Joe McCarthy's ghost
The questioning of TikTok CEO Shou Chew's nationality is a haunting reminder of anti-communist hysteria and is a harbinger of a 'third red scare' in America
In Scotland many of us were busy watching former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s testimony before the Covid Inquiry. While that is important, and I will cover that in future pieces, it is the United States I write about today.
Something you will likely have missed played out in the US Senate. The ghost of McCarthyism & the red scare rose again.
Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was interrogated by extreme MAGA Republican Senators Cotton, Cruz and Hawley. His nationality was questioned in a public hearing supposedly about protecting children online. GOP senators demanded if Mr Chew “is a member of the Chinese communist Party’. Despite knowing he is Singaporean, with American children. Nevertheless, he is ethnically Chinese so the chilling echoes of McCarthyism played out live on television.
Watching his mistreatment live at the Judiciary Committee offended me so incredibly I decided to make this video.
Being ethnically Chinese doesn’t justify allegations of communist sympathies. That is road a to perdition, where sinophobia insists those in our global family with Chinese ancestry be viewed with suspicion as maintaining secret foreign loyalties.
The extreme MAGA Republican rhetoric at times painted the Chinese people with a broad brush and conflated people of Chinese ancestry with the will of the CCP. A target is now tattooed on the back of Asian Americans, Chinese nationals living in the US, and, by extension, all other Asian populations.
It was altogether an appalling display in the US Senate, one I feel compelled to have you focus on.
Remember, we do not protect liberty by surrendering it at home on the altar of hysteria and baseless fears.
“Cassius was right, the fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves”
Welcome to the ghost of Joe McCarthy, and the beginning of the third American ‘red scare’…
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Tik Tok is Chinese owned and controlled. Similarly to Jack Ma's removal from (AliExpress?) the CCP apparently recently cleared out the founder CEO of Tik Tok for not toeing the party line. It is far from a level field competitor with the tacit control and backing of the CCP.
Having seen their manufacturing base hollowed out by the Chinese the Americans should be wary of Tik Tok. There are a great many questions to be asked of Tik Tok; it's ownership or more strictly it's control. It's financial status, and the way it handles data. Perhaps we should assume until proved otherwise that it is a hostiler government sponsored and controlled entity aiming to dominate the remaining Big Tech markets that American companies currently control.
The Americans are far from saintly wee choir boys in these terms - they have very close security links with Big Tech; but they are sort our SOB's and don't come close to the Chinese in terms of brutality and capacity for using human suffering for political ends.
The spectacle was unpleasant but I think that a Chinese government controlled company breaking into a vital American commercial area can expect hard questions.
Calling it a Red Scare like it is all smell with no rot feels unbalanced.