To its credit, Congress did one thing over the last year and Joe Biden did one thing over the last year that made it seem like we are governed by adults. They passed a federal law to ban TikTok from the American market. I'm kind of astonished that they did it. I don't know. I feel like liberals get sort of so convinced that something is left wing coded that they're just going to defend it regardless. And this is something that President Trump had called for in his first term,
even signed an executive order for banning TikTok. And for those who don't know, TikTok is a social media application. It's one of the most popular social media apps. It basically consists of an endless supply of short form videos lasting maybe a minute that you just never endlessly scroll through,
a dopamine addiction creation machine. Now, the reason why Congress, why Trump in his first term wanted to ban TikTok, why Congress and President Biden ultimately decided to pass a law to ban it, is because of its clear connections to the Chinese Communist Party. The point of TikTok seems to be more so than simply to be a business
that makes money. The point of the app seems to be in large part to collect data, enormous amounts of data on its users in a way that it goes beyond even what Facebook other American based social media companies do, and for this information to go into the hands of the Chinese. Byte Dance is the Beijing based parent company
that owns TikTok. It's based in Beijing subject to Chinese law, and like any major business in China, is tied in inextricably with the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.
There are other allegations out there that, based on the kinds of content that's available on American TikTok versus like the Chinese iteration of TikTok, that the Chinese are deliberately trying to dumb down Americans with it, that the content is so vapid and so you know, dopamine hit inducing, so add d d ddddd inducing, that this is actually a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese to
make to weaken their chief geopolitical adversary. Now well, there have been some kind of dumb libertarian arguments against banning TikTok. The libertarians basically don't seem to care about the fact that this is a foreign company producing a foreign product to suck up people's data. I think the libertarians basically just say, well, the market shouldn't be regulated. It's a free market. Have a free market, don't touch the market,
don't interfere with the invisible hand of the market. If if someone's going to make a better product, let them make a better product. But don't have the government regulated. Because libertarians have more dogmas that they follow. No Catholic has had to bind him or herself to more dogmas than libertarians do. And there are some libertarians say, oh, this is an assault against the First Amendment because it's a platform where people express themselves, which I think is belowney.
Congress has the power to regulate international business, international commerce. It's clearly right there in the Constitution. This is an international based company. It is sucking up American interests. The nature of this kind of social media market is such that even if you ban this platform overnight one there's gonna be an American company ready to take this spot right away. Heck, if TikTok overnight goes away, everyone who
utilizes TikTok for content creation purposes. Whatever is just going to go to YouTube or to Instagram owned by American companies, or some new social media platform will arise that will gain popularity, and people just start doing the same thing. Furthermore, the bill that Congress passed the President Biden signed it doesn't actually just call for flat out banning TikTok. It says TikTok will not be available in the American market unless they want to divest and let an American buyer
buy it. So Byte Dance, the Beijing based company that owns TikTok, if they want to sell the product to an American company, they can do that. TikTok can stay on the market. Now, Byte Dance doesn't seem to want to do that. They're they're very resistant, and there's this weird sort of court case that's popped up where President Trump President elect Trump is trying to say no, no, no, I don't want TikTok to I want to have a political resolution to this before this law can come into effect.
The law is supposed to come into effect. The problem is the deadline they set was January nineteenth, So if byte Dance doesn't either sell to an American buyer. If Byte Dance does not sell to an American buyer by January nineteenth, it's off the American market. President Trump is saying, well, I'm coming into office January twentieth, let me have a chance to politically resolve this, which I don't know that
the Court's going to give any credence to it. I mean, sorry, The fact is, this was a law passed by Congress. It was signed into law by Joe Biden. I don't think a president elect has any ability to protest or stop a law from coming into effect if it's supposed to come into effect before he gets into office. Now Trump gets into office January twentieth. And this is the weird thing about Trump's position is that Trump has done like a total one point eighty on the topic of TikTok.
In his first term, he was super anti TikTok. The whole Republican Party wound up joining him, and it was a lot of a lot of it was like national security concerns, national security concerns. Other conservatives, sort of more social conservatives started to raise the issue of hey, like, maybe we should also look at this just from the perspective of this is just bad. The content of it is also bad, and we shouldn't be you know, obviously
we have to. You know, there are constraints that the First Amendment puts on the federal government taking action to limit stuff, or certainly modern day interpretations of the First Amendment, the modern day interpretations of the First Amendment put limitations on our ability to regulate this stuff. But this is not good stuff. It clearly coursens the minds of young people, dumbs down the mind of young people. And this is
sort of the comparison that people have made. There have been some stories about this, allegations of this that the Chinese iteration of TikTok doesn't have the same kinds of content. The Chinese regulate their TikTok much more strictly and only allow that they allow a lot more like education videos and things like that, whereas the American version of TikTok is you know, a lot of softcore pushing the borders of almost pornography, mindless dumb stuff, mindless skit, mindless comedy stuff.
