Hello and welcome to the fifth episode of Left Vault North.
We are your hosts, Adrian and CJ.
And today Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of these glorious United States.
And today we'll also talk a little bit about the TikTok fan, Jeff Jackson, and his hand
in it, as well as Wiley Nickel, if we have the time.
If we have time.
We may get to Wiley.
We'll see.
But some important things are happening on January 20th, unfortunately Martin Luther
King Jr.'s Day of Remembrance, right?
Donald Trump is being sworn in.
And the funny thing that I saw right off the bat is just the sheer betrayal towards some
of it, like for some of his followers, his fervent sycophants that wanted to be out in
the National Mall to watch him get sworn in, but they're not invited to the indoor party.
Sorry.
What was your reaction to that?
To like-
Yeah, I kind of laughed.
You know, I thought it was a little hilarious.
I mean, you know, they're moving it, I think it's interesting, they're moving it into the
Capitol Rotunda, if I'm not mistaken.
And if you know anything about the Rotunda, you know, it is kind of a smaller area, so
it makes sense that they are having to scale it down.
But it's also a place that has a lot of reverence for folks.
You know, it's where, you know, some of the most like famous iconography in American history
is like the, what's the name, Don Trumbull paintings of like the Declaration of Independence
being signed and all that.
But it's also where people like John McCain, Rosa Parks, most recently, Jimmy Carter have
all lied in state.
So it's an area that can be very sacred, very solemn.
And now this is happening.
And it's the swearing in of a guy who, let's be frank, does not give a shit about any of
that.
And is a felon.
Oh yeah, there's that too.
He is a convicted felon.
We can finally say that he is 100% for sure a felon adjudicated by a court to say that
he is indeed guilty of federal crimes and he will face zero, zero prison time for that.
But here's the other funny thing about that too.
MAGA people will constantly spew about how there's a two tier justice system.
And that's, that's of course in defense of their god, Emperor King Donald Trump.
We do have a two tiered justice system in this country.
It's just not the one that they think it is.
100%.
And it's interesting you bring up the rotunda as well, not you bring up, but it's interesting
that they're using the rotunda as a place to hold the inauguration.
I would think that you would hold it inside the White House, but maybe that's just me.
Like I don't know.
Is there some, do you think maybe we should have done a little bit more digging before
this episode to see if there's some kind of rule that the president elect is not actually
allowed in the White House until a certain period of time?
You know?
Maybe, I don't know.
Maybe it's just because of the ceremony of it all.
Maybe that's not allowed in there.
I really have no idea.
I know there's always kind of funky things with, you know, the incoming president isn't
the president until a precise time and whatnot.
I have no idea.
And what an opportune moment for him to become president.
The economy is actually somewhat regaining some steam where we're seeing some level of
income inequality start to dip back into normal levels, which I mean, if you ask me, wasn't
really that great to begin with, but like we're also seeing inflation sort of slow.
What I find interesting about all this is that now Trump is going to be able to claim
victory for a lot of things, not because he actually did them, but because in the minds
of people that are not really paying attention that closely, he will just kind of inherit
those victories.
I want to go through a couple of them with you.
The Israel-Hamas deal where they have agreed to ceasefire and prisoner exchange and hostage
exchange exchange, excuse me.
So he's more than likely going to get credit for that.
And there was a moment in a press conference with Biden, I think this was a few days ago,
where someone asked him, is President Trump going to get credit for this?
And he kind of turns around and he goes, is that a real question?
He goes, yes.
And he just turns around and he's like, oh, and then he turns away.
And like funny moment, but she's, I mean, you know, kind of out of pocket question,
but is she wrong?
No.
I mean, it reminds me a lot of Jimmy Carter, actually.
I know I mentioned him just a minute ago, but with the Iran hostage situation.
History is repeating in the worst way possible.
Right.
No, they, you know, back in the day, Iran refused to negotiate, refused to release the
American hostages that they had for well over a year, I think.
And you know, like the, it's like the final day of Nixon's term or the first day of, or
sorry, Carter's term, first day of Nixon's.
It was the first day of Reagan.
I think you mixed up Nixon and Reagan last time we talked to you.
Yeah, well, they're both assholes anyway.
True.
But yes, it was the last day of Carter's administration.
It was the first day of Reagan's administration where they were actually able to announce
that they were coming home and that the deal had gone through.
And it was his first day in office.
What a victory, you know, right off the bat.
But what we know now, and I mean, they knew this a few years later, of course, publicly,
but that the Reagan campaign had actually spoken with some of the people who had contacts
to the people who were holding Americans hostage during the Iran crisis.
And like, I just think that that is such, there's not a great word for it that can be
aired on every channel, but there is a great word that exists for it.
And it's called rat fucking.
Oh, yeah.
And this is not a foreign tactic for Republicans, especially not when it comes to presidential
elections.
Part of the reason that Congress set the TikTok ban as January 19th was because it was the
day before the president's, or before the president was going to get sworn in.
That was not by accident.
It was not some coincidence.
But I do have some beef with Biden on this because just the other day, he said publicly
that he would not enforce the TikTok ban.
Now, for those of you that may not know what that means, the president is the first executive.
All that means is that he does not create laws.
He enforces them either through the military, through the various departments that are part
of the executive branch, or by his own executive order power.
Right.
But Biden signed it.
He could have vetoed this bill and it probably would not have passed the veto, but he did
it anyway.
Why?
I'm not entirely sure.
There's a lot of difference.
There's a lot of speculation out there as to why.
I mean, a lot of a lot of people point to APAC as a reason, and we don't have to get
into them today.
We can at some point.
That's pretty interesting.
I mean, for President Biden has openly stated that he is a Zionist several times before.
This is not like some secret.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some influence there.
However, we do know that several members of Congress were being paid by Facebook, Metta,
sorry, sorry, Zuck, by Metta and by a lot of different social media platforms to potentially
vote against something like this.
Yeah.
Or vote for the ban, rather.
So I'm wondering, A, what good graces this actually grants him, if any, and has he simply
just paved the way for Donald Trump to look like the good guy here?
