Based Underground is now a conservative news aggregator AND curated newsletter.
When headlines popped up earlier this month that the Biden regime was using TikTok influencers to spread their propaganda about Ukraine, the vast majority of conservative news outlets used it as a punchline. Even on the left, some took jabs at it. SNL did a skit making fun of the White House move.
But as much as the older, politically aware class of Americans might think of it as a desperate ploy or just a comical sign of the times, the Biden regime was actually making a brilliant move. Their actions were lacking; they’re just as oblivious to how TikTok works as the rest of us. But the idea was a good one and if they’d done it properly, the really could have made an impact.
TikTok is the most visited website in the world. More people visit it daily than Google. More videos are watched on it daily than on YouTube. And there’s more interaction on it than Facebook. Once you throw in the fact that it’s also the most used mobile app in the world, it’s a wonder that so few political aware adults are paying much attention to it. They need to. It’s the ultimate grooming tool that brings children, teens, and even adults into a perverse worldview.
On today’s episode of JD Rucker Live on Red State Talk Radio, plus the replay on The Midnight Sentinel, I’ll explain why TikTok is the biggest reason for the rise of LGBTQIA+ teens and preteens. More kids are drawn into thoughts of sexuality and sexualization by TikTok than by every public school teacher in our woke public school system. And there is no other draw into a life of addiction that comes close to what TikTok is doing to our kids.
The article below by Dr. Leonard Sax MD PhD gives a solid overview of what TikTok is really doing and how it’s doing it. My only complain is that he doesn’t ring the alarm bells loudly enough. Parents need to keep their young children off of TikTok, period. If you’re concerned about the curriculum in public schools, then you need to make sure they’re not on TikTok because it is exponentially more damaging to a young mind. What a teacher tells them is one thing. What a teen who is similar to them is much more damaging because it’s a peer they can relate to, a peer they believe relates to them.
It’s spreading like a plague. Kids watch TikTok videos and often have an experience as a result because of the AI-driven algorithm that gets to know them in hours, often even in minutes. It learns what they like and guides them to what it knows they’ll also like. Then, it guides them to things they may not realize they like but because TikTok recommends it they learn to trust it as an authority on THEM. Later, when they become TikTok influencers, their videos start infecting a others as well.
As for teens, the Doctor is correct in noting the risks of keeping them completely off the platform. That may be the approach for some parents, but as a non-doctor but expert parent, I can attest to the efficacy of talking to teens like they’re young adults and laying out the truth for them. If they’ve been raised in a God-fearing home, a good parent can prepare them for the inevitable exposure to TikTok. Tell them how it’s addicting so they can recognize it as it happens. Tell them that the evil forces of this world use TikTok to indoctrinate as many as possible into perverse sexual ideas and radical leftist ideologies.
The reason that TikTok is on so few radars for conservatives is because we’re not seeing the full effects. That’s coming as these brainwashed teens and pre-teens enter the real world and start making real world impacts. It will catch us off-guard. It will be inexplicable. It will be destructive. Worst of all, it will be much harder to reverse than anything we’ve seen in history. Once children are brainwashed, bringing them into a proper worldview becomes exponentially harder when they’re adults.
Today, TikTok is creating a Manchurian Citizenry. Those who are familiar with The Manchurian Candidate know of the fictional effects of a brainwashed and fully controlled individual. Imagine an army of millions who don’t even realize they’ve been indoctrinated into a destructive worldview. That’s what we’re seeing manifest before our eyes.
Here’s the article by Dr. Sax from the Institute for Family Studies blog:
Is TikTok Dangerous for Teens?
How much do you know about TikTok? Maybe you’ve heard of it but haven’t used it. Or if you have used TikTok, you may think of it as an app for sharing videos of teens doing funny dances or cute pets doing tricks, which it is. But it is more than that.
For starters, TikTok is now the world’s most downloaded app and the world’s #1 most visited website, ahead of Google (#2) and Facebook (#3). Every day, more than one billion different videos are viewed on TikTok. Experts agree that the key to its success is its unique algorithm. When you join TikTok, you are asked some questions about your interests and what sort of things you’d like to see. TikTok then offers you some of the most popular videos that match your interests and starts monitoring what you do. It takes note of which videos you watch and—crucially—how much time you spend watching them, and which videos you watch more than once. The algorithm then hones your preferences. Within hours, or even minutes, your videos become more specific, more customized to your interests.
