Even by the standards of Congress, the past few weeks have been a lesson in hypocrisy. Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation that will require TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States—all over concerns that the Communist Party of China uses the app for surveillance. Yet just a few days earlier, Biden had renewed a law synonymous with American surveillance: Section 702.

You may never have heard of Section 702, but the sweeping, George W. Bush–era mandate gives intelligence agencies the authority to track online communication, such as text messages, emails, and Facebook posts. Legally, Americans aren’t supposed to be surveilled through this law. But from 2020 to 2021, the FBI misused Section 702 data more than 278,000 times, including to surveil Americans linked to the January 6 riot and Black Lives Matter protests. (The FBI claims it has since reformed its policies.)

The contradiction between TikTok and Section 702 is maddening, but it points to lawmakers’ continued failure to wrestle with the most basic questions of how to protect the American public in the algorithmic age. It’s quite fair to worry, as Congress does, that TikTok’s mass collection of personal data can pose a threat to our data. Yet Meta, X, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other popular platform also suck up our personal data. And while the fear around foreign meddling that has animated the TikTok ban has largely rested on hypotheticals, there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that Facebook, at least, has effectively operated as a kind of “hostile foreign power,” as The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance put it, with “its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy.”

[Read: The largest autocracy on Earth]

Congress has largely twiddled its thumbs as social-media companies have engaged in this kind of chicanery—until TikTok. ByteDance is hardly a candidate for sainthood, but who would want to beatify Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? Abroad, America’s surveillance draws much of the same political condemnation Congress is now levying at China. The privacy advocate Max Schrems repeatedly sued Facebook to stop the company from sharing Europeans’ data with the U.S., where the information could be searched by intelligence agencies. He won multiple times. Last year, European Union regulators fined Meta $1.3 billion for transferring Facebook user data to servers in the United States.

Congress’s tech dysfunction extends well beyond this privacy double standard. The growing backlash to platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is not aimed at any of the substantial issues around privacy and surveillance, such as the ubiquitous tracking of our online activity and the widespread use of facial recognition. Instead, they’re defined by an amorphous moral panic.

Take the Kids Online Safety Act, an alarmingly popular bill in Congress that would radically remake internet governance in the United States. Under KOSA, companies would have a duty to help defend minors from a broad constellation of harms, including mental-health impacts, substance use, and types of sexual content. The bill might actually require companies to gather even more data about everything we see and say, every person with whom we have contact, every time we use our devices. That’s because you can’t systematically defend against Congress’s laundry list of digital threats without massive surveillance of everything we say and every person we meet on these platforms. For companies such as Signal, the encrypted-messaging app that political dissidents rely on around the world, this could mean being forced to operate more like Facebook, WhatsApp, and the other platforms they’ve always sought to provide an alternative to. Or, more likely, it would mean that companies that prioritize privacy simply couldn’t do business in the U.S. at all.

Perhaps the biggest protection Americans have against measures such as KOSA is how badly they’re designed. They all rest on proving users’ age, but the truth is that there’s simply no way to know whether someone scrolling on their phone is a teen or a retiree. States such as Louisiana and Utah have experimented with invasive and discriminatory technologies such as facial recognition and facial-age estimation, despite evidence that the technology is far more error-prone when it comes to nonwhite faces, especially Black women’s faces.  

But these misguided bills haven’t completely derailed lawmakers pushing real reforms to U.S. mass surveillance. Within days of the House passing the TikTok ban and Section 702 renewal, it also passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which closes the loophole that lets police pay companies for our data without getting a warrant. Yet the bill now finds itself in limbo in the Senate.

Regulating technology doesn’t have to be this hard. Even when the products are complex, solutions can be shockingly simple, banning harmful business and policing practices as they emerge. But Congress remains unwilling or unable to take on the types of mass surveillance that social-media firms use to make billions, or that intelligence agencies use to grow their ever-expanding pool of data. For now, America’s real surveillance threats are coming from inside the house.

So: You’ve decided to force a multibillion-dollar technology company with ties to China to divest from its powerful social-video app. Congratulations! Here’s what’s next: *awful gurgling noises*

Yesterday evening, the Senate passed a bill—appended to a $95 billion foreign-aid package—that would compel ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within about nine months or face a ban in the United States. President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, initiating what is likely to be a rushed, chaotic, technologically and logistically complex legal process that is likely to please almost no one.

