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.