Yeah, I think he did.
I think that's what's going to be interesting.
So TikTok goes dark on the 19th, right?
Or it went dark on the 19th.
So I mean, schedule go out on the 19th, right?
Inauguration is the 20th.
Trump indicated a couple of days ago that he would be open to at least extending that
ban another 90 days.
So he gets in there.
He is able to say, well, hey, I saved TikTok for now, at least in his first big victory,
something that will get a lot of younger people going, oh, nice.
Yay, that's awesome.
Yeah, I kind of like this guy who grabs the bat, which is a smart strategy, I will say.
It is a very smart strategy.
Yeah, he's evil, but he's not really...
Okay, he's evil, but the people around him aren't stupid.
I'll put it like that.
No, and I don't think he's necessarily stupid.
He just knows how to play to his strengths, which are being a sassy bitch and knowing
what makes people pay attention.
Yeah.
He's good about badminton audience.
He knows how to do that.
And I think one thing that one of the many things that helps to explain Donald Trump's
success, so say in politics, is the way the party, the Democratic Party, constantly kind
of, I would say underestimated him, but did not take him seriously, did not accurately
assess his strengths.
I would definitely say underestimated, for sure.
And they failed to realize early on, you know, this is a guy who has managed to have lawsuits
brought against him like every other day, it seems, and then all dropped, or got away
scot-free, they called him the Teflon Don for a reason.
And he is a guy that has managed to somehow still stay relevant and popular in the entertainment
business world, whatever, despite having multiple bankruptcies and failures and whatnot.
He always has found a way to come back.
He's like a cockroach that he can't kill.
Because he's too interesting.
Exactly.
And the party failed to realize that.
I think they thought it was a novelty that would die off very soon and people would get
tired and move on to the next thing.
Yeah, I think he actually, I know his team in 16 didn't expect him to win and they were
kind of like a, oh shit, whenever he did.
Yeah.
There's a bunch of great, many documentaries on YouTube that talk about that.
And there's some actual like full on produced documentaries that talk about this.
Like they, what all this started out as, I don't remember what the network was, but he
was basically about to lose any like ability to make a TV show on some network.
It might have been NBC or ABC or something like that.
And as a stunt, he started running for president.
Yeah.
But the problem was that he was too spicy, right?
And so it actually ended up making it worse, making the situation worse, not better for
his TV deals.
Unfortunately, and what they did not expect was that this would make him make an incredible
opportunity for his presidential bid.
I don't think they saw that coming.
And so they just went with it.
But you made an interesting note or you made an interesting observation just a moment ago
that he is Teflon Don and he's called that for a reason.
He's been called that for many years, way before the, he started running against the
democratic party.
And you know, there is, CJ, are you a student of history?
I like to think I am one of my minors in college was history.
So, well, then I hope you remember the second Punic war.
That's right, folks.
I'm going way back today.
Hop in the time machine.
There's a famous story about Fabius Maximus.
He was consul.
And as Roman consul, you're only elected for one year and you try to get as much glory
and recognition as possible.
Like you know, that's what they did anyway, in that year as you possibly can to elevate
your status, make you enrich yourself, yada, yada, yada.
What Fabius was tasked with was fighting the one and only Hannibal, Hannibal Barca, a
man who is at the moment when he was elected consul, just tearing through Northern Rome
or Northern Italy.
Now why do I bring all this up?
Because Fabius's grand strategy to defeat the seemingly unbeatable Hannibal was to not
fight him.
And that may seem silly to a lot of people who want to get up and fight, especially Romans,
especially Democrats and progressives that are eager to get up off their ass and fight
this asshole.
However, the Fabian strategy is not simply just running away and not fighting him.
The Fabian strategy included a mix of just tearing down everything else around him.
Okay.
And eventually this evolved into Scipio, Scipio, who more famously known as Scipio Africanus.
Scipio was the next big general that came around that was able to lead troops against
Hannibal.
Why am I bringing him up?
Because Scipio's thing was to employ the Fabian strategy and then go and take out all of his
allies, all of the conquered city states, all of the vast kingdoms that had come to
fight for him simply because they did not like Rome.
Where am I going with all this?
Why am I giving you all a history lesson right now?
Because we should have been employing a Fabian-Scipian strategy this whole time.
And to a certain extent, I think that the Democratic party and many arms of the Democratic
party did, especially during midterms.
But the problem was in 2024, we tried to fight him directly and he ran probably the most
laxatasical campaign you've ever seen.
I mean, right up until the end, actually, I think the McDonald's stunt might have put
him over the finish line in a few states.
But that's my big thing for tonight.
Something that I wanted to bring up.
I was thinking about this earlier.
I was like, you know, I think for a time a lot of Democrats were like the Romans.
They just wanted to fight so bad and hey, we can't bow down to fascism.
It's like, yeah, no, we're not bowing down to him.
We're simply not adding fuel to the fire.
The same thing happened in 2016 where Donald Trump got all this free press from CNN and
MSNBC, all these different television stations.
It's purely on the base, purely on the fact that he is entertaining to watch.
He's like a car wreck.
He's like a fire engine wreck.
You just can't look away.
You're like, oh man, that's really bad.
Like, I've seen bad wrecks before, but this is like bad, bad.
So I'm curious to know what you think about that observation and history lesson.
I think that's pretty accurate.
Those who don't learn their history, do them to repeat it, yada yada.
Oh yeah, no, most definitely.
History doesn't always repeat itself, but it rhymes for sure.
It rhymes.
Is that a George Lucas thing?
That's what I thought.
I'm glad you caught that.
Was I even saying, oh yeah, yeah.
I think the party apparatus as a whole was very slow to adapt and was still slow to adapt.
Not just going after him, but trying to attract supporters and new people in general.
But that's a conversation for maybe a little later.
Yeah, maybe.
But the media also, because you got to get on this with the free press, the media does
not know how to hold him accountable.
They have done an absolute shit job treating everything that he has done over the past
10 years, basically at this point, as something normal.
That's something that gets them ratings for sure.
