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DeSantis has his strengths, but they were on COVID response and anti-woke. I don't expect him to deport anyone and I don't expect him to stand up to China.
He can stay right where he is, it seems to suit him. Or maybe unseat Rubio and join the Senate.
Covid to me is still a big deal. There needs to be accountability for that. RDS also runs a very competent Florida government.
Also RDS showed he would respond to a hostile media without cowering. No reason to think that would change.
He is a very competent administrator albeit not a very inspiring personality.
Yes, I agree with your points, but they don't tell me that he's going to shut down the border or be tough on China. Those were, are, and forever will be Trump's biggest selling points to me, and many others.
I would be happy with him if I thought he would accomplish those things. I don't, especially when it comes to China.
What on earth makes you think Trump is going to be tough on China? He's not even supporting the TikTok ban.
And why should he?
In many respects, the TikTok ban seems less like 'tough on China' and more like the Democratic Party trying to assert control of yet another media company, after having spent decades with a partisan-media company alliance that has been used to the detriment of their political opponents.
There's plenty to dislike about social media like Tiktok, but the part that the Democrats were reacting to wasn't actual propaganda-techniques like inflaming election season via hyperbolic claims about political opponents. That was and is just standard Democratic party electioneering. Nor is it about personal data security- that's both old news and not unique. From a more skeptical perspective, the biggest distinguishing factor about TikTok- aside from the anti-PRC electoral hay- was that it was uncontrolled.
Donald Trump has just spent the better part of the last decade under unmitigated information warfare by the controlled or aligned media channels of the Democratic Party. Why would he want to support a Democratic administration assert control/coercion over another social media platform?
It was Trump's policy before it was Biden's.
The origin of the policy came from TikTok censoring content supporting the Hong Kong protests. That made people go "Hey maybe we don't want to let the Chinese government exert information control over our social media" and Trump tried to make them divest through an executive order. That got challenged in court and didn't work so it came back as bipartisan legislation. Until March, Trump supported it too.
Whatever misgivings you might have about other social media platforms, at least they aren't controlled by a hostile foreign government.
And I remember Trump being criticized for his effort then by various parties. What changed wasn't the wisdom of the policy- it was who was in the US government, and when they decided to make an issue of it.
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Because the status quo is that our greatest geopolitical adversary controls the media programming that influences a generation of Americans. It's horrifying that we let this state of affairs persist, and the antithesis of America First.
The problem with TikTok isn't that it's foreign-owned trashy media. The issue is that people enjoy trashy media, especially children, and that good parenting is hard. Trashy media, however, doesn't monkey-see/monkey-do indoctrinate children.
Social media has been trash for decades, well before TikTok became a thing. The power of media influence on children is also wildly inflated, to a degree that I expect a great deal more justification than sloganeering, particularly one when one of the first political tenets of American culture is 'you don't get to tell me what I can or cannot read.' I've lived through 'video game makes kids violent' fearmongering, 'religious media makes kids bigots' fearmongering, 'a lack of religious media makes kids immoral' fearmongering, 'problematic themes makes kids into fascists' fearmongering, and who knows how many alternative variations.
I have yet, however, to see any of these voluntary media consumption theories actually pan out in any empirical fashion into any sort of causal relationship. Kids are frequently stupid, and stupid kids will do stupid things in relation to whatever media they have access to. That does not, however, mean that the media is the cause of their stupidity. The sort of idiot child who tries to live-reenact American pro-wrestling isn't going to be a distinguished engineer if his social media feed / TV station shows more engineering-is-cool clips, but he is just as likely to be a Naruto-running fool with his friends.
No, the issue is that China controls the main media source for a generation. I don't even know what to make of the rest of your post, which doesn't even mention China. Were you trying to completely change the subject? It almost seems like a cognitive analogue of face-blindness, where people who really like TikTok mentally short-circuit when presented with the simple fact that China controls the algorithm that decides who sees what content for a big slice of America, and start reciting unrelated talking points.
You not knowing what to make of the point is rather demonstrating why the point applies.
Not talking about China is not changing the subject, it is the point that that China is not actually the subject, but the red herring justification for a party of an established pattern (the partisan-media complex) and an old problem (decrying the effect of media on kids as a justification for controlling media). It is noting that the historical context around the decision is not Chinese changes, but US domestic politics changes, and that the proposed solution (expropriating PRC influence) doesn't imply the implied result (better Social Media quality), particularly in light on the research that exists around the nominal problem (the nature of the effect of media on kids).
A social media algorithm can provide good content or bad, but 'Good but Chinese' is not bad simply because Chinese any more than 'American social media' is automatically 'good' for the nation's youth. TikTok may very well be 'Bad and Chinese', but 'Bad but American' is also still bad, and not automatically preferable for a number of reasons, including the long-established skepticism for granting the government or political parties greater control of the media-economic sphere.
Given that the Biden administration made no compelling argument that swapping 'Chinese' for 'American' would make it 'better' quality in and of itself, and also that the Democratic Party-media complex has a contemporary history of pursuing and asserting standards that are partisan rather than 'American' in nature, up to and including algorithm manipulation...
Well, 'we need the algorithm in the hands of people we can trust' is not a meaningful argument when the people making it are also the people who would be in a position to determine whose hands it ends up in are also not trusted to abuse it themselves. 'Bad but Chinese' may be bad, but 'Bad but my partisan opposition' is not intrinsically better.
For a commonality argument to hold over something like 'Trust me to take over your media alternative, bro,' there needs to be a degree of social trust to give that, and social agreement of what the nature of the problem is being addressed to warrant extending that trust to resolve. None of the key proponents have it, and not understanding that- or why social trust is necessary- is precisely why the argument resorts to 'because Chinese!', and why it fails to move the domestic opposition skeptics.
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What do you think of the high rate of trans associated with social media consumption by kids?
That the association of their friend and political-peer groups matter far more, and that this is a context where the social media content is downstream, not upstream, of political culture.
Also, that this specific example is a demonstration as to why the foreign affiliation (or lack thereof) is a red herring, and even counter's the original point. TikTok and geopolitical competitor social media are not the sources of trans culture. Social media is a magnifier of access to / awareness of / participation in age-cohort culture, not because of ownership but because of what the internet fundamentally enables via facilitating interactions.
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