It's January 19th. Do you know where your children are?

Dave Chappelle does the opening monologue on "Saturday Night Live."

Here it is, from last night, all 17 minutes:

Taking down TikTok punched a hundred holes in my blog.

Where I had embedded video yesterday, it now looks like this:

Every post that had an embedded TikTok video now looks empty like that and is missing its point. Every post where I linked to anything on TikTok has been turned — forcibly, by our government — into something that would not be posted.

I watched a lot of TikTok yesterday, so I saw how many many TikTok creators were saying goodbye to the audience they had drawn in over the years, and now, this morning, I'm seeing mainstream media articles about how these last goodbyes sounded. The NYT has the headline "In TikTok’s Final Hours, a Mix of Silliness and Sadness." And that headline made me angry, because I didn't see "silliness." I saw sadness, but the other thing I saw was outright anger — anger at the American government for shutting down a medium of free individual speech that was an important part of life for tens of millions of Americans. Even if much of TikTok could be labeled "silly," even silly speech matters — seriously — when the government comes and takes it away.