Oh yeah, no, most definitely.
And it definitely does.
But the normalization of Donald Trump by the media, by the news, definitely helped him.
Definitely helped him.
And then, okay, I've never liked Jimmy Fallon, right?
I never thought he was funny.
I swear to God, I'm going somewhere with this.
No, I'm with you already.
But once he brought Donald Trump on his show during the 2016 race.
Tussled his hair.
Yeah, tussled his hair and all that stuff.
And then, he was able to stabilize him.
This is someone who is a wannabe, and we'll see, in the coming days and weeks, will be
an authoritarian.
He is someone who does not care about the preservation of our democracy, the preservation
of separation of powers.
He does not care about anything other than empowering himself, getting himself out of
jail, making himself richer, and silencing anyone who gets in his way.
And I think the way the news approaches it, covering him, like I said, is awful.
It doesn't even just extend to him.
I think this bad approach from the media also extends to the people he surrounds himself
with.
Treating people like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon as just normal kooky guys, really,
instead of the authoritarian racist pieces of shit that they are.
And then, extend that to people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
That behavior is not normal in a healthy democracy.
We heard Biden say the other night in his little farewell speech, a warning about how
the country was descending, although it already is, an oligarchy.
Yeah, that's the new line.
And I may sound a bit like I'm antagonizing liberals here, but that's the new line that
they're going to start rolling out, is that all of a sudden, we're in oligarchy because
of Trump.
Everybody needs to realize right freaking now that we have been, if not an outright
been, a shadow oligarchy for a very, very long time.
This is not new.
Oh yeah.
I mean, even in most recent history, I can point to somebody like Reagan winning purely
because the oligarchical powers of oil and gas, news, media, and like so many other industries,
coal even, were wholly set on getting this guy into office because Jimmy Carter was disrupting
everything.
Jimmy Carter was the disrupter.
Yeah.
And then he wasn't exactly like the most progressive president we've ever had.
No.
And you can look back through history and you can see people like FDR.
FDR was truly radical in a lot of ways, borderline authoritarian.
I might not even say borderline because like stacking the courts and doing all these other
things sounds great when it's on your side, but like the law of political reciprocity
still applies.
Yeah.
Anything you can do, your enemy can do you and worse.
So here's my problem with the oligarchy thing is that it's basically consigning everybody
to just accept that we are an oligarchy.
It's basically just laying the groundwork for like, well, this is just the way it works.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of people are already assessing it.
Yeah.
It's giving permission to exist.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's giving permission to exist instead of saying, this isn't right.
This needs to be fought back against.
But you know, what do you expect whenever you have members of Congress with stock and
things like meta?
Yeah.
I think that's when the news media is owned by the very billionaires who are trying to
affect the oligarchical changes within the government that we are currently lambasting.
But like there was a New York Times cartoonist that recently quit because their editor got
word from the top that being Bezos, or not New York Times, I'm sorry.
Washington Post.
Excuse me.
A cartoonist from the Washington Post made a cartoon.
I'm sure if you've listened to this, I'm sure you've seen it on Blue Sky, on like other
places where it's all of the like big tech billionaires and Disney bowing down to probably
the fattest iteration of Trump that I've seen in cartoon form, which is a high bar to clear,
let's be honest.
Actually, you know, talking about the news media, I think that's something that is that's
going to bother me.
That bothers me a little bit about how things currently are.
And you and I can talk about this outside of the podcast.
I think last time we were recording.
That one thing that worries me is the fact that if you look at kind of the playing field
of media and forms of communication, a dangerous situation that we're in right now as far as
being able to freely express that stuff.
So if you look at it, so you got Twitter, right?
Or X, whatever.
It's Twitter.
Yeah.
I'm not going to give you a lot of the satisfaction.
But that is in his that is in Trump's pocket.
Like that is his that is one of the sound and boards in this.
He's like his own true social stuff, right?
He has some like Mark Zuckerberg, who, while maybe not out really worshipping at the altar
of Trump, is repeating some of the same sort of rhetoric and has said, you know, at Metta,
we are changing our policies to, you know, not allow fat checkers.
It's this community notes like on Twitter.
And we're doing away with all these various protections for, you know, persecuted groups,
all this stuff.
So very Trump-esque rhetoric.
And then you have the I'll get to talk in a minute because that'd be a good segue, I
guess.
But then whenever you look at more traditional media like print journalism, that's dying.
It's been dying for a long time.
And then even your CNNs, MSNBCs, their viewership is on downward spiral whereas Fox News tends
to be going up or at least staying steady where it is, no signs of faltering.
And then there's talk of interest in selling MSNBC and all this stuff to God knows who.
And then even then these more unbiased sources like the ABC News and all that stuff, they're
just talking and not doing well either.
And so what happens whenever the only people who are able to kind of own these outlets
of news, the only people who can afford to buy them are people who are in the pocket
or at least are sucking up to Trump.
He will then control or can control at least influence to some extent.
Yeah, control by proxy.
Exactly.
It's, you know, it's state media, so to say.
And then I think that's one of the things that I hate so much about this whole TikTok
ban thing is, excuse me, sorry, is that, you know, we can, you can argue, oh, it was, you
know, it's right to national security, which I think is a bunch of bullshit anyway.
It's meta-sales are data in China.
It's no different.
Oh, we know it's bullshit.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
And so TikTok was kind of a unique area, it was a unique app really, in that it allowed
people from all over the world to come together and create communities.
I mean, I got on it during COVID like a lot of people did before that.
I wrote it off as, oh, it's just, you know, stupid dance nap and all that, you know, a
dimmer attitude.
And then I got on it, like, oh my God, it's actually really cool.
And, you know, I always, that was definitely probably the most used app on my phone for
a long time.
You know, I'd be able to like see these walks of life and whatnot that I might not have
gotten to otherwise.
And not to mention there's the fact that, you know, so many businesses in America used
it to either start up their business or to help get their business through tough times
or there was different COVID or maybe just a slow period or something like that.
But it was also a place where we could talk very openly and very honestly about the things
that were bothering us.
