Right and Left, Republicans and Democrats brought great shame on themselves with their efforts to ban TikTok. Pizza Hut crystalizes the previous truth.
But before discussing Pizza Hut, it should be said that free speech means freedom to access any and all information that informs that speech. Which means efforts to ban TikTok on the laughable supposition that the most popular social media site in the world was controlled by the Chinese Communist Party amounted to censorship. How embarrassing and sad that a nailbiting political and pundit class was complicit in American attempts to censor content seen by Americans.
Much more important, how unnecessary for politicians to censor content seen by Americans. To understand why, beyond the obvious truth that freedom is the ultimate virtue, is for politicians and citizens alike to reacquaint themselves with how the world sees us. Pizza Hut is a good way to do this.
While its national footprint in the U.S. reveals it as a beloved place to eat, no one would confuse it with the high end. Expanding on the latter, the biggest American fans of Pizza Hut (and there are many) would generally never view it as a place to take a date.
Tasty as Pizza Hut is, it’s seen as fast food, or at the very least casual food. It’s frequently what’s delivered. That’s its American brand image, and that’s not a knock on Pizza Hut. Instead, it’s a comment on the powerful meaning of the United States globally.
It speaks to why it’s so useful to occasionally look at the U.S. through a foreign lens. What’s seen is frequently different, and in a very positive way.
Traveling back to the 1990s, and as the Soviet Union dissolved on the way to becoming Russia once again, the Russian people were finally getting a taste of the freedom that had been denied them for decades. The freedom included the ability to produce in order to consume, and the consumption was not infrequently of American plenty.
Yes, despite the fact that the former Soviet Union was the U.S.’s foremost Cold War enemy, and by extension routinely propagandized against, the Russian people felt differently. To them, the U.S. represented freedom and the prosperity that is an effect of freedom. The American brand was unrivaled with the Russian people despite their own undeniable pride in their own country.
Getting into specifics, when McDonald’s opened in Russia in 1990 the lines were endless. And they were persistently so.
Pizza Hut followed McDonald’s by a few months. Notable about its arrival is that it quickly became a restaurant that Russian men took dates to with an eye on impressing them.
Such is the power of the American brand, and it speaks loudly to the shameful actions of American politicians and pundits vis-à-vis TikTok. The success of the latter was and is an embrace of the entrepreneurial American way by innovators in China who were (like the Russians) once unfree, but who’ve been increasingly free since the 1990s on the way to China-based prosperity that includes McDonald’s, Pizza Huts, Starbucks, and seemingly every other American brand everywhere you look. Like the Russians, the Chinese have long been conducting a passionate love affair with all things American.
Despite this, as in despite the clear inability of the CCP to turn its own people against the United States, American politicians chose censorship of Chinese innovation out of fear that the CCP would use it to turn Americans against the United States. How sad, how very authoritarian, and how very unnecessary.
Pizza Hut is a reminder of this and of the brilliant truth that no app could shrink the most powerful brand in the world, but that censorship could. Politicians and pundits once again brought great shame on the U.S., and shrunk it, with a ban they voted for and cheered respectively.
