TikTok ban represents free speech sacrificed in name of national security

Credit: creepcomix on DeviantArt

The earmark of empire is the subservience of liberty to ultra-inflated national security fears to protect us from ghosts. Even the courts, terrified of shadows, bow to the national security state. That explains the ludicrous decision this month of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in TikTok Inc. v. Garland to uphold Congress’ ban on TikTok, a social media platform, professedly to protect us from Chinese conquest or control.

The title of the congressional ban bespeaks government paternalism gone berserk: the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” The title errantly implies that Americans were furiously lobbying Congress to protect them from themselves, including TikTok’s 170 million monthly American users. To the contrary, all the lobbying was from the national security state with the ulterior motive of magnifying the Chinese threat a millionfold to hike its bloated $1.5 trillion annual budget. Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned in his dissent in Olmstead v. United States: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

As to a hammer everything looks like a nail, so to the multitrillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex everything looks like an existential threat — even China building roads in the Solomon Islands or buying farmland in the United States. Derangement has been taken to a new level. The United States faces no existential threats — more secure from foreign danger than any other nation in history. Our national defense spending towers above all other countries by orders of magnitude. Who goes to bed at night fearing an invasion from China?