(Daily Caller)—Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott has differentiated himself from most of the Republican presidential field by not vocally supporting a TikTok ban while simultaneously receiving significant financial support from major stakeholders in the company.
While prominent Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates have supported banning TikTok, which is linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through its parent company ByteDance, Scott has opted for a less aggressive approach and has not called for fully banning the app. At the same time, one of the main investors in ByteDance, as well as the executive chairman and founder of Oracle, which stores TikTok’s American data, both contributed large sums to organizations supporting Scott.
Jeffrey Yass contributed $600,000 to Opportunity Matters Fund Action, a political organization that is aligned with and supports Scott, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) data. Yass’ investment firm Susquehanna International Group bought a significant stake in ByteDance in 2012, while his personal stake of 7% is valued at around $21 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“I’ve supported libertarian and free market principles my entire adult life,” Yass told the WSJ. “TikTok is about free speech and innovation, the epitome of libertarian and free market ideals. The idea of banning TikTok is an anathema to everything I believe.”
Yass is a major contributor to the Club for Growth, a conservative organization that mobilized Republican resistance to banning TikTok, according to the WSJ. He has given $61 million to the organization’s political spending division since 2010, which accounts for nearly one-fourth of its overall funding.
Opportunity Matters Fund, Inc., a PAC that also backs Scott, has received over $30 million in contributions since 2020 from Oracle Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison, according to FEC data. Oracle has a contract with TikTok to store the company’s American data. Scott called Ellison one of his “mentors” in May when he launched his presidential campaign.
In response to questions by the Daily Caller News Foundation on whether Scott would support a TikTok ban, his campaign declined to call for one. Instead, it shared Scott’s comment that he has “no problem whatsoever” with a TikTok ban, which he stated in an August Fox News interview.
Though Scott did not call for banning TikTok in the interview, or promise to do so if elected, Scott advocated for a plan to separate American children’s data from the CCP.
“We have to separate or segregate the communist Chinese party from our kids’ data,” Scott said in the interview. “We have to stop them from spying on our kids.”
However, China hawks have criticized Scott for his stance on TikTok when compared to other top Republican presidential candidates, according to Politico.
Other candidates, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, have all indicated support of a nationwide ban. However, Ramaswamy recently appeared to walk back his hard-line stance on TikTok.
“In retrospect, it was a little bit of an old-fashioned decision to say that there’s an entire mode of communicating with young people that I was going to turn off,” Ramaswamy said.
Former President Donald Trump also attempted to ban TikTok, but was stymied by federal courts. Scott cited such legal difficulties in his August Fox interview as evidence that “we can’t ban TikTok.”
DeSantis also received $2.5 million from Yass in February, according to data from his Florida PAC, which was named Friends of Ron DeSantis at the time. Yass has not contributed to Never Back Down, a federal PAC supporting DeSantis’ 2024 presidential bid.
Scott has backed more moderate solutions to potential national security concerns raised by TikTok, including voting to ban TikTok on government devices, and introducing a bill called the Know Your App Act to require applications to disclose what country they originate from.
China is using TikTok to spy on our children and invade their privacy. My Know Your App Act gives parents the tools they need to keep the CCP out of their homes and protect their kids.
— Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) July 20, 2023
The Biden administration plans to resume negotiations with TikTok despite its previous ultimatum that ByteDance must sell its stake in the company or face a potential ban, The Washington Post reported. The Beijing-based company maintains an internal CCP committee, and the U.S. Department of Justice characterized ByteDance as a “mouthpiece” for the CCP.
A former ByteDance executive has alleged that CCP members within the company had a “superuser” credential or “god credential” that enabled them to view all of the data the company obtained, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company also had a “backdoor channel” to gain U.S. user data, the former executive asserted.
ByteDance employees also used TikTok data to spy on American journalists who were covering the company in 2022, Forbes reported. Additionally, TikTok stored American TikTok creators’ and businesses’ financial information such as Social Security numbers and tax IDs in China, according to records obtained by Forbes.
Oracle, Susquehanna, TikTok and ByteDance did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.