diversity that has always been America's greatest strength.
We've seen this before in American history. When eugenic ideologies took hold in the early 20th century, they found fertile ground in institutions across the country, from elite universities to state legislatures. Today, as Trump explicitly returns to this language, we're watching history's shadow lengthen across our democracy. The same pseudo-scientific racism that once justified sterilization programs and immigration quotas now powers algorithms and influences policy. With Elon Musk standing next to him, Trump promoted eugenics hours before he would become president again. Then, during the inauguration on January 20, while Trump was at a distinguished luncheon surrounded by tech oligarchs, Elon Musk stood before Trump's most fervent fans and raised his hand in a salute that cannot be compared to anything but a Nazi salute.
It is harrowing to stand on the precipice of this slide toward authoritarianism and white supremacist dehumanization. Yet throughout American history, in moments of darkness (and there have been plenty), people have found ways to forge solidarity across difference, to build connections in spite of–and sometimes because of—the forces trying to divide them. As social media platforms owned by oligarchs become instruments of division, our resistance must be rooted in physical spaces of community. When we look at our neighbors—in urban centers, rural towns, and suburban streets—and say, "I see you, I hear you, I stand with you," we're preserving the human connections that authoritarianism fears most.
The path forward lies not in Trump's dystopian vision of genetic superiority, but in the mutual aid networks sprouting up across the country. These grassroots communities of care and solidarity represent the most radical spaces of resistance available to us as we face the challenges ahead. They embody not some mythical American spirit, but the real and difficult work of building connection across difference—work that has always happened in the shadows of our nation's darker impulses.
In this moment of crisis, while Trump orchestrates the terrifying sequel of his reality-TV presidency—manufacturing crises, staging spectacles, and exhausting our capacity for outrage—we must remember that democracy has never been a destination but is a messy, imperfect journey. Behind each choreographed distraction, real policies of dehumanization take shape. Yet even as the entertainer-in-chief commands center stage, communities continue their quiet work of resistance and mutual support. The tension between America's ideals and its realities has always been the space where change happens, where communities have pushed against boundaries and reimagined what's possible. Our task now is to continue this long journey toward justice, not by following every performance, but by strengthening the bonds between us. We must build these connections before they can be severed by the politics of division and spectacle. Let's find each other. Let's hold on to each other, let's hold on for our lives, and each other's lives.
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The TikTok Ban Is Discriminatory and Unlawful. Here’s Why.
What Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required. That is racial profiling and an affront to the Constitution.
Jan 17, 2025
Today, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s wrongheaded decision to ban TikTok in a unanimous decision. The ban on TikTok is set to take effect on Sunday January 19, 2025.
Ahead of this misguided ruling, 15 racial justice nonprofits submitted an emergency filing to the Supreme Court, explaining how the TikTok ban violates the rights of 170 million U.S. users and echoes a disgraceful history of anti-Asian racism.
It is no secret that our government wrongfully uses “national security” as a weapon against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Stop AAPI Hate’s research highlights how the government routinely scapegoats our communities for economic downturns, public health crises, and national security threats—often without any evidence.
When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same.
In the case of TikTok, the government claims that a ban is necessary to protect U.S. national security against China. However, the government also filed an affidavit in open court, signed by a senior U.S. national security official, stating there is “no information” that China had ever tried to use TikTok for nefarious purposes in the United States.
In other words, what Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required.
That is racial profiling, plain and simple. And it is an affront to the Constitution.
It is disappointing, though unsurprising, that our government is targeting Asian American communities solely because of our race and national origins. Since our nation’s founding, our government has repeatedly trampled on the rights of Asians, Asian Americans, and other minority groups by relying on so-called “national security” concerns as a basis for outright racial discrimination.
Take, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, and government-sanctioned racial profiling and surveillance of innocent Muslim communities following the 9/11 attacks. More recently, we saw the China Initiative, a Department of Justice operation from 2018 to 2022 that unjustly targeted Chinese and Chinese American academics, ruined careers and livelihoods, and chilled scientific research.
Every time the government insisted that such laws or programs targeting Asian Americans were necessary, it reinforced the pernicious “perpetual foreigner” stereotype or the idea that all Asian people in America are inherently suspicious and disloyal to the United States based on our ancestry, skin color, or religious faith.
Those laws and programs were based on fearmongering and scapegoating. All three branches of government—the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court—eventually admitted that Japanese American incarceration violated the Constitution. Both the House and the Senate officially apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws. And the DOJ eventually shut down the China Initiative, acknowledging it perpetuated a discriminatory double standard against people with any ties to China, though President-elect Donald Trump wants to revive it.
Our government never seems to learn and instead continues to pass laws motivated by anti-Asian prejudice, like this TikTok ban.
The TikTok ban has real human costs. The ban will silence 170 million U.S. users, including communities like ours that rely on TikTok to build solidarity, share valuable information, practice their faith, and engage in free expression.
But what worries us even more is how the TikTok ban fuels hateful rhetoric and actions against Asian Americans. It is clear that Congress targeted TikTok because the company is Chinese. Other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube collect vast amounts of user data and have had major privacy and security issues—yet the government is not applying the same level of scrutiny on those companies.
When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same. We saw this exact ripple effect of hate during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic, then-President Trump spewed racist, anti-Asian rhetoric blaming Chinese people for the virus, fueling a torrent of hate against AAPI communities. In fact, from 2020 to 2022, Stop AAPI Hate received over 2,000 reports of hate acts in which offenders mimicked Trump’s language. His rhetoric emboldened people to spit racist vitriol at our community members as we shopped for groceries, dropped our kids off at school, and took the bus to work. They shouted that we were diseased and told us to go back to our country. Since our founding in March 2020, we have received over 12,000 reports of anti-AAPI hate acts from across the country—and we know racism and discrimination increase when politicians target our communities.
