Xi Tiks Don's Tok

Bigly. Tik Tok Teens flooded the planners of Dumb Don’s Tulsa rally on Saturday with a million ticket requests for the 19,000-seat rally venue. But, when the Tik Tok Teens didn’t show up and only 6,200 Trumpistas did, Dumb Don was left blathering in an empty hall. In front of a global media audience.

Sounds like a brilliant teen prank on the wildly popular Tik Tok. Utterly humiliating the President of the United States on a global stage at almost no effort and zero cost.

Vladimir Putin would love to have taken credit for this.

Instead, all the credit goes to Xi Jinping. In Tulsa, he slammed Dumb Don the way no one has ever slammed him.

Here’s how.

Publius readers know from Xi Inflates The Great Firewall nearly two years ago how The Party at the center of The Center of Everything (“China” in English) uses its Social Credit System to monitor all its citizens.

Then, a year ago, we learned in Xi Fails Again that, to survive the pressures of Cloud Inflation, The Party plans to expand The Great Firewall to monitor all of us, worldwide, in the Center’s Social Credit System.

Tik Tok is one of Xi’s tools and perhaps his most successful. Tik Tok has over one billion users worldwide, mostly between 16 and 24 years old. Downloaded two billion times, it is the most popular app in Apple’s App Store. It has 400 million users in The Center and 65 million in the U.S. That's about half of all voters here.

On June 11, Dumb Don’s campaign offered free tickets to Don’s Tulsa rally on the 20th. Immediately, Tik Tok users started flooding Dumb Don’s campaign with requests for tickets for which they would be no shows. Party servers instantly picked this up and informed Xi. For nine days he must have been howling with laughter at Don’s Dumbness and the magnificent incompetence of Don’s team. How could they miss this, Xi must have asked endlessly? What else are they missing and what can we do next?

Making Dumb Don look a fool in front of everyone in the world with access to the Internet was massive, zero-cost political win for Xi and The Center. Already looking like an incompetent nitwit for his three and a half years of incoherent bungling, Don will never recover from the Tik Tok Teens. If they can do this, Xi knows, anyone can.

What about the GOP election machinery? How did it miss the Tik Tok sensation brewing in public right under its nose? What will it have to do to monitor ticket holders next time? Apparently, The New York Times reports, the GOP campaign does not even have a way of validating phone numbers on ticket requests.

But, here’s the really, really big one!

Because Tik Tok is part of the Party’s globalized Social Credit System, the NSA and CIA monitor it closely. They knew what was happening on June 11 as soon as the Tik Tok Teens became active. Clearly, they said nothing to warn Dumb Don’s team, handing Xi a spectacular victory. A massive national security problem.

Why? Because, as Publius readers knew four years ago, if anyone had tried to explain the Tik Tok Teens to Don, his intellectual incontinence would have exploded over everyone. He would have started screaming and shouting and would have fired the lot.

So, our national security establishment kept quiet and gave Xi his bigly victory.

Making Xi the most powerful person in the world. Good job!

Update July 16, 2020

A huge victory for Xi Jinping: Trump fired his campaign manager, Brad Parscale. Tok Tok worked! At zero cost, Xi has disrupted Dumb Don's re-election bid from one end to the other. No foreign leader in history has as massively humiliated an American president since the British burned the White House nearly 206 years ago, forcing Madison and his wife to flee.

Update August 2, 2020

It took Dumb Don nearly six weeks to figure out what Tik Tok has done to him and to announce that he wants to ban it in the United States. He will even block Tik Tok's sale to Microsoft if that's what it takes to get rid of it. The level of mental confusion ripping though his limited tolerance must be amazing. Six weeks after he was slammed to the ground like no other president in history, he's just noticed all the blood on his face!

Ever dummer than the minute before, instead of letting MSFT take the thing, Dumb Don wants to shut it down, alienating the 65 million Americans who use Tik Tok. Right before an election in which he appears likely to lose bigly. Moscow Mitch, have you talked to Don lately? Lady G?

Update August 31, 2020

The Party has acted predictably to prevent anyone getting access to its Social Credit System by asserting its control over any transaction involving Tik Tok. There is no way that The Party can just let 65 million Americans escape the SCS without doing serious damage to its global ambition to control Cyberspace Inflation.

Update September 17, 2020

Finally, someone is speaking clearly about the threat to us all of The Center's June, 2017 National Intelligence Law that requires all Chinese citizens and companies to comply with the requirements of the Social Credit System, regardless of location or function. Yi-Zheng Lian wrote a great piece in the New York Times describing exactly how this works. It is a must read for everyone.

Update October 5, 2020

A great pice by Ryan McMorrow in the Financial Times reveals that The Party placed Cai Zheng "at the heart of TikTok's policymaking team." Enough said.