The government’s case against TikTok is vague. Broadly speaking, the concern from lawmakers —offered without definitive proof of any actual malfeasance—is that the Chinese government can use TikTok, an extremely popular broadcast and consumption platform for millions of Americans, to quietly and algorithmically promote propaganda, potentially meddling in our nation’s politics. According to the U.S. State Department, the Chinese government is set on using its influence to “reshape the global information environment” and has long manipulated information, intimidated critics, and used state-run media to try and bolster the Chinese Communist Party’s reputation abroad. Lawmakers have also cited privacy concerns, suggesting that TikTok could turn American user data over to the CCP—again without definitive proof that this has ever occurred.

This week, Senator Mark Warner told reporters that, although many young Americans are skeptical of the case against the app, “at the end of the day, they’ve not seen what Congress has seen.” But until the American public is let in on the supposed revelations included in these classified briefings, the case against TikTok will feel like it is based on little more than the vague idea that China shouldn’t own any information distribution tool that Americans use regularly. Some of the evidence may also be of dubious provenance—as Wired reported recently, a TikTok whistleblower who claims to have spoken with numerous politicians about a potential ban may have overstated his role at the company and offered numerous improbable claims about its inner workings.

TikTok, for its part, has argued that it has made good-faith efforts to comply with U.S. law. In 2022, it spent $1.5 billion on data security initiatives, including partnering with Oracle to move American user data Stateside. Under the partnership, Oracle is in charge of auditing TikTok data for compliance. But, as Forbes reported last year, some user data from American TikTok creators and businesses, including Social Security numbers, appear to have been stored on Chinese servers. Such reports are legitimately alarming but with further context might also be moot; although the ability to do so has recently been limited, for a long time, China (or anyone else for that matter) could purchase  such personal information from data brokers. (In fact, China has reportedly accessed such data in the past—from American-owned companies such as Twitter and Facebook.)

[Read: It’s just an app]

The nuances of the government’s concerns matter, because TikTok is probably going to challenge this law based on the notion that forcing a sale or banning the app is a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights. The government will likely argue that, under Chinese ownership, the app presents a clear and present national-security threat and hope that the phrase acts as a cheat code to compel the courts without further evidence.

Nobody knows what is going to happen, and part of the reason why is because the entire process has been rushed—passed under the cover of a separate and far more pressing bill that includes humanitarian aid to Gaza, weapons aid for Israel, and money to assist the Ukrainian war effort. This tactic is common among legislators, but in this case, the TikTok bill’s hurried passage masks any attempts to game out the logistics of a TikTok ban or divestiture.

Setting aside the possibility that the courts declare the law unconstitutional, here are just a few of the glaring logistical issues facing the legislation: First, recommendation algorithms—in TikTok’s case, the code that determines what individual users see on the app and the boogeyman at the center of this particular congressional moral panic—are part of China’s export control list. The country must approve the sale of that technology, and as one expert told NPR recently, the Chinese government has said unequivocally that it will not do so. TikTok’s potential buyer may, in essence, be purchasing a brand, a user base, and a user interface, without its most precious proprietary ingredient.

This might make for a tough sell, which raises the second issue: Who is going to buy TikTok? At the heart of the government’s case against the app lies a contradiction. The logic is that TikTok is the beating heart of a social-media industrial complex that mines our data and uses them to manipulate our behavior and, as such, it is very bad for an authoritarian country to have access to these tools. Left unsaid, though, is why, if the government believes this is true, should anyone have access to these tools? If we’re to grant the lawmakers’ claim  that TikTok is a powerful enough tool to influence the outcomes of American elections, surely the process of choosing a buyer would have to be rigorous and complicated. One analysis of TikTok’s U.S. market values the app at $100 billion—a sum that rather quickly narrows down the field of buyers.

Tech giants such as Meta or Microsoft come to mind, which, if approved, would amount to a massive consolidation in the social-media space, giving these companies greater control over how Americans distribute and consume information (a responsibility that Meta, at least, would rather not deal with, especially when it comes to political news; it has overtly deprioritized the sharing of news in Threads, its X competitor). Bids from Oracle and Walmart have been floated in the past—both of which would amount to selling a ton of user data to already powerful companies. That leaves private-equity funds and pooled purchases from interested American investors, such as Steve Mnuchin (who, as Treasury secretary during the Trump administration, was vocally in favor of a TikTok ban) and a handful of billionaires.

