Every election cycle, Republicans dutifully recite platitudes about winning "the youth vote" and bringing younger voters into the GOP fold.
And in every election, Republicans fail to deliver on that.
Part of the problem is that young voters tend to live in the here and now — they want their student loans forgiven, they want cheaper homes, they want everything handed to them on a silver platter, even as they vote for Democrats who have caused most of the problems they're complaining about. (Note: That by no means includes all young voters. Many of them are bright, well-informed, and understand the world as it is, not as the fairy tale the Democrats try to sell them.)
There's not a lot Republicans can do about that. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way. Stories abound of young Democrats getting smacked in the face by reality when they receive their first tax bill or shop for their first house. The party of free money loses its appeal when the free money they're giving away is yours.
It's an age-old problem, but that doesn't mean Republicans shouldn't try. Unfortunately, the plan they've come up with involves banning Gen Z's favorite social-media app, TikTok.
Yes, TikTok is dangerous, and it helps the Chi-coms spy on us via data mining and security breaches. Tech expert Kim Komando wrote:
TikTok is a national security threat. The Chinese-owned social media platform’s parent company ByteDance is based in Beijing and is required by Chinese law to give the government access to collected data.
TikTok collects data that includes search and browsing history, facial ID, voice prints, texts, location, and photos.
So just ban the thing already, right? Yeah, if you want to anger the 80 million active users in the U.S. — two-thirds of whom are of voting age. The vast majority of TikTok users are under 29 (Gen Z), and most spend more than an hour and a half a day on the addictive platform, opening it 19 times.
Yet somehow, GOP candidates think this is a winning issue for their party.
Related: You'll Smash Your Kid's Smartphone After Reading This
Then-President Trump tried to outright ban TikTok in 2020, but a federal judge shot down the effort.
"TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories," Trump's executive order explained. "This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage."
Trump is not alone. During Wednesday's Republican debate, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said, "We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all, and let me tell you why. For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that."
Then there's Vivek Ramaswamy, who tweeted earlier this year, "And yes, I’m very open to banning TikTok outright. In the meantime, we sit on our hands and do nothing as kids get addicted to it like it’s digital fentanyl." (FYI, the young hypocrite is campaigning on TikTok as we speak.)
Chris Christie said last month, "In my first week as president, we would ban TikTok."
Hear that? It's the sound of Gen Z voters running into the arms of the Democrats.
Ron DeSantis is the only GOP candidate with a more measured approach.
“I am inclined to not want TikTok in the United States,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I think it’s creating a security vulnerability for us. I think they are mining a lot of data.”
However, he stopped short of an outright ban. "At the end of the day, I don’t want Big Brother to be getting into everybody’s apps,” DeSantis told the Journal. "It’s about vulnerabilities to our country." The Florida governor banned the use of TikTok on government and school servers and devices last year.
Again, there are dangers to TikTok, but an outright ban right now, when it's at the height of its popularity, would send Gen-Z voters into the streets, rending their garments and protesting the loss of their favorite mind-numbing entertainment platform. Is that really a winning message?
I share others' concerns about the dangers of TikTok — just not as a campaign issue. If and when Republicans ever get control of Congress and the White House again (and that's a big if), then there will be time to come up with some creative solutions for mitigating the risk — solutions that are, hopefully, not inherently anti-freedom.
So let's stop talking about TikTok and focus on the price of bread and eggs and the exorbitant cost of a college education and a home— kitchen-table issues that Gen-Zers and every other generation care about. We've got enough trouble with government censorship in this country. We don't need to be a party to it.
As always, it's the economy, stupid party.
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