TikTok Tantrum: 19-Year Old Sets Fire To Wisconsin Congressman’s Office Over Ban

Yeah, if this is how addicted America's youth are to the endless stream of mindless videos, maybe we should ban it... TikTok is banned! It's back! It's going to be sold! It's shutting down! If you've been online the past few days it's been hard to not take some sort of interest in the ongoing TikTok saga. Back in April of 2024, President Joe Biden signed the 'Protecting Americas from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act', which was created to ban TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, unless this sold to a US-approved company. The reason was pretty straight forward and obvious to anyone who'd been paying attention over the past few years. Chinese companies are effectively operated by the communist government. Letting one of our greatest adversaries on the international stage control the dissemination of information as they and only they see fit opens the door for disinformation campaigns to change American's stances on key issues, or distract us from other ongoings. It also collected an unheard of amount of data from its users and those in their web of internet/phone connections despite not having those others explicit permission. And on the flip side, Meta and X are both banned in China. Obviously, there's been a lot of contention surrounding the ban because lets face it people around this country are completely addicted to their screens (myself sadly included) and TikTok revolutionized social media with their short, endless, and auto-playing video feed to make the pull toward more content even stronger than it previously was. President Trump is getting ready to be sworn in for the second time just down the street from where I write this and he's promised to sign executive action that will effectively extend the window ByteDance has to sell TikTok before his administration enforces the law signed by President Biden, staving off an imminent shutdown. I've never used and never will use the app so it doesn't really affect me all that much but just the fact that the potential for TikTok to be removed from American's phones exists has a lot of people doing some certifiably insane things, the craziest (so far) being the actions of a 19 year old from Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Teen Admits To Arson

At around 1:02am in Menasha, Wisconsin, authorities were made aware of a fire taking place at 525 N. Peters Avenue, which just so happens to be the office space of US Representative Glenn Grothman. The Fond du Lac Fire Rescue and fire departments responded quickly and used fire extinguishers to tamp down the flames until the fire companies arrived to douse it. Fortunately the building was unoccupied and no one was injured. Police did arrest one man and say that he admitted to starting the fire because of, you guessed it, the TikTok ban (which was overturned mere hours after he did this so he probably feels pretty dumb today). https://twitter.com/nicksortor/status/1881035757642481757 Representative Grothman is a Republican and was a vocal proponent of banning/forcing the sale of the Chinese social media app. He posted the following to X regarding the fire: "Nobody was hurt in the fire and the damage has been contained. Thank you to the FDL firefighters and police officers for your swift response." https://twitter.com/RepGrothman/status/1881067993381433566 Maybe I just don't understand because I never used the app but come on, you're 19 years old and are so upset about not being able to watch dance trend videos that you commit arson? Get real dude, go touch grass. It's official (not that it wasn't before). I'm team ban TikTok. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtVWXfbv-vI