Second, DOJ alleged that Google has monopolized three peculiar markets (as servers, ad exchanges, and advertiser ad networks) for specific ad tech for “open-web display advertising.” These jerry-rigged definitions exclude most of the online places where users see ads – in apps, on social media, on most retail sites (for example, Amazon), and on connected TV. The definitions also exclude in-stream video ads.
Google presumably will argue that these other online places should be included in the market, and when they are, Google is far from dominant.
Justifying the law to block Americans’ access to TikTok, the government says “national security” is threatened by the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that claims 170 million American users. A bigger threat, however, is the incessant use of that phrase to impart spurious urgency to agendas that are only tangentially, if at all, related to the nation’s safety. Linguistic inflation transforms too many things into “national security” threats.
On Monday, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, TikTok will challenge the law banning it from U.S. app stores. TikTok argues in its brief that the law demands a divestiture (from Chinese ownership) that is technologically and commercially impossible — and unprecedented: “Never before has Congress expressly singled out and shut down a specific speech forum. Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.” In 2023, TikTok says, U.S. users uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos that were viewed worldwide more than 13 trillion times. TikTok argues that the ban violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
Granted, any company beholden to China’s Leninist party-state will do what the Communist Party dictates. But labeling speech (often accurately, regarding TikTok) as foreign propaganda does not license government interference with it. In 1965, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a law that burdened citizens’ “right to receive” communist propaganda mailed from a foreign adversary.
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The TikTok law asks us to trust the government that evidently thinks we cannot be trusted to cope with propaganda. Trust the government that tried to suppress as misinformation true criticisms of the government’s pandemic policies? The government that in a 12-month period extending into this election year overstated by 818,000 the number of jobs created during the Biden administration?
Before trusting government’s solemnities about “national security” threats, read Tufts University professor Daniel W. Drezner’s “How Everything Became National Security” in Foreign Affairs. He wrote, “The national security bucket has grown into a trough” capacious enough to contain problems ranging from “food security,” HIV/AIDS, “biologic and genetic dangers,” and “transnational criminal organizations” to “domestic extremism,” “poverty,” “environmental degradation” and certain “supply chains” (e.g., for cobalt and lithium). Drezner warned that “policy entrepreneurs … frame their pet issues as national security concerns” to unlock government resources.
Politicians unleash economic and “national security” nonsense in the service of their demagoguery. The Donald Trump-Kamala Harris consensus encompasses their opposition to allowing a corporation from a close ally (Japan) to purchase U.S. Steel for 40 percent more than its market capitalization, a sale favored by holders of 98 percent of U.S. Steel shares and unopposed by the U.S. military, which uses just 3 percent of domestic steel production.
As he often does, Mr. Carlson defends his interview as merely giving a forum for contrarian ideas. But Holocaust rationalization isn’t contrarian. It’s false history, and dangerous to the extent it might influence the young and uneducated to believe it.
It’s all the more worrisome given the outbreak of antisemitism on the American left. Anti-Israel protesters, including some in Congress, are trucking in slogans that treat Jews as oppressors and call for the destruction of the Jewish state. The Nazis also believed and promoted anti-Jewish conspiracies. American conservatives should be a bulwark against this ethnic hatred.
A favorite resort of Mr. Carlson these days is to claim that critics are trying to “cancel” him. It’s true the left often does censor legitimate dissenting ideas, as it did during the pandemic. But critics of Mr. Carlson’s interview are rebutting his nonsense, not canceling him. He can’t spread bad history and expect it to go unchallenged.
Gary Galles ponders unity, true and false.
“What Americans Think about Trade with China—and Trade More Broadly.”
Jacob Sullum is correct: “Trump and Harris both favor tax hikes that would hurt ordinary Americans.”
Writing at City Journal, Vinay Prasad describes “how the New York Times stoked Covid alarmism.” Two slices:
Our study examined all corrections issued by the New York Times to articles relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, the newspaper issued 576 corrections for 486 articles. Naturally, in times of crisis, facing uncertain and evolving information, reporters will get facts wrong. Sometimes they may, for instance, over- or underreport the number of children who have died or misstate the effectiveness of interventions like lockdowns. If news organizations are unbiased, one would expect such errors to occur with relatively equal frequency.
That’s not what we found. Instead, the paper’s errors tended to exaggerate the harm of the virus (or the effectiveness of interventions). Corrections were made for such errors nearly twice as frequently as for errors that downplayed harms. Fifty-five percent of errors overstated the harm of the virus, while only 24 percent understated (the rest were equivocal). In other words, when the New York Times got things wrong, it tended to do so in a way that falsely stoked fear and encouraged harmful social restrictions.
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In any event, the newspaper’s distortions are skewed in the same direction as its political bias. When it came to Covid-19, Republicans tended to be more skeptical of sweeping governmental and public-health interventions like lockdowns, masking young children, and closing schools, and more concerned about their negative consequences. Florida governor Ron DeSantis reopened his state’s schools in the spring of 2020, against the advice of experts like Anthony Fauci, and opposed masking kids. Democrats, meantime, came to embrace stronger government policies, such as vaccine mandates. The Biden administration enforced the masking of toddlers in Head Start programs. The New York Times’s tilt on these matters appeared consistent with its traditional political sympathies.
