The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law requiring TikTok to divest from the ownership of Chinese firm ByteDance or be banned in the United States. In a 9-0 decision, the justices ruled that the law, passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress last year and signed by President Joe Biden, did not violate the First Amendment--thereby upholding a lower court’s decision after the measure was challenged by TikTok, ByteDance, and some of the app’s users.

“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement and source of community,” the court said in an unsigned opinion. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.” (On those security concerns, read our Big Story from March 7, 2024.)

A statement issued by the Biden administration declared that Biden would not take any actions to enforce the law, leaving that to the Trump administration, which will take office on Monday. Curiously, however, TikTok has found an unlikely defender in President-elect Trump, who is considering issuing an executive order to save the app as the divestiture deadline looms. “The Supreme Court decision was expected, and everyone must respect it,” Trump said in a social media post. “My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!” Trump also said Friday that he’d had a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the future of TikTok.

In a sign that Trump’s allegiance to preserving TikTok is real, The New York Times just reported that TikTok CEO Shou Chew will join Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech moguls at the inauguration. The CEO thanked Trump in a TikTok video for his efforts to save the platform in the United States:

There are several theories as to why Trump has taken an interest in protecting the social media giant. Melania Trump said in December that her and Trump’s son, Barron Trump, was instrumental in advising his father on how to make electoral gains among Generation Z. Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, said that Barron told his father to appear on popular podcasts “The Joe Rogan Experience,” “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von,” “Impaulsive with Logan Paul,” and “Full Send.” The latter two built their audiences on, you guessed it, TikTok. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Barron’s contribution to the “bro-vote” strategy worked: 56% of male voters aged 18-28 backed Trump in 2024, up from 41% in 2020. Trump himself is “big on TikTok” and has racked up 50 billion views on the platform, according to Chew.

Trump’s political calculus may be simpler than that. Jeff Yass, a businessman with a net worth of $27 billion, is an influential Republican donor. Yass’s Susquehanna International Group (SIG) first invested $80,000 in ByteDance on the back of an idea sketched on a napkin in a Beijing coffee shop more than a decade ago, the Financial Times reports. SIG now owns 15% of ByteDance, a stake worth an estimated $40 billion. Yass increased his political spending when the war over TikTok broke out last year, laying out more than $46 million for Republican candidates, making him the largest donor of the cycle, according to OpenSecrets.

Others, however, claim it’s even more simple than that, saying Trump is taking a principled free-speech stance in his TikTok position. A source with expertise in cybersecurity told The Scroll:

My theory on this has been that the TikTok fear is basically fake, the other platforms have matched TikTok’s addictiveness and China has a million other ways to get all of our data, so he’s not going to take a stance that is unpopular with millions of people. I don’t think he will go along with a policy that punishes young people because he believes that young Americans have spent their entire lives having everything taken from them. You don’t need to own a social media company to access this data.

The Rest

→President Biden declared on Friday that the Equal Rights Amendment is ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution and is now “the law of the land.” The amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1972, prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and some liberal legal scholars have argued that this prohibition enshrines a de facto constitutional right to abortion. But an amendment to the Constitution requires three-quarters of states, or 38, to ratify it. Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA in 2020—nearly 40 years after the 1982 ratification deadline included in the ERA’s text. Both the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and the National Archivist, who is responsible for formally adding new amendments to the Constitution, have said they do not consider the ERA to have been lawfully ratified, and so it’s unclear what effect, if any, Biden’s statement will have. But on Friday, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wrote that the ERA is now a “valid part of the Constitution” and encouraged women living in states with abortion restrictions to “file suits to overturn these unconstitutional laws that discriminate on the basis of sex.”

→The Israeli security cabinet has approved the cease-fire deal, Reuters reports. While the Israel-Hamas accord is still conditional on the approval of the full cabinet, which meets today, the closure of the deal is likely to signal the return of the first hostages from Gaza as early as Sunday. Both President Biden and President-elect Trump are taking credit for the deal going forward. When asked who was responsible for the deal going through, Biden responded, “Is that a joke?”

