TikTok is destroying our children
Alex Marlow, News Editor-in-Chief at the rightwing website Breitbart.com, recently made the claim that “TikTok is Chinese mind control,” pointing to how it has captivated the “increasingly A.D.D. American mind” with its constant scrolling.
Is there any truth to this claim? Is TikTok more dangerous than we realize? And is it a problem not just because of the mindless distraction it provides but because of its content?
From my point of view, it's quite a stretch to say that “TikTok is Chinese mind control,” as if the Chinese developers intentionally built an app that could help destroy the Western mind.
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Ironically, although TikTok was developed by a Chinese company and is owned by a Chinese company, it is banned in China, along with a number of other, major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. How interesting! So, the app is good for kids in America and the world but not good for kids in China?
Yet that doesn’t mean that there is not real danger with TikTok, and not simply because it exacerbates our problem with distraction. Rather, there is real danger because of some of its destructive content, appealing especially to children and young people.
To give a shocking case in point, according to a recent video by conservative commentator Matt Walsh, “TikTok Is Making Mental Illness Trendy.”
He noted how destructive ideas and behavior and concepts “can go from fringe to trendy to mainstream quite literally overnight.” He added, “What was unusual one moment might be ubiquitous the next, and people, especially young people, can get caught in the current and drowned before they even notice that their shoes are wet.”
He pointed to the latest TikTok fascination with what is called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), as a result of which large numbers of young people are wrongly diagnosing themselves with this unusual condition.
Walsh played a clip from Good Morning America, where this phenomenon was discussed with real concern, as the host noted that videos with hashtags like #Dissassociativeidentitydisorder and #Borderlinepersonalitydisorder have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. This really has become an epidemic.
Walsh then explained that the young person who self-diagnoses with MPD refers to himself or herself as “the system,” with each personality within “the system” being called an “alter.”
But what effect does this have on young people?
It was a concerned mother who sent me the Walsh video, wanting to tell me about the latest developments with her 18-year-old daughter, who now identifies as a male. (We’ll call the daughter Rachel to hide her identity.)
She wrote:
"Do you know anything about this??? I'm literally livid. This is how it started with us. Rachel went on some social media site, convinced herself she was a system with lots of personalities, like 100. And did this exact same thing!! When I spoke to the psychiatrists about this, they had no clue what I was talking about. No one has been helpful with this. Why is no one talking about this?!?! I'm so angry right now. Part of what the issue is with Rachel, she thinks she has several alters with all different genders. Why would any doctor give her testosterone acting like this???"
So, trained psychiatrists have not heard about this destructive TikTok trend, but millions of impressionable young people are intimately familiar with it. And, here in America, where the daughter now resides, a licensed doctor was willing to give this teenager a testosterone shot to help her “transition” to male, even though her mental instability should have been visible at once.
The mother continued:
"She is so wrapped up and so deep in lies. I don't know how to bring her to truth. . . . Her roommate, also a ‘system’ won't allow me to talk to my child. She is the gatekeeper to any communication. How can a trained therapist even accept this nonsense???"
Nonsense indeed. And some of you can identify with this mother’s pain and anger and frustration.
It’s really as if a foreign entity has invaded the hearts and minds of our kids, what Jordan Peterson recently referred to as a “sociological contagion.”
Peterson also opined that opening the boundaries of “sex categories” would “fatally confuse thousands of young girls,” a claim that the New York Post found to be “unsubstantiated.”
Really? Unsubstantiated?
Perhaps this Newsweek headline from October 2021 provides some of the necessary substantiation for Peterson’s claim: “Nearly 40 Percent of U.S. Gen Zs, 30 Percent of Young Christians Identify as LGBTQ, Poll Shows.”
This spike of more than 4,000 percent, from roughly 3 percent of the population to the current 40 percent, did not happen in a vacuum. Instead, this is what takes place when a society loses its boundaries, casts off traditional biblical values, and inundates its young people with a constant flood of pro-LGBTQ messages and propaganda. The latest TikTok trends provide yet another avenue for such mass deception, as kids are self-diagnosing themselves with all kinds of alleged mental disorders.
And this leads me back to the question about “Chinese mind control,” reminding me of the famous speech delivered by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the Harvard commencement ceremony in 1978. He claimed that, “Only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy. There are no other criteria.”
Looking back to the recent past, he observed, “Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.” In short, “Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition.”
And this stark warning: “The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one; I do not believe it will be) may well bury Western civilization forever.” In fact, in Solzhenitsyn’s mind, in many ways, the West had already lost the war.
What does this have to do with TikTok? I have no evidence that China specifically intended the app to undermine Western morals or downgrade our ability to think and concentrate. But for sure, these are major results of TikTok (along with some other social media apps), and parents need to be incredibly alert to this latest threat. Is this another reason why China bans the app?
A child abuser may not be crawling through your child’s window, but another, very destructive force may be flooding into your child’s mind through social media apps, with TikTok at the top of the list. Be vigilant and beware! And remember that, as Solzhenitsyn warned, if we lose our moral and spiritual grounding, we lose all, and chaos soon ensues.
Only we can push it back with morality, sanity, truth, and persevering love.
Dr. Michael Brown(www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. His latest book is Revival Or We Die: A Great Awakening Is Our Only Hope. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
