NORFOLK, VIRGINIA – NOVEMBER 01: Former US President Barack Obama speaks while campaigning for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate former Rep. Abigail Spanberger during a campaign rally at Chartway Arena on November 1, 2025 in Norfolk, Virginia. Spanberger will face Republican candidate Winsom Earle-Shears in the Commonwealth of Virginia’s off-year elections for governor and other statewide offices on Nov. 4. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Social media has made socialism cool and the war in Iran cool. At least according to Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley.
Actually, it’s not all social media that has Finley up its sleeve, it’s TikTok. Supposedly “the platform is fueling the rise of socialism and opposition to the war in Iran,” but it also may have helped win the 2024 presidential election for a supposed enemy of socialism who is also the architect of the invasion of Iran, Donald Trump. Don’t worry, Finley has an answer for the seeming contradiction in a piece that usually combines contradiction with innuendo: “Have TikTok Engineers Tweaked Algorithms to Help Mr. Trump in the Hopes He’ll Suspend His Death Sentence?”
Which in itself would be interesting. As Finley notes, “Mr. Trump tried to ban TikTok by executive order in August 2020,” but since TikTok is apparently controlling the US election results per Finley, its engineers who are probably puppets of the Chinese Communist Party (according to Finley the latter) “is it impossible to save this problem?”! them, thus giving “the Chinese Communist Party permission to spy on Americans and interfere in American elections.”
The campaign narrative is funny considering Finley’s colleague Holman Jenkins and how he has so artfully discredited Russian campaign collusion over the years. Except that a persistent truth has long been promoted in the of the magazine The editorial page about the incompetence found within the government never applies to China. Not only the members of the C.K.K. they’re reportedly swaying US elections in ways that seasoned political strategists and foreign governments never could, but they can apparently do so thanks to a hugely popular business they may control, which would make TikTok the first government business in history that’s not only powerfully capable, but the whole world wants to spend more time with.
Finley’s claims about TikTok and the latter as an obstacle to much better in the United States are reminiscent of Barack Obama, albeit with a difference. Obama claimed he was a victim Fox Newswhile Finley claims capitalism, the war in Iran and the man who saved TikTok are victims of – yes – TikTok. As Obama put it in 2017, “If I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me.”
In response to Obama and Fox’s frustration, one supposes Finley might have suggested he look inward at his own policy positions. What would be true for Obama would perhaps be true for Finley today for Iran. Except Finley won’t entertain the possibility that American exhaustion with wars predates TikTok.
In Finley’s view, voters would be much more optimistic about Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran if Trump hadn’t saved TikTok. Well, if we ignore how unfair Australia’s social media bans have been, how negative the polls have been on the war since day one, how Trump himself seemingly hates the war because of his persistent and pious posts about how “we have no idea how bad they want to make a deal,” we can at least ask why Finley’s Newspaper Colleague Gerard Baker similarly thought the war was lost from the start.
Instead of addressing his legitimate resentment of the war, including Baker’s, Finley writes that “TikTok is fentanyl for young minds” which, in addition to sounding like the talking point of competitors who had their watches cleaned in market by TikTok, it signals that TikTok is many things, none of which are governed. To suggest otherwise would be for Finley and her editorial board colleagues to retract everything they’ve written for decades about average businesses having to endure government interference in their operations.
As mentioned earlier, Finley claims that TikTok has also made socialism a winner, but then of the magazine The editorial page laments with great regularity since Trump returned to office in 2025, the 45u and 47u The president backs down to a few when it comes to cheering federal stewardship of private resources: think export controls, export taxes in exchange for the right to export, “golden shares” in companies, proposed bailouts of failed companies, antitrust destruction of prosperous companies, and bottomless subsidies for companies that do as Trumpk wants. The answer is that when a socialist runs against a socialist, a socialist must win.
Concluding an essay full of innuendo, Finley wonders if the Communist Party might be “covertly amplifying the vicious voices” of Zohran Mamdani and Tucker Carlson. Right-wingers who aren’t prone to unrolling the victim card would say they hope so, that if we can’t beat the amped up, then the problem is us. Take it? If not, look at Obama.
