Representative Mike Gallagher wants the U.S. to rethink its approach to China and the threat he believes it poses to our economic and national security. And the former Marine intelligence officer and current chair of House Select Committee on China has repeatedly called out the White House, the tech and finance sectors, and other U.S. institutions for not standing up enough to Beijing. In the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher, Kara had a long, refreshingly frank talk with the Wisconsin Republican which she afterward called one of her most important interviews of the year. In the segment of their conversation excerpted below, she presses Gallagher about whether the various efforts to rein in the Chinese-owned social media juggernaut TikTok will ever work, as well as what the U.S. can do to prevent China from gaining an advantage in AI — and whether or not Republicans actually care about governing.
Journalist Kara Swisher brings the news and newsmakers to you twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays.
Kara Swisher: You’ve essentially said that TikTok causes young people in this country to support Hamas, uh, but all social media is problematic and TikTok is pushing back on your claim.
For example, TikTok has gotten flack because of the proliferation of #FreePalestine on its platform, but Instagram had almost twice as many posts tagged with #FreePalestine as TikTok, and Facebook had almost three times as many. By the way, they’re the owner of Instagram. And X is just a snake pit of stuff. I don’t even know where to begin with them. But you want to either ban TikTok or force a sale to an American company.
Mike Gallagher: Well, I concede the point at the outset that social media in general is a cesspool, right? But there’s something different with TikTok related to its ownership structure. It’s owned by ByteDance. ByteDance has, is substantially controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. That isn’t the same thing as dealing with Instagram. The tech is probably just better at some level, right? And you’ve got to give them credit for producing a better product. So I can see those two points.
But there are at least three principles at play here. One is basic reciprocity, right? You know, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube is not allowed in China. Whereas TikTok is obviously allowed here. And CCP officials spreading hateful propaganda are allowed to have access to our social media platforms, and throughout the pandemic, they were deliberately stoking division here in America. So there’s a basic lack of reciprocity, one. There’s concerns over espionage, whether TikTok can track your location, your data — which are important and I think why every major Biden administration official national security official does not use TikTok and has said we need to take action either in the form of a ban or a forced sale.
Swisher: This is a bipartisan thing.
Gallagher: Then the third thing I think is probably the biggest concern, which is that most people are getting their news from TikTok under the age of 30 and therefore it could be an instrument of propaganda and disinformation going forward. Those are the concerns that are specific to TikTok.
Swisher: Right. Yes, I would say propaganda is the most difficult, and actually in July of 2020, I published a column, which got a lot of backlash, with the headline “TikTok is wonderful, I still don’t want it on my phone.” So I’m obviously sympathetic to your argument, but I do want proof. You have to prove this though, correct, in order to get these things passed, these bans. And the retaliation could be vast.
Gallagher: Well first of all a ban is one outcome. A forced sale is another outcome, which I think would, I would be fine with. And if it spun off —
Swisher: Very anti-capitalist, but go ahead.
Gallagher: What, why? So foreign ownership of a media company, with legacy media, there’s an established precedent there that I don’t think anyone views as anti-capitalist. It gets to the national security concern. I understand you’re always balancing, really in any national security issue, sort of free market versus national security concerns. That’s an inherent tension that’s been with us since like the dawn of the republic. But I do think we can figure out a way to prevent an increasingly hostile foreign country from effectively controlling the dominant news and media platform in America without screwing up free market principles or even killing TikTok entirely. If there were TikTok America with control of the algorithm, you’d still have problems with, you know, young people’s addiction to social media, but that’s a separate problem that I’m not trying to legislate a solution to right now.
Swisher: So how is that going to happen? Do you really feel like this is going to happen? Because they have been allowed to own the most important media company for years now.
Gallagher: I don’t know if I can put odds on whether or not it will happen. I think there was a lot of momentum for doing something at the beginning of this Congress, and then two things reduced that momentum. One is the Senate tried to act with the Restrict Act. It was criticized fairly or unfairly as granting too much authority to the executive branch to make a decision. And the executive branch, as you know, is tied up in this long mitigation project, Texas CFIUS deal, and then TikTok launched a major lobbying campaign. And I think those two things may to include buying ads at the last few Republican presidential debates, right, portraying TikTok as small business, mom and apple pie, and all that stuff.
Swisher: They’ve hired some very good people, I have to say.