Well, sometimes.
Sometimes.
Depending on what it was, right?
I think it was at least a more, a slightly more open place than say, Met or Twitter or
whatever.
Sure.
Do you think that's partially because it wasn't through, and I'm just interrupting here because
I want to ask a clarifying question.
Do you think that that was more due to just that it was actual people and their accounts?
You know, it's almost like a face-to-face interaction with somebody.
Whereas something like, I mean, it got more curated as time went on.
It became a little bit more heavily produced from some creators.
But I really do get the sense that it's not like Facebook, not like Instagram, it's not
like Twitter because somebody starts talking to you about something and it's just their
face talking to you.
Does that create a more, I guess, one-to-one interaction?
Like almost this pseudo relationship with somebody, like you're meeting up with them at a bar
or I mean the town square.
For town square.
Yeah, I would argue that was kind of the modern town square in a society where third spaces
are disappearing like crazy.
Oh man.
We could definitely go on about third spaces.
But in a society where third spaces are disappearing and whatever there is, isn't much to speak
of.
Kind of blows, yeah.
I think that was, you know, even I kind of thought about and you mentioned that you think
the government kind of knew that this whole like switch over to like Red App or something
like that was probably going to happen.
And I can see that.
I will say, I do think that the government forgot about one thing and it's that, you
know, somewhere like there is intrinsically in that reptilian Neanderthalian brain, so
to say.
That's a real word.
I Googled it.
There is this desire, this need for interaction, for communication, but most importantly for
connection.
And, you know, if you add to that our natural curiosity, then to me it's a surprise that
we everyone started going over to Red Note.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, and part of that for sure is an addictive personality.
That's a lot of people.
I have fully acknowledged multiple times that there are a lot of people that simply are
like not going to get their fix anymore.
And TikTok was definitely one of the easiest ways to get that.
Yeah.
Because I'm going to be real frank right now.
Most of the other apps, their layout sucks and I hate it.
Oh yeah.
And like even though TikTok, like every three or four videos, it was an ad, you knew that.
You could just scroll right past it.
Yeah.
Right.
But most of the time when you're scrolling on your feed, it's going to be something you
want to see, right?
You're still going to get a little bit of that dopamine rush.
Right.
But on Facebook, almost nothing that I see on the front page is what I want to see.
Right.
And like I only go there to talk to my family and friends.
So like you're stuck in this little cycle of like trying to find something.
It's not a great experience.
It doesn't feel good when you're scrolling Facebook because you're not satisfied with
what you've seen.
I think the same is true for Instagram.
And I mean, they are the same thing basically.
I mean, like shoot, I watched this whole mini documentary series on YouTube where the guy
was like examining why Facebook and meta apps are so enticing to like our brains.
And one of the minuscule examples he gave or like one of the many miniature examples
he gave was that like all of the posts are just big enough so that they fit in a window
size but you can also see the one that comes before it and the one that comes after it.
Like you can see the next thing.
Your brain has to, like you're saying your Neanderthal brain, your lizard brain has to
complete what you just saw.
We are pattern recognition computers.
Yeah.
You know, we are very good at recognizing when something should be something.
Right.
That's why people see faces in toast and stuff.
So when you're scrolling and you see this box that's incomplete and you're like, oh,
what's that?
And so it's basically just a repetition of, oh, what's that?
Oh, what's that?
So you're looking for a good experience though.
That tires your brain out after a while.
And here's the catch.
They don't care.
That's kind of the point.
They don't give a shit that it tires you out and makes you feel like crap.
By the end of it, you stayed on the platform longer.
That was the goal.
Right.
They're engineering your brain to be on their stupid social media platform for longer.
TikTok does a lot of the same thing.
It's just a different experience because it feels more real.
It feels genuine is what it is.
It feels like you're actually connecting.
And I do wonder if part of that aspect of that feeling of connecting is because a lot
of the users did come across it during COVID, during a time of mass isolation, a time of
wanting that connection.
Yeah.
And you know what people are really mourning too?
It's not even just that it's like, oh man, TikTok's going to be gone.
It's the algorithm that they've built, that they've cultivated probably over years.
You know what you want to watch when you're going on a TikTok.
You're not there to watch a bunch of Chinese propaganda that never pops up on my for you
page.
Same.
Yeah.
Maybe at first, when I was first scrolling through it like four years ago, that wasn't
that long ago, maybe three years ago.
But regardless, I'm not sitting there just scrolling through it and thinking, man, I
really just, I love Xi Jinping.
I just don't know what it is.
I'm just completely overtaken by this guy.
One day you're going to run for office and some Republicans going to find that clip and
use that.
You're right.
I should probably cut that.
I'm not even joking.
I should probably cut that.
They're going to play it over and over again.
I love Xi Jinping.
Damn it.
This has ruined me.
You've fallen for it, Adrian.
Oh my God.
But that's the, that's the, that's what we live in now.
Yeah.
See, TikTok is tracking your data.
And what if some, what if some four year old that's addicted to TikTok and YouTube kids
is going to run for office someday?
China will have all the dirt on it.
That was probably the wildest thing that came out of those hearings that the Supreme Court
hearings that I have ever heard is, well, what if somebody like 50 years from now runs
for office and because they were on TikTok, China has all this dirt on them.
It's like, what dirt?
What are you talking about that they scrolled through game of Thrones edits where they're
thirsting after Robb Stark?
Like I don't know what you mean by this.
Probably some of the most embarrassing things that people will be scrolling through with
their FYPs, stuff like that.
Not that I do that.
You can't, you'll never be able to verify because TikTok is going away.
Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.
I don't know.
Side track here.
I'm curious to you.
What was, I know my answer.
I'll give it a second to you.
What was the funniest day on TikTok?
Oh, or funniest era, let's say the funniest era.
Okay.
I know this is going to sound a little millennial boomer of me, but there was that guy.
He's like a journalist guy and he's like, I want to take this opportunity on Star Wars
data.
Introduce my girlfriend.
Uh, uh, Marcus diploma or something like that.