[Read: The moneyball theory of presidential social media]

But as we’ve seen from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, putting the fate of a social-media platform into the hands of a few highly motivated individuals can quickly turn into a nightmare. A Muskian ideological purchase would mean a set of owners manipulating the app as part of an extended political project, perhaps even one that works against the interests of the United States—almost exactly what lawmakers fear China might be doing. There is, too, the ironic possibility that any outside investors with enough money to purchase the app might themselves have ties to China, as Musk himself does through Tesla. In this scenario, a sale might end up merely providing the CCP with a helpful veneer of plausible deniability.

There is also the Trump factor. The law gives the sitting president broad authority to judge a worthy buyer, and it gives ByteDance 270 days to find a suitor—a period that the president can extend by 90 days. Close observers might note that there are 194 days until the next election and some 270 days until the next president is sworn into office. It stands to reason that Biden’s qualified buyer might be different from one selected by Donald Trump, who has his own media conglomerate and social app, Truth Social, and is famous for self-dealing.

Trump, for his part, has reversed his opinion on TikTok’s sale (he had previously been in favor, but now opposes it), reportedly after pressure from one of his China-friendly mega donors. If elected, Trump could plausibly attempt a reversal of policy or simply turn around and approve the sale of TikTok to a group with close ties to China. Or, of course, the courts could strike all of this down. Regardless of who is president at the time, this is a lot of authority to grant to one partisan authority. You can play this 37-dimensional game of mergers and acquisitions chess all day long, but, ultimately, nobody knows what’s going on. It’s chaos!

Process matters. If you’re of the mind that TikTok is a pressing national-security threat, you’d be well within your rights to be frustrated by the way this bill has been shoehorned into law. It happened so quickly that the government might not be able to adequately prove its national-security case and might miss this opportunity. And if you, like me, believe that TikTok is bad in the ways all algorithmic social media is bad, but not uniquely bad—that is, if you believe that the harms presented by social media are complex and cannot be reduced to an Axis of Evil designation—you might very well be furious that the first major legislation against a big tech company is, at this point, little more than vibes-based fearmongering. The case for TikTok is debatable, but the path the government has taken to determine its fate is unquestionably sloppy and short-sighted.

Search on the Chinese food-delivery app Meituan for ejiao, and all sorts of goodies pop up. Ejiao was once a luxury consumed at the emperor’s court, valued as a traditional remedy taken to strengthen the blood, improve sleep, and slow aging. Today, ejiao is for the masses. People drink it in a tonic that costs about $2 for 10 vials; eat it in small cakes made with rock sugar, rice wine, walnuts, and black sesame at $7 for a tin of 30; or snack on ejiao-coated dates at just under a dollar a packet.

There’s just one problem: The collagenous substance is extracted from donkey hides. China’s domestic donkey population has plunged precipitously, and now the nation’s mass taste is stripping African farms of one of their most essential and valuable assets. In countries as far-flung as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Botswana, animals that are the mainstays of many small farms—where donkeys are used for plowing, hauling crops to market, and many other purposes—are instead being slaughtered for the cash value of their skins.

The drain has become so damaging to Africa’s rural economy that in February the 55-member African Union approved a continent-wide ban on the slaughter of donkeys for their skins at its heads-of-state summit. Whether the governments of Africa can implement such a ban remains to be seen. If they do, they could seriously pinch the Chinese ejiao industry.

China’s rulers have done nothing to address the issue. On the surface, their inaction is bewildering. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has expended huge sums of political and financial capital on wooing the countries of the developing world, especially in Africa. Given that context, stepping in to regulate the ejiao trade and help preserve the African donkey would seem an easy, low-cost way of proving China’s willingness to be a constructive partner.

[Read: China’s latest food scandal: fox-tainted donkey meat]

“Leadership comes with responsibility,” Oscar Meywa Otele, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi, told me. African countries would like to see China play “a more meaningful and acceptable role,” but the donkey issue is a big enough problem that it “may undermine [China’s] ambitions to be the leader of the Global South.”

Xi’s grand goals can conflict with China’s short-term economic and political interests. When this occurs, it opens a window onto Beijing’s true attitude toward its putative partners and raises doubts about China’s readiness to assume that leadership. That matters in Washington. As the developing world becomes a battleground between the United States and China, with both eager to gain adherents to their competing visions for a reformed world order, the contradictions of Xi’s approach could damage his efforts to portray Beijing as more sympathetic to the interests and needs of poor countries. The humble donkey has thus taken on geopolitical significance.

