This weekend, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) joined Sean Duffy on Sunday Morning Futures to discuss the Chinese Communist Party’s oppressive lockdowns and the urgent need to ban TikTok.
Click HERE to watch the full interview, or read highlights of the conversation below.
On the Chinese Communist Party’s oppressive regime:
“[The Chinese Communist Party is] using the pretense of public health to institute a system of total techno-totalitarian control. And that’s not just for domestic use, that’s a model of repression they want to export around the world…As the CCP doubles down on oppression, we need to double down on freedom. That’s how we win over the long term. We have too many people bashing America, we have too many useful idiots in the American media. We need to embrace American values as a self-evident contrast to the Orwellian oppression of the CCP. That’s how we win the ideological fight over the long term, by remembering that we’re the good guys.”
On the national security threats posed by runaway spending:
“One thing we’ve discovered is that when we war-game a Taiwan scenario, we war-game the kinetic side, the conventional military side, but we rarely war-game the financial and economic escalation. We saw this in Ukraine both in 2014 and in this past year. We had to improvise and make up our financial and economic warfare strategy. The same is true with China. And at the same time, Xi is preparing his citizenry for economic warfare with the West. We need to get our own fiscal house in order…otherwise, we’re just going to destroy ourselves long before the Chinese Communist Party beats us in a war over Taiwan.”
On the dangers of TikTok:
“TikTok should be banned. Senator Marco Rubio and I have legislation that does exactly that. TikTok is digital fentanyl addicting our kids, and just like actual fentanyl, it ultimately goes back to the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is controlled by the CCP. That means the CCP can track your location. It can track your keystrokes. It can censor your news. Why would we give our foremost adversary that amount of power? Oh, and by the way, TikTok is using the swamp against us. They’re hiring an army of lobbyists, including former congressmen, senators, and 31 former high-level congressional staffers, in order to do their bidding. No paycheck is worth that. We need to ban TikTok.”