And people just iterated on it for, if you, you guys can find it on YouTube somewhere,
just, just look up star Wars day, introduce my girlfriend, TikTok.
You will find it.
Oh yeah.
It's like literally hours upon hours of people stitching and like doing all these crazy things.
Like it's just like one of them's like holding up a nerf gun and it's like, I've got the
shot.
She just needs to blink once to let me know that she's going to be okay.
And then someone like dressed up as like Captain America about to jump out of a helicopter
and whatnot.
Yeah.
I think that's the, the, the, like one of the defining things pretty early on when I
was on TikTok that I was like, okay, this is, this is pretty fun.
Yeah.
I think for me, and this is going to sound bad for me, it was probably the whole ocean
gate thing.
Oh my God.
Uh, just the dumping of everyone was incredible in a way.
It was kind of funny and very morbid kind of, you know, dark humor sort of way.
Sure.
I think it was also very interesting to see how everyone or not everyone, but a lot of
people, you know, kind of ignored the whole, you know, these are actual like people in
the sub who have now died, you know, who have actual families and whatnot and focused on
the whole kind of class aspects of it.
Yeah.
There were billionaires who gives a shit.
It was kind of the precursor to Luigi.
Yeah.
No, very much was.
Which the, I never thought about it like that.
Yeah.
I kind of never have.
And this was even something I don't, this was not a break I placed.
But the number like Luigi, like the thirst traps I ended up getting were actually kind
of hilarious.
What were you searching up?
I wasn't searching anything.
I just thought it was hilarious.
Yeah.
Brick by brick, CJ.
There is a reason that it's there.
You're trying to say your Chinese spy is putting those videos in front of you because you want
them to have genetically engineered or not genetically.
They have bio engineered your brain to be desperate for those thirst traps.
Well, they, uh, they really also went in hard on the, uh, the King Prawn, uh, story memes
that I missed.
Oh my God.
You did not know Pepe the King Prawn.
Oh my God.
No, I definitely missed it.
That's like a couple months, but it'd just be a Pepe, uh, from, uh, the Muppets and it'd
just be like these most incredible range of stories.
Yes.
I did.
I, no, I did not miss that.
I completely misinterpreted what the trend you were talking about was.
Okay.
I forgot his name was Pepe the Prawn.
Yeah.
See, I was thinking like Pepe the Frog.
Oh God.
And then I'm like, what does that have to do with anything?
But yes.
Yeah.
I forgot some of those.
Uh, some of them went way too long.
Some of them did, but some of them, I also-
Maximum four slides in my opinion.
I will say there were a few of them where they're like 20 slides.
I'm like, I'm not going to read all this, but I read the first couple of slides.
I'm like, Oh God.
Okay.
Let's see what happens.
It should just be a video at that point, but hey, you got to go with the trend, right?
Exactly.
Anyway, so let's talk about how we got to this point really.
Please.
TikTok ban.
Um, got there.
So I know this has gone on for years.
Actually the first time there was like a TikTok ban was near the end or talk about TikTok
ban was near the end of Trump's term.
Yep.
2019.
Yeah.
And that ended up not going anywhere.
I think maybe you just failed and get the votes or something like that.
I think they were worried that they weren't going to get the votes and they didn't go
anywhere, but he talked about it a lot.
But now this more modern thing, um, it turned into just really, I think, I do think a lot
of it and you could see this in the hearings with, uh, the CEO TikTok.
A lot of it still wanes in heavily into the whole red scare type of thing.
This sinophobia, sinophobia sort of thing, even though to a pro the CEO TikTok, he's
Singaporean Senator anyway.
You work for a Chinese company, do you not?
Have you ever held Chinese?
I just love when he, I think, I think that somebody gave him a note and they were like,
Mr. True, look, Tom Cotton is a Republican.
He supports, you know, he supports veterans and military members.
Just mentioned to him that you've served your country.
Like as a soldier, he'll have more respect for you.
And in the, you can see it.
He tries really hard to be like, I served my country in Singapore.
Like I'm Singapore.
Just Tom Cotton just completely glosses over it.
Just doesn't, I don't think it even registered.
Yeah.
And I will say, I think one of the problems with the TikTok ban in general and just the
approach to technology as a whole and technology legislation is the people who are making these
results have no understanding of how this technology works.
You know, the average age of Congress is what, like 63 or something like that?
Something like that.
And, you know, a lot of these people, or there are some people who were born with a red scare,
the OG red scare was a thing, you know?
People, when they were born, people were still using rotary phones.
Exactly.
And this isn't just a rag on them for being old or whatever.
No, but it's indicative.
Sorry.
It is.
It is very indicative.
It is indicative of one of the big problems is that these people are so detached from
the realities of say of how Americans interact with technology and the impact that technology
has on everyday lives, but also the potential impact of technology, for example, AI.
You know, I don't think I could ever see, I don't know, what's his name, Steny Hoyer,
whoever.
Steny Hoyer.
I could not see him even trying to understand AI.
I think if you tried to show him what AI was, it would be the same as if you showed a cell
phone to a middle-aged peasant.
Yeah.
Just be like, what is this magic?
Yeah.
Like I can totally see you showing it to like Chuck Grassley, who is still in the Senate,
by the way, at 93 years old, I believe.
And he'd be like, now does it work the same way as a telegraph?
I could see that happening for real.
Like, because the way that they were asking some of these questions is, you're right,
detached.
Completely just, maybe not detached, but definitely, you know, definitely just not aware of the
implications of technological progress and like how that's going to tie into free speech
and everything like that.
When you start banning apps, you start banning the ability to facilitate free speech.
Now, the only thing that I will always kind of agree with just on a constitutional level
is that, yeah, I mean, but there's always another platform.
The slippery slope argument is that, well, what if they just ban the next platform?
And I see and understand the argument, but maybe people should touch grass just a little
bit more.
And this is going to be another shout out right here towards the end of the episode.
Get outside and go talk to your local county parties.
Go get involved.
Yeah.
But I mean, and at the risk of sounding like a boomer, right?