China’s consumption of ejiao has increased with the country’s wealth. Back in 1990, ejiao makers in China required some 200,000 donkey hides annually. Now they are believed to consume about 4 to 6 million skins a year. That amounts to approximately 10 percent of the world’s estimated donkey population of 53 million—a rate of attrition that is clearly unsustainable. The demand from ejiao producers outstripped domestic supplies years ago and led to a brisk import business.

Exactly how many hides come from Africa is unclear, but the continent is home to two-thirds of the world’s donkeys, so it’s safe to assume that African exports account for a large share. Because donkeys breed slowly—a jennet typically produces a foal only every other year—the drain is rapidly depleting Africa’s herd. One study suggests that South Africa’s donkey population declined from 210,000 animals in 1996 to 146,000 in 2019. On current trend, the donkey could completely vanish from the continent over the next two decades. In addition, the rising value of pelts has encouraged the illicit slaughter of donkeys, the bypassing of regulatory controls, and the widespread theft of donkeys from poor farmers.

Beijing could do much to alleviate the problem. Better regulating the donkey-skin trade on its end could assist African governments in monitoring and controlling exports, as well as ensure a more sustainable supply to China’s ejiao producers. Why Beijing has not bothered to react is a matter of speculation. One factor could be that the government likes to promote traditional medicine, at home and abroad, as a way of highlighting China’s ancient science and civilization; in that respect, it may see any restraint on the industry as counter to the national interest. Or the welfare of donkeys and the plight of African farmers may simply be below Beijing’s attention threshold, compared with its more pressing geopolitical concerns.

[Read: A donkey ambulance for women in labor in Afghanistan]

China’s abusive donkey trade is part of a wider pattern of Chinese exploitation of the global South’s resources. Chinese fleets have long been accused of aggressive overfishing, from the West African coast to the South Pacific. In the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territorial waters, Chinese vessels block fishermen from neighboring countries from traditional fishing grounds, which is a significant point of contention among governments of the region.

China’s commercial interests are also at odds with Beijing’s effort to promote itself as a champion of the world’s poorest nations. A lending binge by state banks, much of it to support Xi’s global infrastructure-building scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative, has been touted as a sustainable-development program and proof of China’s superiority as an economic partner. But these loans, which turned China into the world’s largest official creditor to the developing world, have contributed to a debt crisis in the global South as some low-income countries have become overburdened and unable to make repayments.

Yet Beijing has shown its debtors little sympathy, and the state banks have been squeezing poor countries hard. They have resisted writing down some of the loan principal—a common practice in debt restructurings that is aimed at speeding a return to solvency—and typically insist on cutting deals in secret to beat other creditors to what’s left in the depleted coffers of debtor countries. When, for instance, Angola had to restructure a $15 billion loan from China in 2020, the state-owned China Development Bank first began paying itself interest from a mandated escrow account. Then, anticipating the exhaustion of that source, the bank demanded that the cash-poor government replenish it.

Developing countries “are getting to know China in a different role,” Bradley Parks, the executive director of the research lab AidData at William & Mary, told me. Less for its largesse, and more “as the world’s largest debt collector.” And he added: “Debt collectors don’t win a lot of popularity contests.”

At the same time, new lending from Beijing has all but dried up over the past five years. As a result, the flow of funds that once went from China to the global South has reversed. A 2023 study of China’s lending program published by the American Economic Association revealed that developing countries are now paying more to Chinese banks to service their debts than they are receiving in new loans.

[Read: The rich men who drink rhino horns]

Chinese leaders’ approach to developing-world debt “is in direct tension with their desire to enjoy influence with the general public and with governing elites within the developing world,” Parks said. Throughout this push for influence, Chinese leaders have been at pains to portray themselves as selfless partners, interested in the global good, in contrast with the West. “In promoting its own development process, China always insists on mutual support with the countries of the South, complementing each other’s strengths, and jointly building a modernized Global South,” Liu Jianchao, the influential head of the Communist Party’s international department, recently reiterated in a top ideological journal.

Yet the reality is that China’s ascent presents as many risks as benefits to emerging economies. Xi still appears to believe that he can lead the rising voices of the global South in a struggle against their former colonial masters in the West. But China’s actual policies toward the developing world are beginning to echo that old colonialism: the exploitation of resources to benefit the center, the metropole’s self-perception that its superior civilization confers special rights, the use of capital to extract more wealth from the less fortunate.