Gallagher: Yes. And now because of that, we’ve lost momentum, but now there’s renewed concerns based on some of the rhetoric related to Israel post-October 7. I think we have, what we know now is a few things, right? We’ve had sort of reports of ByteDance employees snooping on U.S. journalists by accessing their location data, right? We’ve had admissions that, you know, Chinese ByteDance employees have access to the data, despite TikTok’s attempts to talk around it. There’s been reports of TikTok heating certain content. I think you’re gonna see analysis that just does an apples to apples comparison of Instagram to TikTok. Again, you can’t control for all the confounding variables because there’s differences in these platforms related to, like, opting into a certain network, etc. But to the extent you can control for as much as possible, showing that there’s something weird going on.
And then you always come back to the basic ownership structure, right? If you can’t acknowledge the obvious, like what is a point of fact, which is that CCP members are part of ByteDance’s corporate governance structure, then it’s hard for me to take the rest of your argument seriously — when the chief editor of ByteDance is a CCP boss and they have a history of collaboration.
Swisher: One of the things that I would say, you know, the, the, just as the Hamas stuff isn’t specific to TikTok, it’s just the biggest, you know, for example, Meta has been sloppy to say the least with children’s data and now some, there’s some recent things coming out about how they knew about things. Google, of course, has settled so many lawsuits around location tracking. I think Apple’s the only one that really doesn’t usually get caught at stuff like this. But the most persuasive argument is the Chinese Communist Party is on the board, essentially, as they have, and the Chinese government has a history of overseeing companies there, correct?
Gallagher: Yes, your point about China is where I tend to land. That the CCP is on its board. We also have another layer to that, which is what Xi Jinping has said for a long time and recently about the, what he calls the smokeless battlefield, the ideological and information warfare — and specifically, then, CCP outlets referencing short form videos as a primary way to influence foreign society. So even if you don’t think they’re doing it now, based on the CCP’s recent history, I think it would be a risk that we simply can’t afford to take. And why not allow then a sale? The fact that the CCP won’t allow a sale, I think, tells us something about the value they see in the app beyond just the absolute value, like the dollar value of ByteDance.
Swisher: So you don’t know if anything’s going to happen, because —
Gallagher: We’re going to try to, we’re going to try to have a responsible legislative solution that’s bipartisan. I think we have a chance. Again, I know it’s a complex issue. It’s bound up in this bigger issue of cross-border data flows for which there is very little, if no regulation. So I think we have a chance. It not gonna be easy, but I don’t think the argument that Secretary Raimondo and some others have made, that we can’t do something for fear of angering 14-year-olds is persuasive, right? Like that. I get it. But the national security concerns are significant enough to outweigh the concerns of angering young voters.
Swisher: So what about angering China itself? You’ve, you’ve talked about selective decoupling, um, but they could start banning American companies. Apple lost $200 billion in stock value last September when China announced it would extend a ban on iPhones onto government backed agencies and companies. And then they said, “Oh, we didn’t mean that.” Like, it caused an enormous decline and NVIDIA, Intel, and Qualcomm are lobbying against more restrictions on chip sales to China. They say restrictions hurt profits and paradoxically lead the Chinese to develop more advanced chips themselves.
Gallagher: Yes. Uh, well, one, this is what makes this competition in my mind far more complex and difficult than the old Cold War with the Soviet Union, right? We never had to contemplate selective decoupling from the Soviet Union because our economies didn’t interact. Whereas, and I think this is probably something that Elon would say correctly, which is we are conjoined twins with China economically in so many areas, right?
Swisher: Well, he sure is.
Gallagher: Yeah. But the lesson isn’t out to throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do. It’s to get about the business of selectively decoupling or de-risking or diversifying in key areas again difficult, but I think necessary. We’re doing this massive experiment with chips. We’re gonna learn some lessons from it. Let’s apply those lessons to other areas. I would probably agree with my Democratic counterparts and at least the most important areas beyond that, advanced pharmaceutical ingredients, I mentioned energetics before —
Swisher: AI?
Gallagher: Yeah, I think AI a few simple principles, right? Again, it gets to the outbound capital flows. I don’t think U.S. venture capital, venture capitalists should be investing in Baidu and things like that. I think we should have greater research security safeguards in our own universities for advanced technology, AI, quantum, things like that. But I think there’s a version of this for AI and quantum. And again, none of it works unless we are willing to assume risk when it comes to reviving a positive trade and technological cooperation agenda with the rest of the world, and that’s where both —
Swisher: Rather than just China.