It just is, I mean, and I'm somebody who spends like half my life on the internet, but we
have to kind of put these things into perspective and stop wallowing in grief over the things
we're losing.
And I'm not trying to sound like a boomer when I say all that, right?
It's just that we have the tools in the real world necessary to be able to communicate
with people, right?
Taking away an app should not cripple that.
If you are not doing the work outside of social media, then you're not doing the work for
real.
I mean, I know that there is a place and definitely, I mean, shoot, I'm trying to become more of
a digital organizer for my career, but I know that you have to turn that into reality.
You have to have action attached to that.
You can't just make a Facebook group or another TikTok and think that that was action.
That was communication.
It's the front facing piece of it.
But if you're not doing anything on the backend, you're not doing anything.
That's just my piece on that.
So with TikTok being banned, do you think that there's a chance it'll come back?
Do you think that there's a chance that somebody will buy it?
Are we freaking out over nothing?
So-
And does Jeff Jackson deserve to be tarred and feathered metaphorically?
I'll answer the first part of that first.
I'm not sure.
One of the stipulations is that ByteDance completely give up or sell this part to an
American company so it can divest completely from any connection from China, whatever.
But they have been very adamant about saying we will not do that, which I guess it props
to them for standing by that.
Yeah, it's very, very communist of them to want to hold onto their capitalistic integrity.
Anyway.
I will say, there has been talk about Mark Cuban trying to buy it, which I don't think
that's anything serious.
I don't think he has enough money for that, to be honest.
Yeah, but then there's talk of, and there's actually an offer by Kevin O'Leary, who was
also on Shark Tank with Mark Cuban.
But Kevin O'Leary, this Canadian billionaire who is also a giant Trump supporter, also
one of the biggest assholes I've ever seen.
You're talking about how it's good that there was a top one for saying how it inspires everyone
to actually pull themselves up by their boots.
Jeff, I can't stand the guy.
Anyway.
These are our lords now.
These are the people that sit at a table-
With the refuse to worship at that altar.
No, I mean, like lords, like feudal lords.
Feudal lords, yeah.
These are our feudal lords now.
These are the guys that sit at the tables with each other and then just talk about how successful
they are.
But they don't actually do anything, guys.
It's a giant financial circle, jerk.
Anyway, don't know if we'll cut that out or not.
I will not cut that out.
Anyway, I know like Kevin O'Leary put forth an offer with another investor.
I don't think that's gone anywhere, but I think it will all depend on if Trump does
decide to delay another 90 days, his ban, another 90 days, and we'll kind of see what
happens then.
I think the future is still very unclear.
As far as Jeff Jackson goes, there are two angles to this.
One, and you and I kind of talked about this a little bit before we started recording.
He was one vote yes for the ban.
And like you mentioned earlier, there were still 300 whatever people who voted and a
certain number voted yes.
And they also do deserve the blame.
They all do.
I think what it is with Jeff Jackson though, that pissed people off so much, and I can
understand why they are so pissed.
I can get that.
And he got on there and did a little make-up by himself.
But this was a guy who started out in the General Assembly and then kind of worked his
way up a little bit, became congressman, and built a rather substantial following and became
very well known actually, because he was able to take all the happenings on Capitol Hill
and present it from a very nuanced, I wouldn't say completely nuanced role because obviously
he is a Democrat, but a pretty clear-
And just level-headed.
Yeah, thank you.
A very level-headed way.
He was able to present it in a very level-headed way.
And a lot of people really appreciated that.
And myself included, I was subscribed to him for a long time.
And not just people in North Carolina, but people from across the country.
I would see them in the comments section like, thank you from Idaho or whatever for doing
this.
I like seeing this approach.
I'm a Republican, but this guy speaks.
I can respect him.
Those kinds of things.
You'd see those comments on every single video.
And so for him to have made himself known on that level to that larger audience via
TikTok and then vote against it, I can see why people are ready to crucify him.
I see and can understand why people are so pissed.
It's like a giant, it seems like a giant middle finger.
It really does.
It's like, well, I'm going to use it, but ha ha, I voted for you to not be able to.
It does seem very out of touch and very, I'm better than you.
I should have access to this.
But like you said to me earlier, you're still an entire other part of Congress that voted
for this.
They also deserve to be held accountable.
Yeah, they absolutely deserve to be held accountable.
But here's the other thing.
Do we provoke and criticize our congressmen based on their social media following?
Because I think that that's a big problem because then it just kind of incentivizes
them to lay even lower than they already do.
A lot of the lesson that I think that many of these politicians probably got out of the
Jeff Jackson porching was, oh, okay, well, not doing that anymore.
Like I'm not going to make videos of me like talking about what I did this week in Congress.
And he still did that to his credit.
I mean, he let the steam or he let the smoke clear a little bit before he got back to it,
but he eventually did get back to it.
And I would still see comments, you know, praising and supporting him.
But I would also continue to see comments saying, yeah, well, what platform are you
using, Jeff?
Here's the thing.
You're going to send that exact same video to every major video site, Facebook, Instagram,
all these different places.
Am I defending his choice to delete the original video and then try to try to backpedal and
do all these things?
And then like people were making all these assertions that he's paid by certain invested
parties.
Here's the problem is that a lot of people, when you have your sights on the white whale,
you become Captain Ahab.
And we don't need a country of Captain Ahabs because you're missing and I'm mixing metaphors
here, but you're missing the forest for the trees.
Right.
Jeff Jackson's one guy.
He's a very high profile guy, like you said.
And you're right.
He did build his national status off of.
I mean, there were people here in North Carolina who didn't know who he was.
So I don't think the efficacy of the argument that he got really popular on TikTok, therefore
he should be held to a higher standard is I don't think that works really, because they
should all be held to the same standard.
Yeah, no, they should.
But one person that I want to bring up is a progressive candidate or a progressive representative
out of California, Representative Ro Khanna, somebody that if you don't know, you should
know.
He's very influential.
He has been tapped multiple times to try and run against like before she died, Dianne
Feinstein.
