By Noah Rothman
Monday, February 03, 2025
According to Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services
secretary nominee, Robert
F. Kennedy Jr., the threat posed by TikTok is wildly overstated. Compared
with the menace posed by our fellow Americans, in fact, the communist Chinese
entities that exercise prohibitive influence over that application are
virtually harmless.
Sure, dozens of private and public American institutions and the public servants who occupy them insist that TikTok is
“full of spies,” he sneered dismissively. Well, “so’s Facebook, but it’s the
CIA instead of Chinese spies,” Kennedy added. So is “Instagram, and YouTube,
and Google.” That raises an existential question: “Are you more worried that
the Chinese are spying on us and propagandizing us,” he asked, “or are you more
worried that the CIA is spying on us and propagandizing us?”
Your answer to this question depends on whether you
believe hostile foreign powers are a greater threat to your liberty and safety
than your neighbors. Republicans of a certain age will recognize this default
cynicism as the sort that was once common among those on
the conspiratorial Left — people like, well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But his disposition has become
increasingly associated with the Right insofar as the Right has begun to retail
itself as home to America’s cynics.
“NATO is a greater threat to American liberty than the
Chinese Communist Party,” wrote the controversialist who Donald Trump installed at Foggy Bottom as his acting under
secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, Darren Beattie. Given Beattie’s insistence that the Chinese
are justified in their repression of the Uighur minority (and all who object to
its program of ethnic cleansing “should be shamed as a Uighur Supremacist”) and
his desire to trade Taiwanese sovereignty for “serious concessions on Africa
and Antarctica,” it’s possible Beattie’s logic is informed primarily by
Beijing’s interests. But we cannot rule out the prospect that Beattie came to
his delusion honestly — the natural result of a thought process that starts from
the presumption that the apparatus of the American state is arrayed against you
and those like you.
That seems to be the set of assumptions that leads
libertarian congressman Thomas Massie to oppose a variety of U.S. missions
abroad, including its efforts to punish China’s grotesque human rights abuses.
“When our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, it
invites those governments to meddle in our affairs,” he
wrote in defense of one such vote.
Let’s bypass the notion that opposing, in action as well
as rhetoric, the attempted eradication of the Uighur minority’s culture by a bigoted
regime constitutes meddling in the legitimate
activities of a sovereign state. Down that way lies madness. Instead, we’ll
dwell only on the notion that hostile foreign actors do not aggressively pursue
their own interests at America’s expense unless as a reciprocal response to
American action. Those who take this cognitive shortcut risk following it to
its fallacious conclusion: the menaces that threaten me from abroad are an
extension of the menaces that threaten me at home.
You would be hard-pressed to find anyone of a
conservative or libertarian ideological inclination who rejects the notion that state power can be abused and wielded against the citizenry. That
idea — one that contrasts with the progressive supposition that enlightened,
rational government by an expert class is preferable to the dog’s breakfast voters serve up every two years — is a
fundament of conservative political philosophy. But those of us who retain some
capacity for discretion should be able to recognize the distinctions between
challenges posed by domestic and foreign threats.
That distinction becomes harder to draw once you’re so
far down the rabbit hole that you’ve persuaded yourself that hostile foreign
threats are themselves fabrications concocted by your domestic adversaries.
That’s when healthy skepticism verges on lunatic paranoia.
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