Some stuff is fine and good, but a lot of it is pointless, stupid nonsense. We also have seen evers basically, since the iPhone and social media became a dominant force in our culture starting around two thousand and nine, the mental health of teenagers in America has taken a massive noseedive. Much higher rates of teenage suicide, much higher rates of teenage depression, much higher rates of teenage anxiety, much higher
rates of teenage mental illness. And it all starts in two thousand and nine, right when the smartphone and social media became these enormous forces in our culture. Now, why has Trump flipped his position on it? It's tough to say. There are some people who are trying to argue that Trump has people close in his inner circle who are bite edance investors that they don't want to see their investment die, so they're trying to push President Trump to
be pro TikTok. The other theory is that Trump massively benefited from TikTok in the twenty twenty four election, which probably he did. Trump realized he's making these kind of generational gains with young male voters, and he sees that people in their twenties and under don't want TikTok to be banned, which, by the way, I got to applaud Congress for having a real like adults in the room moment,
saying of even Democrats in Congress. I mean, obviously this wouldn't have happened without Democrats in the Senate voting for it and President Biden getting on board, coming to the realization, Hey, this is just a bad This is just bad. This is bad for American national security, this is a geopolitical foe just vacuuming up tons and tons of information about Americans. Just not good and acted like adults in past this law.
But I think President there is real political shrewdness behind what behind this position Trump is trying to take of trying to do anything in his power to save TikTok. Now it's political shrewdness. Again, I still think they're moral, ethical, childhood development reasons that I want to see TikTok thrown in the trash, although I do acknowledge even if TikTok goes away, if you TikTok completely is annihilated tomorrow, it's
not gonna fundamentally change things. Instagram just has properties that are every bit as addictive. YouTube has properties that are every bit as addictive. Some other social media company that is American based could come up. That's every bit as addictive. If bite Dance sells to an American company, TikTok will continue to be and will continue to be just as
bad as it is. And by the way, the fact that byte Dance isn't selling, I mean, one of the basic principles of appropriate corporate activity is, well, you look the interests of your shareholders. That has to be if you're a CEO of a company, you ultimately have to make your decisions in the light of what is in the best interest of the shareholders. That is sort of
your mandate. And a lot of American laws kind of premised around that, a lot of theory of business is premised around what is in the best interests of the shareholders. The fact that this company is byte Dance, again based in Beijing, the fact that byte Dance is not willing to divest to allow for an American owner of the American app store iteration of TikTok suggests that something other
than making money is afoot. Something other than shareholder interest is what this Beijing based Communist Party tied company is concerned with. If the point is not to have a platform with advertising that makes money, which is the point of all other social media entities. But something else that that almost proves the point of what Congress and President Biden and you know what, first term President Trump were saying that the point of TikTok isn't actually to operate
like a normal business. The point is to gather up people's data. The point is some kind of nefarious geopolitical motive that the Chinese Communist Party has. That that's the actual point. If if they were just interested in the interests of their shareholders, they would try to keep the company afloat. They would try to find for their for their most valuable market, they would try to find a buyer so that the shareholders wouldn't suffer a tremendous loss
by just losing the American market. But that's not what's That is not what's happening. So I mean, I guess I could understand now. The thing is, though, I you know, I'll deal with this in the next segment when we return. I want to talk about the political shrewdness of Trump trying to preserve TikTok, trying to be the guy that young voters look to as a kind of savior, and why Republicans would be smart to think about stuff like this.
That's next on the John Girardi Show. President Trump is trying to do what he can to prevent the social media app TikTok from being unavailable in the American market. He's trying to save TikTok. I'm not sure that he's going to be able to do it. He's trying to the American law to either ban TikTok from the American market unless they divest and find an American buyer for the app is set to go into effect before he
takes office. I don't know what interest he can bring to the court to say, well, I should have a say in stopping this before the deadline. Well, no, you're the president elect. If you become president after this law comes into effect. Sorry, you know you're out of the picture that you don't really have a role here. But I will say I think Trump is really shrewd for wanting to preserve it. Now, let me explain why this reminds me of a lot of the debate about student loans.