He keeps saying no.
I think he is by many measures a decent guy.
I think he has a lot of iffy ideas sometimes, but he's also a Californian.
So you know, we forgive him for that.
Anyway, my point in bringing him up is that he voted no on the TikTok ban bill.
However, of Democrats, he is one of the highest recipients of money from Metta of any congressman,
like way above what Jeff Jackson and any of those other people who voted yes.
Now you could think about this one of two ways.
Oh, man, they really lowballed Jeff Jackson.
He really sold out for a pretty penny while Ro Khanna was getting the full buck.
But the way I see it is this.
A lot of these politicians and keep in mind, Jeff Jackson was a first term congressman.
A lot of these politicians who want to stay in for a long time, they learn to be very
savvy and let their star rise when it needs to and stay under the radar when they need
to.
I think it is not just Ro Khanna, but I think that a lot of progressives, a lot of Democrats,
a lot of people on the left end of the on the left side of Congress made a tactical
decision and decided to steer into the no category simply because they knew it was going
to pass.
They knew that the Republicans had the vote.
They knew that enough Democrats supported it.
So they just, you know, they're like, OK, well, I'm not going to get mixed up in this.
They made that decision for a lot of them.
I think that it was a moral imperative.
I think that they did agree that, hey, this is a violation of free speech, but they're
still politicians.
Like, let's never put that past these people, any of them, because when you start doing
that and you start vilifying them as one person missing the mass behind them that also voted
the same way, we have a problem.
We have a really, really big problem because Jeff Jackson is a lot more accessible online.
You can go to any one of his videos right now and comment.
But I don't think that you're going to see the same vitriol and the same reaction for
a representative from Kansas.
I just don't think you're going to.
And you could argue, I think a lot of people would argue, that that's just because we expect
them to be monsters.
So when did we start fighting our allies and letting the monsters be monsters?
CJ's nodding his head like, oh, you got a point there.
But I mean, it's the same criticism that a lot of people gave to people who were protesting
the Israel Hamas war, the, like, I hesitate to say the G word, but the G side in Gaza.
A lot of people were criticizing them because they kept showing up to Democratic rallies
or Democratic speeches instead of going to Republican ones.
And the argument from their side was, well, if we go there, we're just going to get shouted
down and kicked out anyway.
People might actually listen here.
But the story that it paints is that it doesn't matter what Republicans do.
We don't need to hold them accountable because we can't.
We are physically unable or we are physically unable to do it.
But we can hold Democrats accountable.
We can hold them to a much higher scrutiny than anybody else.
And I think that Jeff Jackson is just a symptom of that.
Or no, not a symptom.
I'm sorry.
I think Jeff Jackson's, the reaction to his vote is a microcosm of that.
That's where, and that's why I wanted to get into this with you today, CJ, because I think
that it really does speak to a larger problem.
We aren't really holding these people to the same standard.
There are 435 members of Congress, 100 Senate, or excuse me, 535 members of Congress.
There are 100 senators and 435 representatives.
Each one of them should be held to the same standard, regardless of party.
And if Republicans are going to have no shame, where does that leave us?
But I would love to hear a rebuttal.
No, I mean, I do agree that they should be held to the same standard.
All I'm saying is I do understand why people were pissed at Jeff Jackson.
I get that.
And I completely get that perception of everything.
I really do.
And I do think that, you know, I think you can have hit on this.
One thing that these types of battles, so to say, they're just they end up just being
distractions from a bigger picture.
So I say that they are not important because, you know, something like TikTok is a big money
maker for a lot of people.
Yeah.
Estimated something like 7 million jobs will be lost because of this.
There's more to this than just one guy, like being mad at a guy, or one bill even.
Yeah.
So with this whole thing, in the end, there is more to it than just one guy, one vote,
one bill and whatnot.
You know, it is important to realize that, you know, everyone voted the way they did
and that because of that vote, there is there are going to be some consequences to it.
You know, there are around 7 million jobs that could be affected by this.
I mean, we only thing we have to do is you look towards India.
They haven't picked up there actually.
And there are a bunch of jobs that, you know, were lost because of that.
There are a lot of businesses that just completely disappeared and the ones that were able to
take around a very hard time rebuilding their audience and finding their customer base again.
Yeah.
I will be personally affected by this as well.
I have a side channel where I do political content and that was my money maker for that
content.
You know, it was a decent little side gig.
Not enough to live on, but it was something.
For some people, it has been enough to live on, like as a full time thing.
Oh yeah.
You know, I'm a big like movie buff, right?
And so there were a bunch of like movie channels, pages, whatever that I would follow.
And they get a good amount of the share of the ad revenue that comes through TikTok.
Yeah.
I mean, I unfollowed him at one point.
One of the first people I followed on there was a guy named Straw Hat Doofy.
I knew exactly who you were going to say.
Did you unfollow him before or after the writer's strike?
After the writer's strike, like during it because of the stance.
Anyway, I figured a solidarity with the writers anyway.
But I don't like scabs.
Whatever.
Anyway, you shouldn't.
Nobody does.
That's why we pick them off.
Exactly.
But he was one of the first people I followed on there.
And I remember whenever I first started following him, I forget what he was doing.
Maybe he was like.
Did like anime reviews and stuff.
Yeah.
Well, his main job is your real world job, so to say.
Oh, I don't know.
Maybe he was working for Disney or something.
I don't remember.
But he was able to quit and dedicate all his energy to that channel after some point because
he was able to get enough viewers, make enough content.
Eventually, he was able to be on the red carpet.
And I remember going to the movies a couple of times and all the pre-show stuff was him
and Maria Menounos and all these people.
Sure.
And so that's a guy who's out of a job.
And then another movie person, J. Stoob, they did content together a lot.
She's out of a job.
Now, these people have like the big creators have YouTube channels and Instagrams and all
this stuff.
But it's not quite the same.
Exactly.
That interaction isn't the same.
Because you could just get on your phone and make a video real quick.
Exactly.
I mean, YouTube, there's a bit of a higher standard when it comes to the content that
you have to make.
