o ban it because of free speech.

All right, let me deal with the Rand Paul complaint. So you know that typically I love my Rand Paul, but he's in my opinion analytically just totally wrong on this one. Now he says it's a free speech thing and you don't want to be against free speech so don't ban it. Now I like the simplicity of the argument. However it's not really a free speech question. Let me give you another example as a mental experiment. Let's say you had a terrorist who captured a US citizen in a foreign country and the terrorist was probably going to kill them and they were under duress. And then the captured person produces one of those captive videos where they say ISIS is great, you know, and all the things you know are lies. Now should, let's say that the military gets a hold of it, should the military provide it to the world because you know free speech? Or should they say this is more of a military thing and we should prevent it because we don't want more of these videos? Would it be a violation of free speech to prevent a terrorist video that featured an American saying something with their own voice? Would it be a violation of free speech to suppress that for military purposes?

Now remember it would be coming from another country and the video is not being made by the person speaking but they are, it's an American speaking. Now I would say that's not free speech. That there's a minor element of somebody who's American who's saying something but he's not saying something he believes and it's being done for military purposes, you know terrorist purposes. I would say that's not free speech. That's an enemy using a weapon. I believe we can stop a weapon but not free speech. So the fact that a weapon has some free speech embedded in it shouldn't stop you from being able to stop a weapon. Do you agree? And I say that TikTok is a weapon the way it's used now. Because although the people using it probably are mostly looking at American content, they're producing it and consuming American content mostly. But who gets to decide who sees what? Whose free speech are we protecting?

See the free speech of an American to say something is still available because they can go to any platform and say it except TikTok if the ban happens. But if they say it on TikTok the presumption is that how many people see it and hear it is going to be determined by a Chinese company. So what's only being banned is the ability for a Chinese company to determine how much free speech Americans have. We're not banning the Americans' free speech. We're banning China's ability to regulate our free speech. Because that same person can just walk over to Facebook or Meta or any place else and just do the speech, right? So really it's about the danger of the tool and the fact that there's a free speech element in it is true and it's not nothing but it's so much less important than the fact that we're brainwashing our youth to rip off their own genitals. I mean I think that matters.

All right, I have a suspicion that something else is going on here, which is if it turns out that this gets voted, let's say here my guess is it'll get defeated because I think there are too many people in Congress who either rely on TikTok for their election or don't want to make their young voters mad or some other reason. But I think it'll be turned down. Now I haven't heard anybody say that the vote counter say that it has the votes. Usually you hear that pretty early, don't you? Am I wrong? Usually with something like this, a high profile thing, you hear right away whether it's likely to pass. That's completely missing in the story. That's like a giant dog not barking, isn't it? I mean just think about that. That we don't hear whether it's likely to pass. We always know that in advance and for some reason this one that story is missing. So I think it's going to fail because I think Democrats are unable or unwilling to ban it.

But I'm going to give you a conditional prediction. Conditional prediction. If it flies through and gets passed then there's something else going on. Because nothing really changed from the last time they tried to do it and it didn't work. The only thing that could have changed is maybe our intelligence people said you know what it would be great if we're the ones who controlled this. So if there's a, if you see suddenly there's an American company that just pops up out of nowhere and says hey I'll buy it, you know maybe a Microsoft, somebody else, then you would have to assume that they're in cahoots with the intelligence people who just want to control it like the rest of the platforms. So if Microsoft bought it for example I would assume that they had already worked out an agreement in which the CIA or FBI or whoever has a back door. So I think the problem with TikTok is our intelligence people don't have a back door so that's my summary. That the real problem with TikTok from the perspective of the people who are really