This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. You could probably count on just one hand the subjects where there's bipartisan support for anything in Washington.

But one of those few subjects is the

Tik-Tok ban, which was just signed into law. The law will remove Tik-Tok from the

App stores unless its owner, Bight Dance, sells it to a competitor.

Jacob Helberg worked behind the scenes to get the band through Congress.

He's a technology executive with Palantier

at the giant data firm and military contractor,

co-founded by Peter Teal.

And Helberg's also a member of a government agency called the United States China Economic

and Security Review Commission.

Helberg was all over Capitol Hill in the run-up to the Tik-Tock ban

convincing one legislator after another

that it was an urgent matter of national security.

The basic pitch is that Tik-Tok is wholly owned by bite dance Bight Dance does the bidding of the CCP.

And we know that...

The Chinese Communist Party.

In fact, the Chinese embassy was directly involved in the lobbying against the Tik-Tok legislation.

Because by dance does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party,

Tik-Tok is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, and it's also a vehicle for Chinese

surveillance, which is a major national security threat to this country.

Now, we should be clear on something for the record.

Bight Dance has repeatedly denied that it does the bidding of the Chinese government and the Communist Party itself does not own Bight Dance, which is something you may hear in this debate.

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