TAYLOR HATHORN: our weakest points of infrastructure in the United States when it comes to cyber security are really our local and our state municipalities. That is really where Chinese hackers and CCP hackers and any adversarial hackers can get into our networks and start working their way up the chain.

We have other major weak points outside of education, that we’re not fully addressing. Business, farm land, bio labs, cyber networks, etc. We can’t let our foot off the gas. @IWF pic.twitter.com/M2FsPkV9XS

— Taylor Hathorn (@TaylorHathorn) February 7, 2026

Definitely.  You know, they are effective in many ways. Look at some of the influence that the CCP has had just over our education system.  So I think it's good that Governors are paying attention.  I mean our weakest points of infrastructure in the United States when it comes to cyber security are really our local and our state municipalities.  That is really where Chinese hackers and CCP hackers and any adversarial hackers can get into our networks and start working their way up the chain.  It's a lot harder to break into the DOD network than it is a local municipality that has contracts that they work with DOD on.  And so I think that the State of Florida is very wise to do this.

Sadly, the media is no friend of ours in our information warfare battle against China, and there are some serious questions raised as to why. @yaf alum @AlexMarlow wrote about legacy media in his book, Breaking the News - it’s worth the read. @IWF pic.twitter.com/k5lpUikjjb

— Taylor Hathorn (@TaylorHathorn) February 7, 2026

It's not just one that this has happened in, right. Like that's happened several, several times under the Biden Administration and the media was complicit in covering it up.  Why would they be complicit in covering it up?  I really encourage everyone to look at the funding mechanisms of some of these major news networks and see where their tie backs to the CCP are.  Alex Marlow has a really, really good book about this I believe it's called Breaking the News: Exposing the Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption, 2021, and I encourage everyone to read it that talks a lot about why the media, like a CNN,  national media is often complicit in these things and just like with anything it usually follows the money.  So I think people just need to be educated and this does not mean be racist, right.  This does not mean look at everything with Chinese influence and think that's bad.  That is absolutely inappropriate and not the way to handle this.  But you need to be able to look at the data and look at reality . . . 

TAYLOR HATHORN: Economic espionage cases committed by Chinese Nationals have gone up 1300% in the last decade.

Data is still data, even if it makes us uncomfortable. @TomCottonAR is right, at present, Chinese nationals should not be trained on our weapon systems or educated in our engineering institutions to bring that information back to China to ultimately use against us. @IWF pic.twitter.com/3xLxou9JG5

— Taylor Hathorn (@TaylorHathorn) February 7, 2026

How do we stop this transnational repression by the CCP?

First and foremost, you have to call a spade a spade.  You have to call it out when you see it.  I wrote an article recently about the number of students that come into the United States from China to study here and the fact that they are focusing on engineering fields and the fact that they're focusing on AI fields and they are getting that training in the United States and taking it back to China . . . .  "Hybrid Warfare, Student Visas, and Chinas Trojan Horse," Taylor Hathorn, Townhall, September 27, 2025.

Economic espionage cases committed by Chinese Nationals have gone up 1300% in the last decade.  I mean you've got trade best secret cases happening in the United States, 60% of which are attributed to the CCP.  And so the data is there and it shows it.  It shows that we are educating these students and employing these students and they are taking what they're learning here and using it against us in the United States.  I need to be very clear that I am not vilifying all Chinese students.  I do not think that is a problem here.  But we need to create a better awareness pipeline to understand where the students' allegiance are.  And I think the reality is people don't understand that when many of these students come here from China they are given a very strict out processing from China interview and an in-processing interview every single time they come home to make sure that they have not been too heavily influenced by the United States.  To date, there are nearly a quarter of a million Chinese students studying at universities inside the United States, and we have less than a thousand American students studying inside of China.  And China has great universities too, so it makes you wonder, why that tactic?  Why is that being implemented and not the other way around if it really was a shared partnership among education institutions? 

TAYLOR HATHORN: The CCP is inflicting hybrid, asymmetric warfare on the U.S. A lot of scary realities tied to China’s covert tactics.

Thank you to J. Michael Waller. 

The CCP is inflicting hybrid, asymmetric, mental, whatever academic word you want to call it on the U.S. and it’s easy to make jokes about things like TikTok, but there are a lot of scary realities tied to China’s covert tactics. @IWF pic.twitter.com/NRI8OMYjV2

— Taylor Hathorn (@TaylorHathorn) February 7, 2026

With students what is the long-term strategy here and talk to us about Chinese students and Scholars associations in the US.

So really there are two methodologies that you can have in any kind of mental warfare and really this is mental warfare, right.  So you've got your overt strategies and you have your covert strategies, and really what China is super good at is the covert strategies.  If they were focused on the overt strategies, you wouldn't have Prime Minister Carney in Canada talking about how they wanted to ally and align themselves with China moving forward with this values-based realignment that he talked about in Davos not too long ago. 

And so really you're looking at these covert strategies and covert tactics.  So what does that look like?  It looks like mental manipulation. Our society regrettably is incredibly susceptible to influence from the outside world.  Our youth, because of their involvement on social media, on web platforms, where they have access to information all around the world are incredibly susceptible to this influence.  I wrote a series of articles for Independent Women at the start of last New Year about the Tik Tok ban, "Tik Tok Ban: The Battle Is Not Over Freedom of Speech," Taylor Hathorn, Independent Women, January 26, 2025, and several of my friends were like, "Man, Taylor, you need to get over it.  It's not that big of a deal. It's not that big of an influence."  What a lot of people didn't realize is that the algorithms for Tik Tok in China students were rewarded, vastly rewarded, for looking at videos and watching what videos and promoting their algorithms focused on engineering, education, medicine, reading, literature.  They were promoted and rewarded for that, while the same algorithms in the United States existed for United States students they were promoted for doing Tik Tok dances and Tide pod challenges and their ratings went up for that.  So that is just one example of a covert strategy that has direct effects on the mental capacity, truthfully, and on the educational abilities of our students.