I said this a lot during the whole federal student loan Should President Biden forgive Federal student loan debate? I don't think it's crazy to forgive student loans student loan debt, although it raises the question why are student loans special? Why not forgive people's credit card debts or you know, mortgages that people got that were lousy, or any other kind of debt that people take on in ways that
they got taken advantage of or something. Actually, people with student loan debt are financially much better off than a lot of people in a lot of other categories because they all have college or many of them anyway, have college degrees. And some of the worst cases of student loan debt are people that we're going to wind up
paying for anyway. It's usually people who got some pointless master's degree, so they're gazillions of dollars in the hole, and they don't have any job skills that would allow them to pay that debt back. So we're going to eat the worst of those examples. Anyway, My thought had been, like a Republican administration should actually try to forgive student loans, but fix the root problem. I wouldn't want student loan debt just to be forgiven without fixing the root problem.
I think that's more important is fixing the problem at the source. Stop allowing the federal government to give out so many federal student loans. The fact that you had so much easily accessible federal funny money available to anyone who wanted to get a higher degree anywhere, and they were giving out these loans without any of the assessment of risk of oh, we're going to give you one hundred thousand dollars for a master's degree in underwater basket weaving,
ballet gender studies. You know, if it were a normal bank looking at a normal investment in a normal business, they would say, no, that's a terrible business plan. But because it's the federal government, they're like, sure, go for it, with no thought that this person is never going to be able to pay that back. That's what I would fix. I don't mind paying back, I don't mind for giving
student loans if you solve the root problem. And I sort of thought it would make sense a Republican would be wise to make a deal like that saw the root problem while also ingratiating yourself with a new generation of voters. I wonder if this is what Trump is trying to do. Trump sees, hey, I got a whole bunch like what has always been the Republican parties problem. Young voters vote for Democrats, older voters vote for Republicans, and you're always struggling with that dynamic of, Okay, how
do we get more young people to vote Republican. Republicans have been struggling with this pretty much for I don't know, for the last seventy years. It's like the old Winston Churchill quote, if you're not a communist in your twenties, you have no heart. If you're still a Communist in your fifties, you have no brain. Trump reversed that trend. He got a big percentage of gen Z mail to
vote for him. He's giving the Republicans like a head start on the next twenty years of elections because instead of all those voters being liberals being Democrats, they're already Republicans. Gen Z can start coming into the Republican fold faster than most prior generations. And what does gen Z like?
They like TikTok. They use TikTok all the time. Trump won the twenty twenty four election in no small part because of clips of interviews he did, podcasts, he did stuff he said getting shared widely on TikTok so I kind of think he's smart, politically shrewd. You know, I still think the national security side of it is terrible. I think, you know, I don't agree with him doing this, but I think politically he's wildly like a fox to realize, Hey,
I want to position myself. I want to position the Republican Party to still be the party that this generation keeps pulling the lever for. We're not going to do that if we eliminate this social media platform they really like. So. I again, I don't agree with him. I think it's bad to keep TikTok afloat. I think TikTok in and of itself is just a bad thing. But he is politically shrewd, and I guess I applaud him for having a kind of political foresight that most Republicans totally lack.
When we return, the Liberals are getting more and more of a normal white guy problem. Next, on the John Girardi Show, I didn't watch too much of the Pete Hegseth confirmation hearings from yesterday. Pete Hegseth is President Trump President elect Trump's nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense. And the Senate under Republican control is trying to move
expeditiously to get Trump's appointees confirmed. So even before President Trump takes office, they're starting to have confirmation hearings on Trump's nominees. So here's Pete Hegseth testifying and these confirmation hearings. Basically, for most of these different cabinet officials, the way it works is they have their confirmation hearings where they have witnesses giving testimony for and agains, they take questions and
stuff that the nominee him or herself takes questions. This is all happening in the context a Senate committee, So it doesn't happen in the context of here's the nominee for Secretary of Defense and they're just on the floor of the Senate and all one hundred senators you get to ask them questions. No, it happens. Basically. The process is, you're nominated for Secretary of Defense, the Senate Armed Services Committee does your first round. They do your vetting basically,
so they ask him questions. He presents his information to the Armed Services Committee, he takes questions from senators on the Armed Services Committee. The Armed Services Committee votes up or down to confirm him, and then his nomination goes to the full Senate, where all one hundred Senators have the opportunity to vote up or down. Now, let me
give you the roster of Senators in the Armed Services Committee. Now, the way it works with committees in both the House and the Senate is the majority party gets to determine who is a member of the committee, and the majority party basically gets to allocate their x number of seats within the committee x number of members of this committee, and the majority party in the Senate gets a majority of members also in this Armed Services Committee. So there are let's.