Gallagher: It can’t just be: “Okay, we’re getting out of China, and then we’re going to devolve to autarky here in America.” That’s not a winning strategy. It’s selective decoupling combined with expanding the bounds of the free world and breaking down barriers to cooperation. That to me is the big formula for success.
Swisher: One thing you and Ro Khanna, a Democrat from Silicon Valley, who I know very well, have introduced a bill that calls for AI that is advanced, tested, evaluated, and dominated by the members of the Five Eyes Alliance. Tell us how that would work and how would it change AI development. I do know in talking to Silicon Valley executives all the time, they sort of do what I call — Mark Zuckerberg did this — the “Xi or me” argument. And again, I’m always like, I don’t like either of you. I don’t like him more, but okay. But I would like a more wide-ranging development process where there’s more diversity, not just diversity — I’m not talking about people, I’m talking about smaller companies and this and that — but how do you, what is this bill supposed to do to protect our AI?
Gallagher: Well, I think, actually to the point I was trying to make earlier to turbocharge our collaboration within the Five Eyes Alliance when it comes to AI, because I just don’t believe that we’re going to be able to press pause on the development of this technology
Swisher: We are not.
Gallagher: Or if we did, it would only were down to the CCP’s benefit because they’re not going to press pause. So because we just have less human beings to throw at this problem, it kind of leads you to two conclusions. One is we need to sort of fix our immigration system in a way that we are actively recruiting the best and the brightest from around the world to work on key national security technologies.
But the two is just to think about this less as America versus China and more our allies, America and our allies versus China. So this would be an attempt to force the Pentagon to have a framework that includes Australia, U.K., Canada and New Zealand so that when we try to strike the balance between innovation and guardrails, so the killer robots don’t take over, we’re on precisely the same page with our closest allies. And that’s what I think is the right formula going forward.
By the way, Ro Khanna is incredibly easy to work with. And even though we disagree, it’s always a breath of fresh air when I have to deal with him because he’s just so — he has a bias for action and he’s willing to engage in a good faith debate, which is increasingly rare in today’s Congress.
Swisher: Well, speaking of rare, I’m going to finish up with the future of the GOP and your personal ambitions. Let’s talk about domestic politics. You recently compared Congress to a high school reality TV program — the Kevin McCarthy-Matt Gaetz saga, the punching, the merry go round. Seems absurd. Is the Republican conference interested in governing?
Gallagher: I think we’re having —
Swisher: I know, I’m walking you right into one. But you said “high school reality TV program,” not me.
Gallagher: It’s a fair question. Um, I think our conference has been unwilling to accept the basic fact that with a narrow majority and control of only one aspect of the federal government, one chamber of Congress that no one gets 100 percent of what they want. You can push for the best conservative solution, but at the end of the day, you’re going to have to compromise within your own caucus and occasionally compromise with the other side. And that is a problem when you have a subset of people that are unwilling to compromise, and I think that’s at the heart of a lot of our problems right now.
I will say, I think the bigger problem with Congress, and it’s expressed in both parties and the challenges they have, is Congress has just become so structurally weak relative to the executive branch that it’s as if we’ve turned Congress into a green room for Fox News and MSNBC, where we spend all our time trying to score soundbites or “hug Tucker Carlson,” to use your phrase.
Swisher: The only reason I said that is because I think you’re smart, so that’s why it was a compliment. But go ahead.
Gallagher: Well, thank you, thank you. — And while we await the coming of a president to solve all our problems, right? Like that’s the story of the modern Congress. We keep giving up our power to the executive —
Swisher: So, performative, the performative nature.
Gallagher: Yeah, it’s performative. It’s not substantive. To fix that, you have to reclaim some of that authority from the executive branch and then devolve power within the institution from the office of the Speaker to the committees because the committees are really the place where productive work can be done. But we’re not really doing that right now.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
On With Kara Swisher is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Cristian Castro Rossel, and Megan Burney, with mixing by Fernando Arruda, engineering by Christopher Shurtleff, and theme music by Trackademics. New episodes will drop every Monday and Thursday. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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