That’s why AAPI communities must tell our leaders that we disagree with the TikTok ban. This decision is not only an affront to our civil liberties and free speech, it is also an affront to our safety. We need leaders who will defend our rights and safety—not strip it away.
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A Court Upheld the TikTok Ban, Proving Trump’s Not the Only Threat to Press Freedom
Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power.
Dec 11, 2024
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is just weeks away from returning to the White House, and when he gets there, it is all but assured that he will attack press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/14/24; NBC, 12/4/24).
But the will and desire to clamp down on free speech and expression isn’t just a Trumpian phenomenon. A U.S. District Court of Appeals panel, with two Republican-appointed judges and one picked by a Democrat, has upheld a law forcing the sale of TikTok because of its alleged Chinese government control (AP, 12/6/24).
An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.
All corners of government, joined by members of both major parties, concur that national security concerns should allow the government to scrap First Amendment principles. This means that Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power. The enormity of this decision, if upheld by the notoriously conservative Supreme Court, is a dire sign of what is to come.
Censorship for Freedom
Writing for the court, Ronald Reagan appointee Douglas Ginsburg said that despite the importance of the First Amendment, the government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States” (Reuters, 12/6/24).
In a concurring opinion, the court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said that “concerns about the prospect of foreign control over mass communications channels in the United States are of age-old vintage,” and thus the “decision to condition TikTok’s continued operation in the United States on severing Chinese control is not a historical outlier.”
Srinivasan cited the Communications Act of 1934 and other Federal Communications Commission regulations:
The FCC’s revocation of China Telecom’s authorization was “grounded [in] its conclusion that China Telecom poses an unacceptable security risk” because “the Chinese government is able to exert significant influence over [it].”… In rejecting China Telecom’s claim that the asserted national-security risk was unduly speculative, we noted that Chinese law obligates Chinese companies “to cooperate with state-directed cybersecurity supervision and inspection,” and we cited “compelling evidence that the Chinese government may use Chinese information technology firms as vectors of espionage and sabotage.”
He went on to say that “China Telecom is a present-day application of the kinds of restrictions on foreign control that have existed in the communications arena since the dawn of radio.”
Two-Fifths of the Nation
But there’s a key difference. For many reading this, this might be the first time you have ever heard of the FCC’s case against China Telecom (Reuters, 10/26/21). When I last wrote about the potential ban on TikTok (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), I debunked many of the national security concerns about data mining and espionage, and I also noted that the ban is incredibly unpopular, in part because “TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black, and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24).”
An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.
This year, the House of Representatives “passed legislation that would allow the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accuses of supporting terrorist entities” (New York Times, 11/21/24). While most Democrats voted against the bill in the end, it enjoyed the support of “blue dog” Democratic congressmembers like Henry Cuellar of Texas and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State (Intercept, 11/21/24).
With Trump coming back into the presidency and the Senate falling into GOP control, that bill has a good chance of becoming law. Just think of what an unfettered Trump—who has vowed to make “the Fake News Media… pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country” (AP, 12/5/23)—could do with a law giving virtually free rein to pull the plug on any nonprofit.
For example, The New York Times (8/5/23) last year raised alarms about a left-wing tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham, who the paper painted as a Chinese government puppeteer (FAIR.org, 8/17/23). “He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a ‘smokeless war,’” the Times wrote.
In order to advance Beijing’s “goal… to disguise propaganda as independent content,” the account continued, his groups “have produced YouTube videos that, together, racked up millions of views.” This depiction of journalistic advocacy as a kind of foreign invasion could be used to justify fodder to go after groups the government could connect to Singham, like the antiwar group Code Pink.
But any nonprofit would be under existential threat under the bill, if the Trump administration decides to label it a ““terrorist-supporting organization.” This includes major nongovernmental organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty International, as well as major news outlets organized as nonprofits, including NPR, ProPublica, and The Intercept.
Flimsy Security Concerns
Some see a ray of hope in Trump’s mercurial behavior, hoping he turns course on TikTok despite the fact that he started the whole campaign (NPR, 8/6/20; Vox, 12/6/24)—there’s some self-interest for the president-elect at play as “Trump joined TikTok during the 2024 election and used it to reach younger audiences” and he “boasts more than 14 million followers on the app” (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/24). But, given how far this case has gone, it would be a mistake to think Trump might simply give up the China-bashing as the core of his economic nationalism.
And Washington is already heading in a repressive direction. The Biden administration’s sanctions have forced Russian radio broadcaster Sputnik off U.S. airwaves (FAIR.org, 10/22/24), and privately owned Chinese newspapers like Sing Tao have had to register as foreign agents (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21); FAIR.org, 2/28/22).
It is also important to note how flimsy the “national security” concerns are in the TikTok case. As many journalists, including myself, have pointed out, the accusation that TikTok, a social media product, might engage in data collection is like saying water is wet—this is the nature of social media platforms.
The AP report (12/6/24) on the appeals court decision said that during the case, TikTok
accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S.
To “assuage concerns about the company’s owners,” AP noted, “TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around U.S. user data.”
But the court ruling shows that the mere invocation of “national security” can pull government branches together to support measures that smother media freedom. A federal law eliminating a product enjoyed by nearly 150 million Americans might seem anathema to the free market rhetoric of the GOP, but this is completely in line with the authoritarian mindset that has been growing in the United States and many European countries for years.
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