Biden’s TikTok Flip-Flop
Despite security concerns, President Joe Biden fearlessly took to TikTok to promote his 2024 presidential campaign. Some registered shock at the president using the app that the Chinese company ByteDance owns. Others, looking at the Biden re-election effort from the macro perspective, shrugged. As Biden’s detractors have said multiple times during the campaign season, anything is possible, and nothing is too extreme to consider impossible.
Biden’s TikTok appearance was his campaign’s brainstorm and touted as a way to reach the coveted youth demographic, a bloc that is not only abandoning the president but expressing to pollsters that they plan to vote for Donald Trump. A recent New York Times/Sienna College poll showed that among probable voters aged 18 to 29, Trump led Biden 49 to 43 percent.
Alarm bells about the inherent security risks that TikTok represents have been sounding for more than a year. In September 2022, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray testified before the House Homeland Security Committee, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid to warn that, via TikTok, the Chinese government could, on millions of U.S. devices, control data collection or manipulate software.
Three months after Wray’s testimony, Biden signed a bill that approved a limited TikTok ban which prohibited its use on nearly 4 million employees agency-owned devices, with exceptions for law enforcement and national security. Underscoring the importance of banning TikTok, Biden issued federal employees a 30-day deadline to delete the app; government contractors had 90-days to comply.
Biden, infamous for saying one thing, then doing the opposite, had pledged not to open a TikTok account. Instead, since its Super Bowl Sunday launch, @bidenhq has posted nine ineffective videos. The harsh online comments posted on Biden’s TikTok account indicate that the president bombed.
Coincidentally, at the same time Biden’s Super Bowl TikTok debuted, CBS’ 60 Minutes broadcast a segment which proved how much sway the app has in China. Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi traveled to the U.S. border near San Diego where she saw a fence with a four-foot gap through which, over four days, she watched large groups of Chinese nationals, including many from the affluent middle class, cross unchecked into the U.S. During the four days, CBS witnessed nearly 600 migrants — adults and children — most of which will ask for political asylum.
· Alfonsi: “We wondered how all of these migrants…knew about this particular entryway into California”
· Translator: “TikTok, TikTok.”
The TikTok posts CBS found had step-by-step instructions for hiring smugglers and detailed directions to the hole in the fence the Chinese nationals accessed. CBS, the transcript reads, was “struck by just how orderly and routine it all seemed.”
Alfonsi provided more unsettling details: “The migrants walked about a half mile…waited in line for U.S. Border Patrol to arrive so they could surrender. About two hours [later]…we saw the Border Patrol pull up, broadcasting recorded instructions in Mandarin. The migrants were driven to a detention facility near San Diego…Typically — within 72 hours — they are released into the United States and can begin the process of filing an asylum claim.”
Alfonsi omitted, perhaps unknowingly, that the Biden administration had neutered the Border Patrol and rendered it powerless to enforce immigration law. On March 16, 2021, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas declared the border open for illegal immigration when he stated that, going forward, DHS’s focus would be on “processing” illegal aliens — in other words, catch-and-release — -and the creation of new “lawful pathways.” Mayorkas does not have the authority to make unilateral changes to immigration law.
Unchecked Chinese immigration to the U.S., already the fastest-growing group at the southern border, has the potential to further destroy the nation’s sovereignty. China’s population is 1.4 billion or about 4.3 times that of America’s 331 million. Even if a tiny percentage of China’s overall population enters illegally, and then the new alien waves petition their relatives — -chain migration — -and begin or grow new families — -anchor babies — -America will become irreversibly transformed.
Biden and the CCP could end the Chinese invasion today. But Biden and China are engaged in a mutual admiration society that will keep the immigration invasion going for, at a minimum, ten months. China has a good thing going with its patsy Biden and has no intention to upset the status quo. Ditto for the traitorous Biden who has his sights set on a second lawless term to compound the destruction he’s done in his first four years.
Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org
