On Wednesday, Representative Chip Roy (TX-21) issued the following statement on the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (H.R. 7521):
“We are in a cold war with China. The CCP is one of America’s greatest geopolitical adversaries — working to undermine and weaken us on every imaginable front — and we should start acting like it.
During the last Cold War, we as a country would never have allowed the Soviets to have this kind of control and access to our people. Just like we took action to ban Huawei, ZTE, China Mobile, and China Telecom, I am pleased that the House took action to prohibit the distribution of the CCP-controlled application TikTok that is exploiting their control over millions of Americans’ data.
Contrary to widespread misinformation about it, this bill respects and adheres to the Constitution’s protections for free speech by focusing on the conduct and control of corporations, rather than the content of speech. Further, it is written to address any social media platform which is owned by one of the listed adversaries and poses a national security threat — not just TikTok. In TikTok’s case, however, the choice is simple: either break away from the Chinese Communist Party or stop doing business in the United States. I look forward to the Senate taking up this bill and sending it to the White House to be signed into law.
But we cannot stop here. We should also prohibit the CCP from buying American land, decouple our dangerously intertwined economies, cut off their fentanyl pipeline at our southern border, and do everything possible to root out Chinese Communist influence and espionage in our educational institutions as well.”