Yeah.
I mean, hell, one of the last videos we had on the TikTok for this podcast was a video
I made in like five minutes just pulled off in a parking spot.
Sitting in your car.
Yeah.
It's classic TikTok.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, I've got some shit to say.
Yeah.
Throws down the phone on the dashboard, starts yapping.
Honestly, God, that's what it was.
I was just thinking about it.
I was just pissed.
I'm like, OK.
But I think it was interesting, too, that we got some messages from people that knew
you or people that knew just about North Carolina politics and knew kind of what was going on.
We talked a little bit about it in our last episodes.
Just for a little bit, we talked about the Riggs versus Griffin case going on.
It was a minor thing going on right now.
But people, it resonates.
And your For You page can be local, depending on how well you curate it, I guess.
But you make a great point that people's stars, like Jeff Jackson, were able to rise because
of this platform.
And that's not just because, like, everybody was following them or whatever.
It's because people liked the niche.
And I think that TikTok proves that there is a following out there for everybody.
And TikTok was better at finding it for you.
Oh, yeah.
Most definitely.
I don't know about you, but most other social media sites are not great at finding my niche,
are not great at connecting people.
I have struggled to get followers anywhere else besides TikTok.
Yeah.
And I think one thing that I do hate about this platform going away is it allowed us
to see perspectives and allowed us exposure to things we might not have been able to see
otherwise.
Just as an example, going back to when all the protests about the Israel-Palestinian
war and all that stuff was going on, all these protests on campuses, we were able to see
firsthand accounts from people who were in the camps, in the protest camps.
What they were saying, what they were experiencing, we wouldn't be able to, we might not necessarily
be able to see that just watching the news on TV.
No, because it's all edited.
It's all heavily digestible.
Right?
Yeah.
And that's the problem is that we are now in an age where if a content source is too
easily accessible, we run the risk of it being called a propaganda machine.
Right?
But here's another problem.
And I heard a senator say this today that, well, we had to ban it.
It's the best source of propaganda there is.
Something to that effect, basically saying that it's propaganda and that's why we need
to ban it.
Propaganda is protected by the First Amendment.
It's been upheld in the Supreme Court.
I was listening to NPR thinking about that this morning.
Yeah.
I don't really listen to NPR.
So I'm glad that that lined up, but I'm glad that they're also talking about this because
the fact that there are a number of people who seem to think that propaganda is a type
of speech that should be banned really need to understand what the First Amendment actually
protects and why John Adams is still one of my least favorite presidents from the revolutionary
age.
Because the man was like, if you talk bad about me, we're going to bring the hammer
down on you.
You can't talk about the president or the government in a negative way.
Look up the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Guess what?
Unconstitutional.
Because you cannot limit somebody's speech based on your criticism or misdirection about
truths about the government.
Propaganda is protected speech.
I mean, period, end of sentence.
Side note, the John Adams miniseries with Baldy Imani on HBO, incredible.
Love everything about it.
Love the way it's shot, written, acted.
Oh my God.
Official Left of Old North recommendation to watch the John Adams HBO miniseries.
Yes.
It's the same director who did Les Mis and Cats, although maybe that's not exactly high
praise.
I was going to say, you could have left out Cats.
I think there is.
I'm convinced that Cats is like the last thing that happened before COVID really became a
thing in America.
Yeah.
I fully blame COVID on Cats.
Anyway.
You blame COVID on Cats.
See, I blame Cats on COVID.
You think that it was because of the Cats that we have COVID.
I think that everybody just lost the frickin' minds and decided, you know what, let's release
this movie.
It looks fine.
No, because it came out I think December 2019.
Damn it.
Well, anyway.
So we've hit off on some interesting tangents here on Left of Old North.
Yeah, December 2019.
Anyway.
Damn it.
So we did go off on some interesting tangents tonight.
Look, and we're way over time as I'm looking at here on the clock.
I guess we'll have to get to Wiley-Nicoll some other time.
Because maybe.
Yeah.
We'll see.
Maybe next episode.
Maybe.
I think we'll record Trump will be present for about a week and God knows what will have
happened, which I will say, let me just take a moment for a hop off of here.
Trump has talked about in his first couple of days, there was shock in all campaign of
executive orders and whatnot.
You know, there's, it's been leaked, although it'll probably be canceled or redone somehow.
There has been leaks of plans to have mass deportations out of Chicago and Illinois this
week.
So no matter what happens, one, stay engaged and stay informed.
You know, the best way we can fight back against this is with knowledge of what's happening
and knowledge of how to fight back against it.
So stay informed, stay in tune, but also take care of yourself and take care of those around
you.
Yeah.
It's going to be a tough four years for everyone, especially if you are someone who is in a
minority group who can be and will be targeted by the Trump administration.
It's going to be a very hard time, but just know that even if it feels like you don't
have any support from those around you, there are still people out there who are fighting
for you, who want you to be okay.
Anyway, happy little day to end on, I guess.
Well said.
Happy inauguration day, everybody.
Happy official end of neoliberal America.
We're about to see some weird new generation of that.
We've got the tech bros, the Bitcoin bros on full blast, behind their main man, Don
Old Trump.
So strap in folks.
And while you're strapped in, make sure that you're staying over here on the left of Old
North.
We are on Blue Sky.
We are unfortunately on Twitter.
We are on YouTube.
We are available where you can get all of your podcasts, mostly Apple and Spotify.
I know I listen to Spotify.
I don't know if you listen to Apple.
No, I'm a Spotify guy.
Okay, so we're not officially wrapping either one, but we got the metrics back.
And it seems like that's the most places that people are listening.
So just make sure to keep listening and send us send us some suggestions for topics.
We'd love to hear some suggestions from y'all and like any anything to keep us from going
off on random tangents about Star Wars and thirst traps on TikTok.
Look at our fifth episode.
We'll rein it in at some point, folks.
Maybe.
But for now, we'll talk about Wiley Nichol in 2026.
Stay safe, stay motivated and stay on the left of Old North.
Have a great day, everybody.
Bye.