See two, four, two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty two, twenty four, twenty six, twenty seven.
They're twenty seven members in the Senate Armed Services Committee, with Republicans having the majority. Let's go through the list of Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Jack Reid, a Democrat from Rhode Island, is the ranking member. Then Gene Shaheen from New Hampshire, Kirsten Gillibrand Gillibrand from New York,
Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hrono. Total Moron, the Democrat from Hawaii, Tim Kaine from Virginia, Angus King from Maine, Elizabeth Warren, Gary Peters from Michigan, Tammy Duckworth from Illinois, Jackie Rosen from Nevada, Mark Kelly, and Elisa Slotkin from Michigan. Now, much of the time, as a result, in Hegseeth's confirmation hearing was dominated by Democrat female senators berating him. Kirsten Gillibrand was yelling at him, Mazie Herona was asking a
bunch of stupid questions like she always does. Elizabeth Warren is trying to posture because probably she's thinking she wants to run for president or Pocahontas herself. And this huge percentage of the Democrats on this committee are women. Of the let's see, of the twelve Democrats on the committee, there are one, two, three, four, five, six seven women, So seven of the twelve are women. It's not a
huge majority, but it's a lot. It's more so than on the Republican side, and they have tended to be the most vocal voices on the committee. Now, the hilarious thing is that Richard Blumenthal is on this committee. Richard Blumenthal who lied about being a Vietnam veteran for most of his adult life. Would kind of completely outrageous that
he's still on this committee. But I digress. Now, the fact that you had all these female senators yelling and shrieking at Pete Hegseth and shrieking is not too far off yelling quite a bit at Pete hegg Seth. I think it's highlighting a problem that this guy I follow on Twitter named Will Chamberlain, who's a senior counsel at the Article three Project, which is some conservative judicial entity.
He writes, One underdiscussed issue for the Democrats is that they lost a number of their quote, normal white guys in the Senate. They're normal white guys. Here are some of the normal white guys who are now not in the Senate on the Democrats side. Bob Casey, he lost his reelection bid, Sharad Brown lost his reelection bid, John Tester from Montana, Bob Casey from Pennslvania, Shrod Brown from Ohio, John Tester from Montana. They all lost their seats, so
they're out. Joe Manchin retired, Tom Carper retired, Ben Carden retired. Manchin was replaced by a Republican. Carper and Carden were replaced by women. As a result, Chamberlain writes, you wind up with hearings like the Hegseth hearing. Women like Maizie Herono and Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand who have zero relevant military or intelligence experience are on the Armed Services
Committee berating a combat veteran. It's a bad look, and the Democrats don't really have any way to fix it. It's a brilliant inside I thought, because it's true. I think Democrats are going are they are Certainly they've got
a white male problem. They are so committed to the left just embraced so much all the millennials who were young in the Obama era, and they learned this lesson from their college professors, learned all this lesson of learned all these lessons from their college professors about using woke coded language and embraced the whole panoply of intersectionality ideologies that white males have to give space for black female voices and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And
the Democrat Party really seriously has embraced this. By I mean, you can see it reflected in their numbers. They just don't have as many white guys in the Senate and in the House as the Republicans do. Now, that's not a bad thing in and of itself, and I'm not trying to be like prescriptive that you should have more white guys. I'm not saying that. What I am saying is this, white guys are still a pretty sizable voting
block in this country. White voters are still the majority, and there is more than a little bit of fairness, especially among white guys who are literally at the bottom of the left wing intersectionality. They're not literally at the bottom there figuratively and actually reading more about totem poles, I think actually your most important thing is at the bottom of the totem pole. Anyway, regardless, white males are
at the bottom of the intersectionality hierarchy. The absolute bottom of the hierarchy with role, intersectionality, politics, cultural ideas is the most important people that we have to give the most time and energy and attention to listening to are you know, disabled, LGBT, African American, queer, transgendent whatever. The very bottom of that hierarchy is straight white guys, and
straight white gen Z guys have learned that lesson. They have learned their that lesson their whole life, and all of a sudden they they have the temerity the gall to say, hey, maybe maybe I shouldn't keep voting for this party that says I suck. Maybe I shouldn't keep voting for this party that says I am literally the worst category of person, because that is effectively what they've been told. And then they have the gold and the Liberals.