“It’s African governments that need to be much more proactive. You can’t afford to let China dictate to you,” Sanusha Naidu, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, a South Africa–based think tank, told me. “That’s been the big challenge, the difficulty, in this relationship.”

The African Union donkey ban is a sign that the continent’s leaders are deciding to act in that more proactive way. Implicit in the ban is a strong message that China can’t have all it wants, on its own terms, from the global South. If the African Union succeeds in shutting down the trade in donkey hides to China, Beijing will no longer be able to pretend that its actions have no detrimental effect on African countries or its reputation on the continent. The ejiao industry is already damaging China-Africa relations, Lauren Johnston, a China expert at the University of Sydney, told me. “It’s making people hate China.”

It’s not too late, because it’s never too late. No outcomes are ever preordained, nothing is ever over, and you can always affect what happens tomorrow by making the right choices today. The U.S. Congress is finally making one of those right choices. Soon, American weapons and ammunition will once again start flowing to Ukraine.

But delays do have a price. By dawdling for so many months, by heading down the blind alley of border reform before turning back, congressional Republicans who blocked weapons and ammunition for Ukraine did an enormous amount of damage, some of it irreparable. Over the past six months, Ukraine lost territory, lives, and infrastructure. If Ukraine had not been deprived of air defense, the city of Kharkiv might still have most of its power plants. People who have died in the near-daily bombardment of Odesa might still be alive. Ukrainian soldiers who spent weeks at the front lines rationing ammunition might not be so demoralized.

[David Frum: Trump deflates]

The delay has changed American politics too. Only a minority of House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, joined most Democrats to approve $60 billion in aid yesterday. What is now clearly a pro-Russia Republican caucus has consolidated inside Congress. The lesson is clear: Anyone who seeks to manipulate the foreign policy of the United States, whether the tin-pot autocrat in Hungary or the Communist Party of China, now knows that a carefully designed propaganda campaign, when targeted at the right people, can succeed well beyond what anyone once thought possible. From the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion, President Vladimir Putin has been trying to conquer Ukraine through psychological games as well as military force. He needed to persuade Americans, Europeans, and above all Ukrainians that victory was impossible, that the only alternative was surrender, and that the Ukrainian state would disappear in due course.

Plenty of Americans and Europeans, though not so many Ukrainians, supported this view. Pro-Russia influencers—Tucker Carlson, J. D. Vance, David Sacks—backed up by an army of pro-Russia trolls on X and other social-media platforms, helped feed the narrative of failure and convinced a minority in Congress to block aid for Ukraine. It’s instructive to trace the path of a social-media post that falsely claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky owns two yachts, how it traveled up the food chain late last year, from the keyboard of a propagandist through the echo chamber created by trolls and into the brains of American lawmakers. According to Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, some of his colleagues worried out loud, during debates about military aid to Ukraine, that “people will buy yachts with this money.” They had read the false stories and believed they were true.

But with the passage of this aid bill, Russia’s demoralization campaign has suffered a severe setback. This is also a setback for the Russian war effort, and not only because the Ukrainians will now have more ammunition. Suddenly the Russian military and Russian society are once again faced with the prospect of a very long war. Ukraine, backed by the combined military and economic forces of the United States and the European Union, is a much different opponent than Ukraine isolated and alone.

[Read: The war is not going well for Ukraine]

That doesn’t mean that the Russians will quickly give up: Putin and the propagandists who support him on state television have repeatedly stated that their goal is not to gain a bit of extra territory but to control all of Ukraine. They don’t want to swap land for peace. They want to occupy Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv, and more. Now, while their goals become harder to reach, is a good moment for the democratic countries backing Ukraine to recalibrate our strategy too.

Once the aid package becomes law this week, the psychological advantage will once again be on our side. Let’s use it. As Johnson himself recommended, the Biden administration should immediately pressure European allies to release the $300 billion in Russian assets that they jointly hold and send it to Ukraine. There are excellent legal and moral arguments for doing so—the money can legitimately be considered a form of reparations. This shift would also make clear to the Kremlin that it has no path back to what used to be called “normal” relations, and that the price Russia is paying for its colonial war will only continue to grow.