The results are uncanny. “TikTok can read my mind” is a common refrain among young people, as the app soon starts serving up videos that are precisely what the viewer was hoping to see: whether it’s a funny cat video, or a video of synchronized swimming, or one about applying glitter make-up, or a video of a pretty girl dancing in a way that appeals to a particular teen boy and wearing precisely the outfit that boy finds most arousing, doing exactly the moves that the boy finds most irresistible. And the same is true of sexual variations. “TikTok knew I was bisexual (or gay, or trans) before I did” is a common trope online.
Is TikTok Harmful?
TikTok is customized. It can be addictive. But is it truly harmful to teens?
That depends on how a teen uses it.
Adolescence can be confusing. Young people are struggling to figure out who they are. Increasingly, they are looking online for clues and for guidance. Doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital used to see one, maybe two teenagers a year presenting with new-onset Tourette syndrome. Between spring 2020 and autumn 2021, that number skyrocketed to about 60. Psychiatrists worldwide—from the South Atlantic island of St Helena, to New Caledonia in the South Pacific, to almost anywhere on the planet where kids have access to the Internet—began reporting a surge of teenage girls self-diagnosing with Tourette syndrome. Many of these girls are shouting out “beans!” at unpredictable intervals. Psychiatrists in England call these girls “Evies” because their behavior resembles that of Evie Meg Field, whose TikTok videos have earned her more than 14 million followers and more than 500 million likes. In a characteristic video, Evie shouts out “beans” uncontrollably. In an earlier era, the sudden appearance of myriad teenage girls shouting out “beans” might have been called mass hysteria. Today, the preferred term is “social media induced illness.”
Other issues can lead quickly down a rabbit hole. Go to TikTok and type “how can I lose weight?” and it will offer many options. The TikTok hashtag #diet has had over 11 billion views. There, you will find videos encouraging viewers that simply doing some planks and leg lifts will result in becoming slim in just 16 days (that particular video has had over 32 million views). Scrolling through the videos, it’s easy to be drawn into a spiral of more videos that speak directly to an individual situation. Alyssa Moukheiber, a dietitian at a residential treatment center for eating disorders in northern Illinois, says, “The TikTok algorithm is just too freaking strong.” The algorithm sucks girls into a world that promises physical perfection for just trying a little harder.
Girls who post videos on TikTok soon discover that their online popularity is linked to their sexuality. Newport Academy is an Atlanta-based treatment center for eating disorders. Crystal Burwell, the program’s director of outpatient services, recently noted that 60% of the girls treated since last summer have posted “sexually inappropriate” videos on TikTok. A similar observation comes from Paul Sunseri, director of the New Horizons Child and Family Institute in El Dorado Hills, California, who is concerned about the growing number of girls who are posting sexualized videos on TikTok. “For a young girl who’s developing her identity, to be swept up into a sexual world like that is hugely destructive,” he says. “When teen girls are rewarded for their sexuality, they come to believe that their value is in how they look.” Sunseri estimates that about one-quarter of the girls at his clinic have posted sexualized content on TikTok.
Boys are not immune. A growing number of teen boys are getting sucked into TikTok’s algorithm, which often means they are seeing TikTok videos of young men who are bigger, more muscular, than they are. That can lead to “bigorexia,” boys becoming obsessed with acquiring the muscle-bound look exemplified by The Rock and the entire cinematic Marvel universe of he-men.
Advice For Parents
So, what’s a parent to do about TikTok?
The first step is for parents to have a frank conversation with their daughters—and their sons—about the dangers of TikTok. I have heard teen girls say, “I saw it on TikTok” with the same air of authority as a middle-aged woman a few years back might have said, “I heard it on Dr. Oz.” In both cases, the speaker is citing an authority they believe to be unchallengeable. Parents, make sure your kids understand that a TikTok video is not authoritative, even it has 10 million likes.
At what age should a child be allowed to be on TikTok? Jean Twenge, our nation’s leading researcher on how social media impacts child and adolescent development, recommends that no child under 13 should be on any social media, including TikTok. And I would add that many 13-year-olds aren’t ready. TikTok offers a curated version of their app for under-13s. Don’t use it. That watered-down version is designed to fuel interest in the grown-up version. Twelve-year-olds don’t like to be on the kiddie version of anything. And tweens quickly figure out that if they lie about their age, they can easily access the full version.
