The Republican Party may be struggling to reach Generation Z, but Nikki Haley, appearing at a Fox News town hall event on Sunday, said the answer is not TikTok, the Chinese social media platform.
In a conversation with “America Reports” co-host John Roberts, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, criticized President Biden for posting a TikTok clip on Super Bowl night younger voters. She also criticized former President Donald J. Trump, her main rival in the Republican Party, for failing to limit the use while he was in the White House.
“President Trump said he would ban TikTok, and when President Xi asked him not to, that fell by the wayside,” she said, referring to Xi Jinping, China’s leader. “We should have banned it from the start. It’s incredibly dangerous.”
The volleys against both men are part of a broader argument Ms. Haley has made in recent media appearances and on the campaign trail that it is time for new leadership. Her attacks on Mr. Trump, under whom she served as ambassador, have become particularly sharper as the two head into a primary fight in South Carolina on Saturday.
At Sunday’s town hall event, Ms. Haley, as before, broke with her party’s isolationist wing on foreign policy and criticized the former president for his friendly relations with authoritarian leaders like Mr. Jinping and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. She argued that Mr. Putin “knows exactly what he did to Aleksei A. Navalny,” the outspoken Russian opposition leader who died in prison last week, and rebuked Mr. Trump for suggesting he would oppose Russian aggression against Promote US allies in Europe.
“I think that’s why it’s so damaging when Trump said he was going with Putin and actually encouraged invading NATO allies instead of standing with our allies,” she said .
When a young voter asked her why she thought the GOP had largely ignored Generation Z and first-time voters, Ms. Haley called it “a problem” and argued that Republicans need to listen better to a demographic that has different concerns, such as the environment and debt.
Asked what she thought about the Biden White House and Democrats using TikTok for public relations, Ms. Haley renewed her calls for a ban, saying China has access to too much personal data.
“America cannot be the last country to ban TikTok,” she said.
TikTok became a political flashpoint as both Democrats and Republicans accused the app of not doing enough to protect Americans’ data. They also said TikTok downplayed its relationship with ByteDance, the app’s parent company based in China – where national laws allow authorities in Beijing to secretly request data from local companies. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, criticized TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during a hearing this month, insinuating that Mr. Chew was affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, the country’s totalitarian ruling party.
Ms. Haley brought these concerns to the campaign trail and called for a complete ban on the app. In a Republican debate in September, she called TikTok “one of the most dangerous social media assets” and attacked Vivek Ramaswamy, an opposing candidate who supports using the app to reach young voters. The two continued to discuss the issue: Mr. Ramaswamy pointed out that Ms. Haley’s adult daughter uses the app. Ms. Haley then called him “scum.”
She regularly called for a TikTok ban during the campaign and accused the Chinese government of using psychological warfare against American users by distributing content on the app that Ms. Haley considered subversive. In November, for example, she argued that young Americans were more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause because of the “pro-Hamas videos on TikTok.” Users promoted the “Letter to America” on the platform in the early days of Israel’s war in Gaza, a text written by Osama bin Laden after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“There are members of our younger generation who say they now understand why he did it. This is disgusting,” she said while campaigning in Iowa. “This is not America doing this. This is China doing this.”
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2024-02-19 00:11:48
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