This is also a good moment for both Europeans and Americans to take the sanctions and export-control regimes imposed on Russia more seriously. If NATO were running a true economic-pressure campaign, thousands of people would be involved, with banks of screens at a central command center and constantly updated intelligence. Instead, the task has been left to a smattering of people across different agencies in different countries who may or may not be aware of what others are doing.

As American aid resumes, the Ukrainians should be actively encouraged to pursue the asymmetric warfare that they do best. The air and naval drone campaign that pushed the Black Sea Fleet away from their coastline, the raids on Russian gas and oil facilities thousands of miles from Ukraine, the recruitment of Russian soldiers, in Russia, to join pro-Ukraine Russian units fighting on the border—we need more of this, not less. The Biden administration should also heed Johnson’s suggestion that the United States supply more and better long-range weapons so that Ukrainians can hit Russian missile launchers before the missiles reach Ukraine. If the U.S. had done so in the autumn of 2022, when Ukraine was taking back territory, the world might look a lot different today.  

This war will be over only when the Russians no longer want to fight—and they will stop fighting when they realize they cannot win. Now it is our turn to convince them, as well as our own pro-Russia caucus, that their invasion will fail. The best way to do that is to believe it ourselves.

Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?

The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Later research found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.

Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts.  

This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”

[Andrew Moseman: The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles]

The president has chosen which end of the bargain he’s willing to take. The Biden administration has left in place a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese vehicles (a measure initiated by Donald Trump), which has kept most Chinese EVs out of the U.S. even as they are selling like crazy in Europe. That probably won’t hold off Chinese EVs forever, which is why the administration is contemplating further restrictions. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” Biden said in a statement in February. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”

One view of this approach is that Biden is choosing to sabotage his own climate goals by cynically pandering to a tiny group of swing voters. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has observed, less than 1 percent of Americans work directly in the auto industry, whereas more than 90 percent of American households have a car.

The Biden administration, unsurprisingly, sees the situation differently. Biden’s team starts from the premise that decarbonizing the U.S. economy will be a decades-long effort requiring sustained political buy-in from the public. Chinese EVs might lower emissions in the short term, but the resulting backlash could help elect Trump and other Republicans intent on rolling back the Biden administration’s hard-won climate achievements. Keeping out Chinese EVs now, in other words, may be necessary to save the planet later.

“We ran this experiment before,” Jennifer Harris, who served as the senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, told me, referring to the first China shock. “We saw whole industries shift overseas, and Trump rode those grievances right to the White House. And last time I checked, he didn’t do much decarbonizing.” Already, Trump is trying to turn Chinese EVs into a wedge issue in the 2024 election; his recent “bloodbath” comments were a reference to what would happen to America if Chinese cars were allowed into the country.

That doesn’t mean the Biden administration is giving up on an electric-vehicle future; it just means that future will need to be built at home instead of imported from abroad. Threading that needle won’t be easy. Apart from Tesla, American automakers still make the bulk of their profits selling gas-powered pickup trucks and SUVs while bleeding money on EVs. (Last year, GM lost $1.7 billion on its EV business; Ford lost $4.7 billion.) Although the generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to speed up the pivot to electric vehicles, U.S. companies—including Tesla—aren’t close to profitably producing EVs nearly as cheaply as China can today.

The most straightforward way to buy time is by imposing further trade restrictions. But doing so effectively requires careful calibration: Expose American automakers to Chinese competition too quickly and they could whither and die, but protect them for too long and they might remain complacent selling expensive gas-guzzling cars instead of transitioning toward cheaper EVs. “The sweet spot is where you prevent a rapid shift of production to China while also holding the auto industry’s feet to the fire,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me.

Separating technocratic analysis of policy objectives from the vicissitudes of politics, however, is easier said than done. Trump recently called for a 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars; Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri recently proposed legislation to raise that to 125 percent. Even congressional Democrats—many of whom are facing close elections in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin—have recently begun pressuring the Biden administration to raise tariffs further.

That isn’t the only way political currents could undermine the transition to electric vehicles. In order to compete with Chinese EVs, American companies must, paradoxically, learn from Chinese battery makers, who have spent decades developing the best EV batteries in the world. The U.S. auto industry knows this, which is why in February of last year Ford announced a partnership with China’s leading battery maker, CATL, to open a factory in Michigan. Ford would pay CATL to, in the words of Ford’s chairman, “help us get up to speed so that we can build these batteries ourselves” and create 2,500 new manufacturing jobs in the process. (Such partnerships are common in the EV industry; Tesla, for instance, partnered with the Japanese company Panasonic to develop its batteries.) Everybody would win: Ford, CATL, American workers, the planet.

