Tick…Tick…TikTok…BOOM!
Strangled on the Vine
“Top CIA officials openly admit, Al-qaeda and Usama bin Laden are total and complete fabrications, never having existed at any time.” — Adam Curtis’s now very-difficult-to-find 2004 BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares
“Finest girl I ever met in my life / Want to take her home, make her my wife / Knew she was a freak when we started talkin’ / And she said ‘Fuck me like we fucked bin Laden…’ ” — The Lonely Island, “Finest Girl”
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Remember Vine?
Vine was a short-form video hosting service, a predecessor to TikTok, that was one of Twitter’s many acquisitions as the blessing/curse social media platform evolved from slender-but-hungry sparrow to The Biggest Baddest Blue Bird on the Block.
Launched in January 2013, Vine videos would loop repetitively and were max six-seconds long. Vine had its own social network platform, but it could also be shared on other social media spots like Facebook (and of course Twitter). It had the ability to upload by “Theme” to drive trends.
For a couple years Vine was quite the sensation among young people. By the end of 2015, Vine peaked with more than 200 million active users.
Competition to Vine popped up, of course, the way it always does in a healthy capitalist society — Kwai, Huddles, Vero, Coub, all now a veritable graveyard or retirement village of short-form video failures — but Vine had a couple big advantages going for it: It was first to market and it had the power plus deep pockets (and now we’ve learned U.S. intelligence community assistance) of Twitter behind it.
There was one competitor, however, that had equally deep pockets and just as much power and a government’s oomph behind it: TikTok, the Chinese video hosting service aimed at the West like a Wetiko-howitzer and based on China’s short video counterpart Douyin, launched in September 2016.
TikTok had one differentiating facet that Vine did not: It allowed longer videos, at first three minutes, then later up to 10 minutes. But Vine retained multiple other advantages: Getting to the space first, Twitter affiliation and bucks, American-made. Vine still hadn’t worked out the monetization or advertising angle, but it was surely just a matter of time.
The only way TikTok or any other competitor was going to catch and supersede Vine would be if Twitter shut it down and left the playing field wide open for a competitor to snatch all its market share. But that would be nuts! Every media and marketing trend was pointing to short-form video as the next frontier for financial fecundity.
And yet, that’s exactly what Twitter did. It shut down Vine on January 17, 2017, almost exactly four years after its launch, and only four months after China debuted its competitor. Remarkably fortuitous timing for TikTok in the marketplace, if you care to believe the Official Story™.
Since then, TikTok has been a hugely effective weapon in the Culture War that’s Civil War 2.0 which is actually WW3 but above all else a Spiritual War. It’s been Ground Zero for the rise of the Stridently Revolutionary Transgender Weirdos, pro-communism/socialism/collectivism/fascism nihilists, China cheerleaders, delusional Disney religious fanatics, satanic schoolteachers, “Minor Attracted Persons,” and some of the ugliest and most repellent blue-haired land whales in the history of themkind. Among other debilitating societal cancers.
And now, ladies & gentlemen, Osama bin Laden apologists.
Before my crack (or cracked?) Conspiracy Theorist cred gets questioned, let me first say that Yes, I know ObL was a long-time CIA connection and asset, going back to the Afghanistan War with Russia and probably before; that the bin Laden bloodline has been longtime pals with the Bush Crime Family, which treasonously pulled out all the stops to GTFO the 40+ members of the bin Laden brood from the USA by private plane while every airport in America was shut down after the 9/11 attacks; who “Tim Osman” is/was/wasn’t; how bin Laden likely died of liver failure (Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto told David Frost that in 2006; she got blown up soon after), long before we were told Obama got ‘im and he was “buried at sea,” LOL; and many other strange, shadowy, suspicious, sinister spin, secrets, hype, misdirection and lies about Osama bin Laden, all the way out to the fundamental falsehood about the guy’s name, which was actually published as Usama bin Laden until shortly before 9/11 when it was changed overnight all across corporate media to Osama bin Laden, maybe because the cruel joke of naming the plotter and planner of mass murder of Americans having USAma as his name was a little too on the nose when it comes to discussion of an “Inside Job” (or a LIHOP).