As with any social media, the parent must limit, govern, and guide their teen’s use. At this time, we don’t have evidence that 10 or 15 minutes a day on TikTok, or social media in general, is harmful. One study of more than 220,000 teens found that the risk of bad outcomes began to increase after more than 30 minutes of social media a day, on average (see, for example, Figure 3). However, that study was published in 2019, based on data gathered before TikTok became the most-viewed social media for teens. An hour a day on TikTok is definitely too much. Kids have better things to do with their time than spending an hour a day on TikTok. So I advise parents to install parental monitoring apps to limit how much time kids are spending on TikTok.
That’s where many parents push back. One parent told me: “I think it’s important to show my daughter that I trust her. Installing a monitoring app implies that I don’t trust her. Besides, I already use the TikTok Family Pairing option, so that I can see what my daughter is doing in the app.” I remind parents that I see many teens who have created two TikTok accounts. One is the “clean” account which they show to their parents and which their parents follow on the Family Pairing option. The other is the real account, where the daughter is watching, or posting, the videos she doesn’t want her parents to see.
Then the parent says: “My daughter would never create a secret account just to deceive me.” I explain that if all the girl’s friends are doing it and advising her to do it, what is that girl supposed to say to her friends? It’s not reasonable to expect a modern American girl to say, “I know all you guys are doing it, but I won’t do it because I don’t want to deceive my parents.” The parent needs to allow the daughter to tell her friends, “I can’t do that, because my parents have installed this evil monitoring app that sees everything I do!”
Anne Sena is Director of Technology at St David’s School in Raleigh, North Carolina. She recently told me that she uses the Bark parental monitoring app to monitor and limit her teen’s online activities across social media, email, web browsers, and YouTube. She likes that Bark installs a VPN so that the controls are in place when her teen is outside of the home network, for example at a friend’s house or using a network provided by a cell phone. In Sena’s own home, she uses the Circle Home Plus device as well as the Apple’s screen time controls and Microsoft Family Safety to enforce time limits and provide an added layer of search protection on the family’s home computers. There are other similar monitoring and filtering programs out there, including the Canopy app, for parents to choose from.
“That sounds like a lot of work,” one mother told me the other day when I suggested that she follow Sena’s example. And it may be, especially for those of us who are not as knowledgeable about VPNs and screen time controls. But if taking these steps decreases the risk of more teens becoming anxious and/or depressed, I think the extra effort is worth it.
I recently spoke with a young woman who is a senior in college. She admits that she used to spend up to four hours a day on TikTok. But one of her professors inspired her to take control of her time, and she now spends 5 minutes a day, or less, on the app. She says she has reconfigured TikTok to show her only those videos that are closely related to her professional interests. She gives her professor the credit for inspiring her to cut back. I am inclined to give her the credit for finding the courage to govern herself—even when many of her peers can’t, or won’t.
Leonard Sax MD PhD is a practicing family physician and the author of four books for parents, including The Collapse of Parenting, which was a New York Times bestseller.
Mysterious “Skyquakes” Are Causing Strange “Booms” in the Sky, and Scientists Have No Explanation
by Michael Snyder
(End of the American Dream)—What is causing the extremely loud “booms” that people are hearing in the sky all over the world? We are being told that “skyquakes” are responsible, but scientists have no idea why these “skyquakes” are occurring. In some cases, the “skyquakes” cause such powerful shaking that…
The Biggest Sale on Long-Term Storage Beef EVER
by Sponsored Post
Let’s cut to the chase. Prepper All-Naturals is offering an unprecedented 40% off for it’s “Beef Steak” survival bags with promo code “steak40”. With a 25-year shelf life and a single ingredient (beef, of course), our most popular product is available for a very limited time with the biggest discount…
Seattle Is Ordered to Stop Blocking Illegal Alien Deportations in the Most Hilarious Court Decision Ever
by PJ Media
A federal court has just pooped in the oatmeal of the West Coast, Messed Coast™governors and local election officials suffering from acute cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome who think they can stop illegal alien deportations. And after this hilarious and thorough legal takedown from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals,…
Illegal Alien Terror Suspect Found Dead in Cook County Jail Cell
by Slay News