But the backlash was swift. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia called the Ford-CATL partnership a “Trojan-horse relationship with the Chinese Communist Party” and vowed to keep similar projects out of his state. House Republicans launched multiple investigations into the deal, claiming that it could pose a national-security risk. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was instrumental in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, has balked at the notion that a partnership with a Chinese company could qualify for the subsidies that that law provides.

[Zoë Schlanger: Joe Biden and Donald Trump have thoughts about your next car]

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Biden administration eventually announced new guidelines that could disqualify the deal, and others like it, from being eligible for some of the IRA’s tax credits and grants—a move that would make it much harder for American car companies to gain the expertise they need to produce better, cheaper EVs. “It’s ironic, really,” Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Our efforts to cut China out from every part of the supply chain might actually be what prevents us from competing with their EVs.”

Herein lies the Biden administration’s deeper dilemma. Decarbonizing the U.S. while retaining a thriving auto industry requires a delicate balance between tariffs and subsidies, between protection and competition, between beating the Chinese and learning from them. The prevailing sentiment toward China in Washington, however, is neither delicate nor balanced. That America’s leaders are committed to preventing another China shock is commendable. But going too far in the other direction could produce a different kind of avoidable disaster.

“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.”

Li, who calls himself an “indie journalist” and subsequently posted another video blaming Israel for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, got more than 160,000 views for his TikTok theory—and the video was one of the poorer-performing entries making similar claims on the platform.

What prompted this outburst? On March 13, Congress advanced a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese parent company six months to sell it or be banned from American app stores. The legislation passed 352–65, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the rational observer will have no trouble understanding why.

The United States has a long history of preventing foreign adversaries from controlling important communications infrastructure. Washington spent more than a decade, under Democratic and Republican presidents, leading a successful international campaign to block the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from Western markets. Donald Trump attempted to force a TikTok sale back in 2020. The reasons are straightforward: The app has access to the data of some 150 million American users—nearly half the population—but it is owned and controlled by the Chinese company ByteDance. Like all companies in the country, ByteDance is effectively under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly punishes and even disappears business leaders who displease it. A former ByteDance executive has said that the CCP had “supreme access” to the company’s data, and used the info to track protesters in Hong Kong, for example.

[Read: Beijing is ruining TikTok]

Recent polls show robust public support for TikTok’s ban or sale, and for years, Gallup has found that Americans see China as the country’s greatest enemy. In short, Congress has strong electoral and political incentives to act against TikTok. But spend some time on the platform itself, and you’ll discover a very different culprit behind all this: Jews.

“We were all thinking it: Israel is trying to buy TikTok,” the influencer Ian Carroll told his 1.5 million followers last month. The evidence: Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive, has sought investors to purchase the app. “He’s not Israel, right?” continued Carroll. “Well, let’s peel this onion back one layer at a time, starting with just the fact that he’s Jewish.”

Carroll’s TikTok bio says “do your own research,” and he certainly had research to share. “The censorship is not about China on TikTok,” he explained. Rather, “as a TikTok creator who gets censored all the frickin’ time, I can tell you that the things you get censored about are the CIA and Israel.” Carroll did not address why Israel would go through so much trouble to acquire TikTok if it already controlled the platform, or why the Semitic censors somehow missed his video and its more than 1 million views, not to mention the several similarly viral follow-ups he posted.

In truth, far from suppressing such content, TikTok’s algorithm happily promotes it. I purposely viewed the videos for this piece while logged out of the platform, and it nonetheless began suggesting to me more material along these lines through its sidebar recommendations.

Characteristic of anti-Semitic online discourse, these videos and others like them interchangeably reference individual American Jews, American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the state of Israel, as though they are all part of one single-minded international conspiracy to take down TikTok. When a commenter asked Carroll to “look into universal studios pulling their music from TikTok,” a reference to the Universal Music conglomerate’s dispute with TikTok over royalties, Carroll replied, “Universal CEO is a Jewish man.”