You can still find traces of “USAma bin Laden” lingering on the internet, however. The government’s FBI “Most Wanted” website, oddly, is one of them. How to explain that? Revelation of the Method? Gleeful cruel mockery of the ignorant masses? A cry for help? No matter the elucidation, chalk that one up right next to CIA putting a downloadable pdf of Fritz Springmeier’s conspiracy classic Bloodlines of the Illuminati on the CIA government website, which, when I was trying to get my hands on it in the 1990s, when Mr. Springmeier was sitting in jail on bullshit charges and some unknown force was trying to buy up all his books and bury or burn them, would’ve cost me a thousand bucks. Now the government will give it to you as a freebie. Strange Days, indeed.
Anyway, I’m not going to take you too deep down the Osama/Usama bin Laden rabbit hole today. I just want to acknowledge to my “conspiracy theory” peeps that I’m well aware one exists, and if you go too deep inside it you’ll discover the mutant rabbits down there have very sharp teeth.
Yet the vast majority of normies/muggles/sheep have no clue about anything relating to Osama/Usama other than the Official Story™ of how he attacked America on 9/11/01, is the personification of Islamic Evil, gave large leeway to the government to start stating things like “you’re either for us or against us,” and that as of the past week or so he’s being used as a prop to propagandize “against us.”
Yes, Virginia, the latest TikTok craze is the normalization, if not an elevation, of Osama/Usama bin Laden as parapolitical philosopher: The marketing of his at-the-time-notorious but then corporate media memory-holed “Letter to America” in 2002. In it, ObL/UbL explained why terror was coming to America’s shores, basically blaming the West’s treatment of the Palestinians and how the USA is a tool of Satan and Israel, not necessarily in that order or maybe they’re the same thing. You can read it for yourself and decide.
One of these days I might get around to the Middle East parapolitics myself, but for today’s purposes we’ll stick to American parapolitics, propaganda and TikTok.
The TikTok platform has been a massive mind-virus win for China. Anybody not addicted to it or a blue-haired lesbian land whale knows it. Thus, I was happy in July, 2020, when President Orange and his CIA director (and now the footnote first failed primary candidate for 2024 GOPrez) Mike Pompeo announced TikTok was a national security threat and they were going to ban it, because the FCC had discovered TikTok was providing a back door for China to grab everything off your phone or computer.
This was a bipartisan thing, incidentally. Right afterwards in July, 2020, the Joe Biden presidential campaign told its staff to delete TikTok for security reasons.
That lasted until after the blatantly stolen 2020 election (3 a.m. — the vvitching hour!). Once in the White House, whoever’s running the Biden-bot made the puppet pretzeldent sign a fresh Executive Order in June, 2021, revoking the Trump Administration's pending ban on TikTok.
Since then, of course, like with a lot of things, President Orange has been proven right. Even his most rabid enemies in Congress, specifically squinty-eyed Senator from Virginia and insufferably dishonest intel community butt-boy Mark Warner, who said recently: “As painful as it is for me to admit, Donald Trump was right and if we could’ve taken action [against TikTok] then, that’d have been a heck of a lot easier than trying to take action [now]. The sooner we bite the bullet, the better.”
How’s the bullet-biting going, Mark? Not so hot. While TikTok remains a free-range animal seeking to turn the next generation of short-attention-span trans-bots into straight-up anti-American Jihadists, all eyes and targets inexplicably remain on Twitter from the apparently similarly-minded anti-Constitution, anti-free speech contingent of crony capitalists (and worse) in the controlled corrupt collectivist corporate clown media and the despicable dishonest message-control freaks in the abominable advertising industry.
On my way out, I’ll note that once things reached critical mass, yesterday TikTok reportedly started removing hashtags promoting the ObL/UbL letter, and the non-journalist cowards at The Guardian deleted the letter from their website. But by that point Pandora’s Box had already been opened and gone viral. Now the subsequent censorship squelching only ignites the Streisand Effect.
Since we’re living in a horror movie, I’ll cite one: “The killer is inside the house!” TikTok is a singular surveillance and brainwashing weapon wielded against America, poisoning our youth at a rapid rate. The conquering Chinese are laughing their asses off about it, watching our national social media suicide, Seppuku on a selfie stick. Because, for some incomprehensible reason, Twitter served up Silicon Valley’s self-skewering sword on a silver platter when they strangled Vine, leaving things wide open for Zhongguo to toss a psychological and technological time bomb with multiple countdowns, ticking away, ticking away, ticking away.
It's such a relief to hear from somebody who has a memory. And questions the official history of events.
So many commentators react emotionally to the latest outrage like it appeared from nowhere. Or examine it in the context of clearly fabricated history.
One of the best pieces yet by Tom…especially the dope on a dope comment…great work.