Perhaps Meghan McCain was having an off day when she wrote her latest Op-Ed for The Daily Mail [1] because she used the opportunity to attack President Joe Biden, accusing him of using teen TikTok users to spread government propaganda after the White House held a Zoom meeting with 30 or so influencers last week, Queerty [2] reports.
Really, I’m not kidding. She actually did this.
McCain really went after 18-year-old TikTok user Ellie Zeller who posted a video about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in higher gas prices in the U.S. She was one of the influencers at the meeting, and she posted the video shortly after.
“Now with Putin starting this horrific fight between Ukraine and Russia, nobody wants to work with him and do international trade… so with people being scared of war and limited resources prices are bound to go up,” Zeller said.
@elliezeiler [3] Link in my bio to help ❤️
In a recent interview with The Teen Mag, [5] Zeller described herself as a “big activist” for human rights.
“I love that I can use my voice to speak up on my platform to shed light onto these topics and spread word,” she said. “From me speaking out, I feel that people are getting to know me better, because activism is something that is significant to me.”
But McCain seems to have that proverbial bee in her bonnet and she makes a number of digs at Zeller’s age. At one point she calls the young influencer’s comments on gas prices “inaccurate on its face.”
“It is Biden’s policies, not just the war Ukraine, that have driven inflation and led to rising energy prices, and no amount of TikToks will hide this,” McCain wrote. “But the more troubling aspect here is that it is a priority for the administration to feed TikTok stars their spin.”
I’ll have to admit I don’t know why the Biden administration decided to do this, but McCain is positively snippy about it.
“Let’s simply call this what it is: A propaganda play on behalf of the Biden administration, using the goodwill of very young people to naively do their bidding.”
But Queerty’s Graham Gremore [6] notes:
“We’d argue what’s more “troubling” is a 37-year-old woman using her platform to falsely accuse a teenager of spreading government propaganda and being too stupid to know better. (BTW, Zeller was recently accepted into Harvard.)
But Gremore also found it ironic that McCain was attacking a young person for being interested in politics “when she herself elbowed her way onto her father’s presidential campaign when she was in her early 20s then wrote a horribly reviewed [7] tell-all book about it.”
McCain didn’t end her rant there, however. She spent a considerable amount of time opining on TikTok, writing at one point “Don’t feel bad if you don’t have the slightest clue, what TikTok is — most adults don’t.”
That’s another veiled slap at Zeller and other young adults who frequent the platform. But the fact is, according to BackLinko, [8] TikTok has 1 billion active users each month, and I guarantee that not all of them are teenagers. There are plenty of older adults (like myself) who rely on it often.
McCain also takes the opportunity to say she’ll never create content for the platform (I doubt anyone will miss her) and she also won’t allow her 17-month-old daughter to use it either. Her next jumping-off point was to attack White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and President Biden again.
“Unless Biden is able to course correct his administration in the coming months, he will be remembered as a weak, Jimmy Carter-esque figure who further divided our country and potentially ushered in another economic depression,” she wrote.
“Maybe a good place for Biden to start turning it around would be leveling with the American people—not trying to spin us.”
I guess she never heard of Reaganomics and “trickle-down economics,” which was a disastrous monstrosity [9] for poor people but a boon for the well-heeled. Reagan followed Carter and left his successor, President George Bush with a $155 billion budget deficit, according to this New York Times article [10] from 1988.
So McCain can just can it with that nonsense.
Twitter users have some thoughts on her latest “think piece” as well.
Meghan should worry about the Russian propagandists within her own party before going after teaching young people about gas pricing.
— 🕶 Rickdiculous 🐝🍷 (@rickdiculous23) March 17, 2022 [11]
These teens are out there with quite a following. Not a bad idea to teach them what's really happening so they spread facts not opinions. Now let's see a tweet abt Tucker Carlson, MTG, Madison Cawthorne and what they are spreading but no bad words about your own party, right?
— SpeakingMyMind (@French_One) March 17, 2022 [12]
The same way Russia uses Fox News and Tucker Carlson ? Or differently?
— michael minnock (@michael_minnock) March 17, 2022 [13]
You still haven't called out your friend @TulsiGabbard [14] but have time to talk about teens on tik tok. Uh huh, sounds about right for you.
— Sonita1223 (@ChanitaSonita) March 17, 2022 [15]
Oil prices are set by world wide markets. Biden has little control
And yes Putin is to blame for some of the recent spike. An unprovoked attack on Ukraine making oil market gittery added many % to the price
If you didn't just attack for attack sake you would have known that
— AllenW (@amw47) March 17, 2022 [16]