Webinar | TikTok – A Weapon the CCP Would Never Allow Us to Wield

On January 19th, it became illegal for TikTok – a social media platform weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party doing business as ByteDance – to operate in the United States. Overwhelming bipartisan majorities of the House and Senate adopted the ban in 2024; it was signed into law by President Biden, and the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of that statute.

To understand why TikTok has been banned, consider how the CCP would respond if a U.S. government-controlled entity had the following capabilities:

- directly reach half of the people of China, without the permission, or censorship, of the ruling Chinese Communist Party;

- employ algorithms to make this vehicle powerfully addictive to its users in the People’s Republic;

- serve as a source of news and information for hundreds of millions of Chinese, including propaganda designed – either overtly or subliminally – to undermine the CCP and promote America and its values; and

- collect personal health and other data about every one of its Chinese users and to surreptitiously turn on their phone’s camera and microphone to spy on others

The short answer is that CCP would never permit us to do to their population what they are currently doing with the TikTok app to 173 million men, women and children in this country. In fact, the Chinese Communists refuse even to allow their own people to be subjected to TikTok’s insidious and subversive content.

The reality that the Chinese Communist Party has gotten away to this point by unilaterally wielding such a potent instrument of information and political warfare against the American people and nation is nothing short of astounding. It speaks volumes about the lack of our public’s “situational awareness” of the threat posed by the CCP and its oft-stated intention to destroy the United States – and the complicity of “captured elites” here in aiding and abetting those ambitions.

More remarkable still is the decision of newly inaugurated President Donald Trump – who sought to ban TikTok during his first term – to intervene to postpone enforcement of the law now in effect that requires Chinese divestiture of TikTok.

Moderator:

- Frank Gaffney, President, Institute for the American Future; Vice Chairman, Committee on the Present Danger: China

Panelists:

- Charles “Sam” Faddis, Former Career Clandestine Service Officer, Central Intelligence Agency; Army veteran; author, “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA”; editor, AndMagazine at Substack
• Topic: “Situational Awareness about the CCP’s Weaponization of TikTok”

- Dr. John Lenczowski, PhD, Founder, President Emeritus, and Chancellor of The Institute of World Politics; former Special Advisor for the U.S. State Department in the Bureau of European Affairs; former Director of European and Soviet Affairs in the Reagan National Security Council; author, “Full-Spectrum Diplomacy and Grand Strategy” among other titles
• Topic: “The CCP’s Unreciprocated Use of TicTok as an Instrument of Political and Information Warfare”

- Colonel Grant Newsham, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.), Former Military Attaché in Embassy Tokyo; former Foreign Service Officer; longtime business executive in the Western Pacific; author, “When China Attacks: A Warning to America”
• Topic: “A Military Assessment of the Damage Being Done by TikTok to U.S. National Security”

- Jan Jekielek, Senior Editor, “The Epoch Times”; host, “American Thought Leaders”; award-winning documentary filmmaker
• Topic: “Don’t Count Donald Trump Out on TikTok”