From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Christian Josi

Of the many, many Biden-era policies that the new Trump administration is expected to reverse, it appears that the pending TikTok ban is high on the list.

After promising to save TikTok on the campaign trail, his spokeswoman last week confirmed that Trump’s plans to deliver. Since almost everyone — including Trump himself — as well as many companies utilize the technology, reeling in the ban is good politics and smart policy. Coincidentally, it is also consistent with the stance taken by President-elect Donald Trump’s pal and nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose populist and libertarian views will likely help shape Trump 2.0 even beyond the department.

Much like what has come to be known as Barack Obama’s “Facebook election” in 2008, the 2024 cycle might well be known as the “TikTok election.” Trump joined with Vice President Kamala Harris and candidates from federal to local levels in embracing the app unequivocally and successfully, quickly gaining millions of followers almost overnight. From rowdy rallies to ebullient encouragement from supporters in every part of the country and soundbites hitting at opponents and detractors, to the now-iconic dance moves, the Trump campaign made its way into the history books with a good deal of help from his TikTok content.

This was no accident. The president-elect and his campaign knew that connecting with young voters, especially those Gen-Z voters going to the polls for the first time, would be a critical part of the coalition that could return him to the White House. An NBC News poll taken last week showed that among first time voters, Trump’s support grew a whopping 22% from 2020 to 2024. As the Trump team recognized, these voters get their news and information largely from social media, and many from TikTok in particular, and little if any from traditional media outlets.

Back to RFK, Jr. As a key advisor and voice in Trump world, he has been a similarly strong advocate for protecting TikTok and undoing the legislation that now threatens to ban the app. Last Spring, Kennedy, with more than three million followers of his own, came out publicly against a ban and committed to filing a lawsuit to fight it.

In a post on X, Kennedy wrote: “Don’t be fooled — the TikTok ban is not about China harvesting your data. That’s a smoke screen. Intelligence agencies from lots of countries, especially ours, are harvesting your data from everywhere all the time. TikTok isn’t even majority Chinese-owned, and the company agreed to put its data behind a U.S. firewall. The Biden administration rejected that deal. Congress and the administration don’t understand that TikTok is an entrepreneurial platform for thousands of American young people. They want to screw them over just so they can pretend to be tough on China.”

The initial misinformation and propaganda against TikTok when the ban was first proposed came in heavy and hard, and many people initially bought it. Myself included. I thought, without having even logged on, TikTok was garbage (wrong) and admittedly I can be pretty gullible when it comes to suggestions of Chinese chicanery. Nobody’s perfect. But I digress.

The power of populism at this uniquely American moment is golden — an opportunity to give voices to the voiceless and an ear to those previously unheard. It is a good thing that both Trump and Kennedy understand that banning social media which is now a fact of American life, no matter what the app or the platform, is an attack on free speech and the populist power now driving American politics. Any politician still advocating for a TikTok ban is going against that populist sentiment and may want to re-think it — as even I have — lest they soon be looking for a new line of work.

Christian Josi is the founder and managing director of C. Josi & Company, a global communications and public affairs resource organization.

COP29 International Climate Change Event Concept. Baku, Azerbaijan

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The deal may already be moot with Donald Trump returning to the White House

The international COP29 conference finished over the weekend with multinational pledges to spend billions of dollars over the next decade combating “climate change” in third world nations, amid expectations that the agreement will be rendered moot by former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Just the News reports that the conference, among the almost 200 nations who signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, ended with a mutual commitment to spend $300 billion every year until 2035 helping poor countries mitigate the so-called effects of “climate change” and transition to alternative energy.

India representative Chandni Raina wanted the conference to commit to $1.3 trillion a year, and lamented $300 billion as “abysmally poor” and a “paltry sum” that would not suffice to “address the enormity of the challenge we all face.”

Another group in attendance, the America-based Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), had a very different conclusion, as CFACT dissents from the green agenda of the international establishment.

“Nations such as China and India are given a pass on emissions reductions and paying out funds,” noted CFACT’s Craig Rucker. “This, despite the fact that China is the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases and boasts the second largest economy, while India’s economy is all the way up at number five.”

Regardless, the conference’s deliberations may already be moot, as Trump is widely expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement upon resuming office in January, which in turn would eliminate America’s share of the funding for COP29.

Trump formally pulled out of the Paris accords in August 2017, the first year of his first term, with then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stating that the administration would be “open to re-engaging in the Paris Agreement if the United States can identify terms that are more favorable to it, its business, its workers, its people, and its taxpayers.”

Such terms were never reached, however, leaving America out until Trump’s successor, outgoing President Joe Biden, re-committed the nation to the Paris Agreement on the first day of his presidency, obligating U.S. policy to new economic regulations to cut carbon emissions.

In June, the Trump campaign confirmed Trump’s intentions to withdraw from Paris again. At the time, Trump’s team was reportedly mulling a number of non-finalized drafts of executive orders to do so.

Left-wing consternation on the matter is based on certitude in “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or “climate change,” the thesis that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate and that such trends pose a danger to the planet in the form of rising sea levels and weather instability.

Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.

AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings in order to make the so-called “settled science” say what climate activists wanted it to.