18 January—Aw gee and alas and alack, yesterday a unanimous Supreme Court refused to rescue TikTok’s American operation from the evil clutches of bipartisan legislation that required its Red Chinese owner, ByteDance, to transfer or divest by tomorrow whatever its American app involves by whatever means to American ownership or essentially drop dead. We know that would never happen, to be sure. (That’s one reason the digital gods invented virtual private networks.) And it must be noted that, despite common belief, neither bipartisan legislation nor unanimous SCOTUS decisions are at all uncommon.

It’s also worth noting that the American Civil Liberties Union embarrassed itself (yet again) whining about the SCOTUS decision on First Amendment grounds, which the Supremes found the TikTok ban didn’t violate. And they were absolutely right.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a concurring opinion, saw a “compelling interest” in nobbling TikTok in order to prevent a foreign country from gathering virtually unlimited personal data on millions of Americans. But he warned, “Whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends, I do not know. A determined foreign adversary may just seek to replace one lost surveillance application with another. As time passes and threats evolve, less dramatic and more effective solutions may emerge. Even what might happen next to TikTok remains unclear.”

It’s crystal clear, on the other hand, foreign adversaries like Russia, Red China, and North Korea aren’t the only malefactors hacking into absolutely everything in and about American business, government, life, and people. Our allies do it too. And so do American criminals, inter alia.

Joe Biden, taking time off from what even he, a futile old fart, knows is nothing but a futile old fart for the long defunct Equal Rights Amendment, has left the next step regarding TikTok to Donald Trump. And Trump, formerly a TikTok opponent, has become a supporter, since it likely helped him get back into the White House and a number of his oligarch ass kissers have considerable positions in ByteDance. So expect President Trump (it really hurts to type that) to do whatever he can to rescue TikTok—with the full cooperation of his gutless bicameral Republican majorities, which had less than a year ago voted to disable or kill it.

It doesn’t speak well of American society that almost half the country’s population regularly wastes time on TikTok. That’s 170 million users. It speaks even worse that there are four social media apps that encourage time wasting by even more addicts, Facebook leading the pack with 250 million junkies—almost three quarters of the population. As for influencers, fake news, moderators (censors), and other travesties engendered by metastatic social media, it’s good to be a troglodyte, a social-media-free recluse. Not that simply using the internet doesn’t invade even a trog’s privacy.

So how many suicides may we expect if Trump doesn’t save TikTok?