“A foreign government is influencing the 2024 election,” the leftist podcaster and former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray declared on X in March. “I’m not talking about China, but Israel. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a ‘TikTok problem.’ Suddenly, a divided Congress agrees on one thing: A social media ban.” Greenblatt is an American Jew, the ADL is an American organization, the bill isn’t a ban, and the push for a forced sale predated the Gaza war, but other than that, Gray was on the money.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why Facebook and Twitter won’t ban antisemitism]

“Banning TikTok became a crucial emergency because what they saw was a bunch of young individuals, essentially people that are going to be the future leaders of America, who were not pro-Israel,” the far-right commentator Candace Owens claimed in March on her popular show at The Daily Wire. She then issued an implied threat: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, the ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed … You can see that sentiment building.” (Owens left The Daily Wire a week later following a string of anti-Semitic incidents, which included claims that Jews were doing “horrific things” and “controlling people with blackmail,” as well as her favoriting a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.”)

At this point, it’s not uncommon to find videos about the TikTok legislation that do not even mention Jews or Israel—like this one with 1.5 million views—yet are flooded with hundreds of comments, garnering tens of thousands of likes, accusing “Zionists,” “Jews,” or AIPAC of being behind it, despite years of national-security reporting on concerns over the platform’s Chinese owners. That alleged Jewish malefactors are being assailed on TikTok even when they are not invoked explicitly in a video illustrates how widely the meme has spread.

Like many conspiracy theories, the notion that Jews are out to ban TikTok contains a grain of truth. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have raised concerns about TikTok’s failure to moderate anti-Semitic content for years, including when it pertains to Israel, but they have never called for the app to be shut down. After the TikTok sale legislation was proposed, the Jewish Federations of North America said it “appropriately balances free speech and individual rights with regulatory action” while asserting that “our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” (Presumably, the organization arrived at this conclusion by spending 10 minutes on the app.) Researchers have found that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs pro-Israel content on TikTok, likely reflecting the platform’s young and international demographic.

But no conspiracy theories or appeals to recent geopolitical developments are necessary to understand why U.S. politicians wouldn’t want one of the most-trafficked social-media networks in America to be run by Communist China via a black-box algorithm. Just this past December, researchers at Rutgers found that anti-China posts on topics like the Hong Kong protests or the regime’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.

TikTok’s response to allegations that it could function as a foreign influence operation have not exactly allayed concerns. Shortly after the Rutgers study was published, the app restricted access to the tool used by academics to track its content. Last month, it sent multiple alerts to its American users falsely warning that Congress was about to ban TikTok and urging them to contact their representatives. In fact, the bill seeks to force a sale to new ownership, much as congressional scrutiny over data privacy led the dating app Grindr to be sold to non-Chinese owners in 2020.

Simply put, none of what is happening to the social-media platform is new. Neither is the tendency to blame Jews for the world’s problems—but that doesn’t make the impulse any less dangerous. Many understand anti-Semitism as a personal prejudice that singles out Jewish people for their difference, much like other minorities experience racism. But anti-Semitism also manifests as a conspiracy theory about how the world works, alleging that sinister string-pulling Jews are the source of social, political, and economic problems—and this is the sort of anti-Semitism that tends to get people killed.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-semitism]

Consider recent American history: In 2018, a far-right gunman who blamed Jews for mass immigration murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three; one of the shooters had written on social media about Jews controlling the government. In 2022, an Islamic extremist took an entire congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas, and demanded that a rabbi get a convict released from a nearby prison. These perpetrators—white supremacist, Black extremist, radical Islamist—had essentially nothing in common other than their belief that a Jewish cabal governed world affairs and was the cause of their problems.

The reality is the reverse: Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, and although they exercise influence like any other minority, they frequently disagree among themselves and do not dictate the destiny of the majority. Politicians voting against TikTok are pursuing their conception of the national interest, not being suborned to serve some nebulous Jewish interest. Remove the Jews from the equation, and the situation will be the same.

Conspiracy theorists typically claim to be combatting concealed power structures. But as in this case, their delusions make them unable to perceive the way power actually works. Thus, conspiratorial anti-Semitism hobbles its adherents, preventing them from rationally organizing to advance their own causes by distracting them with fantastical Jewish plots.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.”

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories won’t safeguard TikTok from the bill that’s currently moving through the U.S. legislature. But the more people buy into them, the more they will imperil not only American Jews but American democracy as well.

For at least ten years, the Chinese Communist Party has been abducting its overseas citizens on EU territory and forcibly returning them to China - violating the rule of law and public security in Europe - a new report finds.