An Islamic illegal alien has been found dead in his jail cell after being arrested on terrorism charges. According to CWBChicago, 22-year-old Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi was found dead at the Cook County jail in Illinois on Saturday. Abdallahi was arrested on felony terrorism and hate crime charges in October. He…
Trump’s Wild Bunch Is Ready for Action
by Frank Miele
If for no other reason than that it will elicit fear in the hearts of autocracy-phobics, I propose that Donald Trump’s second-term Cabinet be known as “The Wild Bunch.” The name is best known as the title of Sam Peckinpah’s classic 1969 western featuring a colorful cast of aging outlaws…
FAA Issues Flight Restrictions Over Questionable Drone Activity Near Trump’s Bedminster Golf Course
by Just The News
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday said that it has issued two flight restrictions on the area surrounding President-elect Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, following questionable drone activity. The drone sightings were first reported on Nov. 18, but have continued into this week, according to Fox…
Ex-FBI Agent Convicted for Stealing From Jan 6 Defendant During Raid
by Trending Politics
A former Houston-based FBI agent has been convicted of stealing valuables and cash while conducting searches. In one instance, the agent stole cash and silver bars from a non-violent January 6 defendant’s home. Nicholas Anthony Williams, 36, was indicted on January 31 in the Southern District of Texas. Williams, who…
Democrats, Media Elite Urge Biden to Pardon Trump’s Alleged ‘Enemies List’
by Breitbart
President Joe Biden should issue preemptive pardons to his political allies and those deemed to be on President-elect Donald Trump’s alleged “enemies list,” Democrats and their media allies believe. Delivering a preemptive pardon indicates an admission of guilt, although Democrats claim a preemptive pardon would only be intended to block…
Fani Willis Forced to Release All Communications With Jack Smith, J6 Committee
by Trending Politics
The Fulton County Superior Court has ruled against District Attorney Fani Willis, ordering her to disclose communications with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee. The decision, announced on Tuesday, follows a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, which accused Willis of violating Georgia’s…
Lindsey Graham Is the Warmongering NeoCon Leading the Charge to Upend Pete Hegseth
by JD Rucker
Pete Hegseth represents a shift away from the wokeness that has infected the United States military. This is possibly the biggest reason President-Elect Donald Trump tapped him to be the next Secretary of Defense and the vast majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill can support this, at least for the…
‘Where Are Black Democrats?’: Charles Payne Tells Personal Story to Call Out ‘Huge Double Standard’ of Biden Family
by Nicole Silverio, DCNF
(DCNF)—Fox Business host Charles Payne called out the alleged “huge double standard” of President Joe Biden’s family Tuesday by revealing that his brother, who struggles with a crack addiction, is currently serving a jail sentence. Payne said his brother, who is getting out of jail on Friday, is likely one…
Zelensky Admits Ukraine Can’t Retake All Its Land: ‘We Must Seek Diplomatic Means’
by Breitbart
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky conceded in an interview on Tuesday that Ukraine does not have “enough forces” to restore sovereignty over Russian-occupied Crimea and “must seek diplomatic means” to end the Russian invasion and regain its land. The state-run Ukrinform outlet reported that Zelensky described Crimea – which Russia colonized…
Ultra-Processed Foods: How Bad Are They for Your Health?
by Olivia Cook
(Natural News)—Despite the serious health risks associated with eating junk food, they remain the most consumed food products in many countries, particularly developed ones. But a review published in The BMJ, which studied 9.8 million people, warns that eating a lot of ultra-processed foods can increase your risk for 32 diseases. Among these are heart…
“Already Pretty Far Down the Line”: The Container Store Could File for Bankruptcy as Soon as Next Year
by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge
(Zero Hedge)—As the retail apocalypse that started with Amazon and e-commerce continues, the latest victim is The Container Store. The retail giant could file for bankruptcy as soon as next year, according to the New York Post, who said the retailer is blaming its recent descent on “a weak housing…
Mysterious ‘Car-Sized Drones’ Over New Jersey Prompt FBI Investigation
by Zero Hedge
Several weeks of mysterious drone swarms over the skies of one New Jersey county near the military research and manufacturing facility Picatinny Arsenal have sparked concerns among residents and prompted an FBI investigation. “It’s kind of unsettling,” Mike Walsh, a Morris County resident who has spotted the drones on numerous…
UNESCO’s New Mission: Train Influencers About Combatting Online “Misinformation”
by Reclaim the Net
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is now incorporating teaching influencers how to “fact check” into its activities. UNESCO claims that influencers have become “primary sources of news and cultural information” around the world – which prompted it to carry out a survey into how these online personalities…