Nevertheless, Politico reports that few in the region question that it was indeed Trump who was the “closer” on the deal. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said it was Trump’s Jan. 7 remarks that “all hell would break loose” if the Israeli hostages were not released, as well as Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff’s aggressive January push, that sealed the deal. Trump’s remarks were thought to be aimed at Hamas, but Steve Bannon said to Politico that they were directly aimed at Netanyahu and Israel. An anonymous senior Netanyahu official agreed with Bannon that that was how Netanyahu read Trump’s claim. This can only make sense when considering, as we’ve reported throughout the week, that the deal provides little strategic advantage or gain to Israel.

→Quote of the Day

Free-speech restrictions are like poison gas. They seem like a terrific weapon when you’ve got the gas in your hands and you’ve got your particular target in sight. But the wind has a way of shifting, and when it does, it blows the restrictions back on you. That’s why the progressives have their heads up their asses. I know they’re freaked out about the strength of the right wing these days. I know they’re freaked out about Trump. I’m freaked out, too. But when you allow one power the power to decide who gets to speak, you are deciding that all power[ful people] [should have] that power.

That’s Ira Glasser, head of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001, speaking toNew York Magazineabout how the ACLU grew disconnected from its original mission during the Trump era, abandoning a non-partisan defense of the First Amendment in favor of a more selective progressive activism. We applaud New York’s interest in the topic, which is only about four years behind Tablet’s—we wrote about Glasser and the transformation of the ACLU back in March 2021.

→One of the greatest American artists of all time, filmmaker and visual artist David Lynch, passed away yesterday at age 78. In a rare moment of cultural unity, social media posts were universal in their appraisal of the monumental loss of Lynch and the seismic legacy of his work. The director, whose masterpieces include Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and the Twin Peaks series, posted to X in August to bat down rumors that he was retiring, which he wasn’t. He had, he admitted, contracted emphysema from his many decades of smoking:

Lynch goes down as arguably the most important American arthouse filmmaker, whose aesthetic left such an indelible touch on pop culture that it was even given its own adjective. The “Lynchian”—described by the late writer David Foster Wallace in a 1996 piece for Premiere as something “unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal”—is a cultural touchstone so recognizable that it turned the experimental artist into a bona fide brand. Eulogies for Lynch were launched all across social media by the likes of Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, fashion designer and Prada creative director Raf Simons, filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, to name a few. Perhaps no Lynch eulogy was more touching than that written by actor Kyle Maclachlan, the most recognizably Lynchian leading man for his performances as Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet and Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, who claimed that he owes his entire career to the late visionary:

→Chart of the Day

This chart summarizes the findings of The Telegraphafter analyzing 73 democratic elections around the world. The takeaway? Left-wing parties are more unpopular now than they’ve been since the end of the Cold War. The left captured just 45% of the electorate globally, a record low. In the United States and Europe, leftist parties are even more unpopular. Just 42% of Americans and Europeans voted for left-wing parties in 2024; the right won 57% of American and European votes, the widest gap between left and right since 1990. These findings of course come on the back of Trump’s landslide victory in the United States. According to some experts, the left’s declining popularity in the West is more than likely to continue in 2025, with leftist parties in Canada, Germany, and Australia forecasted to lose. Intriguingly, even parties of “the hard right” did better in 2024 than ever before, winning 14.7% of the votes in 2024: Hard-right politicians like Marine Le Pen in France got far more votes than analysts predicted and José Raúl Mulino won the presidency decisively in Panama. Jeremy Cliffe, the editorial director and senior policy fellow at the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations, cites three primary reasons for this seismic shift in voters preferences: “The globalization-driven decline of organized labor, rising identity politics harnessed more successfully by the Right than the Left, and a general tendency among Leftist forces to fragment rather than unite.”