Are shocked, astonish, the oh my gosh, gen Z males are voting for Republicans. They like Donald Trump for sever That's terrible. How could they have done this? How could they have betrayed us when we told them their whole lives, that that girl power was far more important than that they were totally meeaningless.
Straight white guys are voting Republican in droves, which is frankly, I think the left has this idea that that's always how, that's how it's always been. It has not always been that way. Straight white guys voted for Democrats in large numbers as recently as Barack Obama. Okay, look at two thousand and eight, I mean two thousand and eight, when Barack Obama won his first time was a crushing victory.
And even beyond that, I mean, it was quite common for straight white guys to vote for Democrats in the South. In the middle of this of the twentieth century, straight
white guys were Democrats a lot. That this kind of gender and racial politics that we see today has not always been the case, and as a result, like Democrats are losing this voting blog as a result of their cultural, political, almost esthetic preferences, They've just decided we don't care about white guys, and millennial white guys have been more willing to accept that, having grown up in a sort of
pre intersectionality culture than gen Z guys are. I think gen Z guys have been told, basically their whole lives that they stink in some subtle way or another, and then they become eighteen nineteen twenty and they're trying to rebel, and they're like, hey, let's rebel by voting for Donald Trump. What's more rebellious than voting for Donald Trump, the one guy you're not supposed to vote for. As a young person, perception the shapes political realities, especially political realities, and to
see Pete Hegseth. As Will Chamberlain was making this point, to see Pete Hegseeth sitting there. This guy was an actual combat veteran, This guy who actually did a lot of stuff to help veterans out in his post military service life. This guy who actually deployed get screamed at by Elizabeth Warren because she thinks his tattoo is some
kind of white supremacist thing when it's not. Get screamed at by Kirsten Jilbrand who's never been a member of the military, and yet here she is as a barking orders at this guy who's been nominated to serve as the Defense secretary, who actually did serve. It's just a terrible look and it's highlighted. And this is the problem Chamberlain's identifying.
The Democrats are going to continue to have more and more and more of this perception problem that the Left is going to be more and more identified in the eyes and minds of gen Z men, young men, male voters, white male voters, as this is the party that hates you. This is the party that is here to yell at Hector bright, straight white dudes. So vote for us, please, as we yell and scream at you. Vote for us, please as we say that you have horrible white male privilege.
Vote for us, please as we you know, condemn and criticize you. That's not going to work. That's not a winning message, and so much of modern day left ideology is built around this stuff. Frankly, it's kind of why Joe Biden's a better candidate than Kamala Harris. Joe Biden's at least he's a straight white guy, And I think the perception before Biden was fully senile was that, hey, this is an affable fellow. I guess I'll vote for him.
Sure less crazy than Donald Trump. I mean that that was kind of the thought I think that a lot of voters had, including a decent chunk of suburban white people, in twenty twenty. But when the option is then presented as instead of relatively not in the throes of dementia, twenty twenty, Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, that's a different proposition to twenty twenty four Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump,
or in totally senile Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. When we return, one of the most important things that Pete Hegseth discussed during his confirmation hearing getting answers and accountability for the Afghanistan withdrawal. That is next on the John Girardi Show. There's this journalist I follow on Twitter named Jerry Dunleavy. He was a DOJ journalist for the DC Examiner and he worked as a senior investigator for the House the House Foreign Affairs Committee for a number of
years and loudly quit the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He was like a Republican staffer. This was after Republicans took control of the House after the twenty twenty two elections. He loudly quit that committee because the Republican chair of that committee basically was not willing to really dig deep for answers about the Afghanistan debacle, the withdrawal, the disastrous
withdrawal from Afghanistan, and as a result he quit. Basically, it seems that even Republicans on Capitol Hill didn't want to totally roast various people in leadership positions within the military, people like Mark Milly, other generals, and they just didn't
really want to get to the bottom of it. Well, Dunleavy's been following this really critically and closely over the last few years here, and he has this to say about Pete hegseeth heg Seth made clear today that holding the Department of Defense and generals accountable for their twenty twenty one failures is a top priority for him as Secretary of Defense. It's exactly what the troops vets in
public deserve. Here here the fact that somehow we didn't have heads rolling left, right and center among top military brass for the disaster of the withdrawal. For however, many Americans got left in Afghanistan. Media totally uninterested in covering it. It was antional disgrace. So I if HEGs Us is really going to do that, God bless him. I hope he gets it done. That'll do it. Johns already show see next time on Power Talk