Anti-TikTok crusader Rep. Mike Gallagher will tell you — over and over again — that the popular social media app is a “threat to national security.” Gallagher isn’t wrong.
Communist China’s control over TikTok’s corporate parent ByteDance affords America’s No. 1 foreign enemy control over sensitive American data. In short, there’s more at stake than the brain rot of self-involved human beings lip-synching, dancing, and twerking in short video clips. No doubt that’s why the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that threatens to ban TikTok if ByteDance doesn’t sell the social media Goliath to a buyer without ties to the CCP.
But there is another national security risk, and a more immediate one, at which Gallagher has shrugged his shoulders: the Biden-led invasion of America’s southwest border.
Last month, Gallagher surprised his fellow House Republicans in voting against a resolution to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a man whose photo should be included beneath a dictionary definition of dereliction of duty. Gallagher joined three other Republican House members in coming to the defense of Mayorkas, who has wilfully failed to defend the United States. That was enough to save the secretary’s bacon, albeit briefly. The Republican-controlled House quickly regrouped, with leadership figuring out how to count, in narrowly passing the resolution. Gallagher again voted with Democrats in the second attempt.
Just days later, Gallagher announced he would not seek reelection. Good call. The Green Bay representative who has cruised to victory in representing Wisconsin’s solidly red 8th Congressional District since entering the House in 2017 would most likely find his path to reelection a bit more choppy.
Gallagher explained his decision in a prepackaged op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. He claimed he didn’t want to pull a Pelosi in using impeachment as a weapon against political enemies the way Democrats did with former President Donald Trump. (Exhibit A on why Republicans have lost election after election).
The congressman suggested his colleagues on the right pushed impeachment against Mayorkas because he made “unpopular decisions” and engaged in “non-criminal acts.” No, they impeached the Homeland Security secretary precisely because he has committed criminal acts, which, as it turns out, are also extremely unpopular with Americans. Mayorkas, in breaking all manner of U.S. immigration law, has failed to do what the name of the agency he leads clearly states: secure the homeland.
On Mayorkas’ watch, some 7.3 million illegal immigrants have entered the United States. That’s more than the population of Massachusetts. In fact, the influx of illegals in the past three years is greater than the population of three dozen individual states. Some estimates indicate more than 10 million illegal aliens have crossed since Biden and his lackeys took over.
Not only has this unprecedented flood swamped the resources of states and communities across the country, some of these “migrants” pose a real existential threat. (See Laken Riley, 12-year-old Travis Wolfe, Washington State Trooper Christopher Gadd, Steven Michael Nasholm, Craig Schimming, and many, many more.)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection sources have confirmed that the number of known gotaways are likely significantly higher than the 1.7 million-plus reported during the Biden years. According to House Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green, R-Tenn., who coincidentally did vote to impeach Mayorkas, “In Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, CBP arrested 35,433 illegal aliens with criminal convictions nationwide, including 598 known gang members.”
“In addition, 294 illegal aliens on the terrorist watchlist have been apprehended at the Southwest border between ports of entry since the beginning of FY 2021 — and those are only the individuals Border Patrol agents have caught,” Green’s office noted in a December press release.
With the gangs and the terrorism threats also comes the proliferation of illegal drugs, a homeland security risk that claimed more than 111,000 lives in the U.S. last year. The death count was nearly the population of Lansing, Michigan, which, like the rest of the country, is dealing with a fentanyl crisis. That is Chinese fentanyl coming over the border, by the way. Green noted that in the last fiscal year, CBP, including Air and Marine Operations, “seized 27,293 pounds of poisonous fentanyl coming across the Southwest border — enough to kill around 6 billion people. Notably, federal officials estimate they are only able to seize 5-10 percent of all fentanyl smuggled across the Southwest border.”
But a social media app tracking the wit and witticisms of Billie Eilish and Justin Bieber is priority No. 1 for the defenders of the homeland like Gallagher.
Perhaps the chairman of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (Yes, the namers of congressional committees need to do better), should also take a closer look at the threat posed by U.S.-based Big Tech operators that have routinely trampled all over the liberties that make the homeland so worthy of securing.
Mayorkas, whose department includes the First Amendment-stomping and election-meddling Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), should be impeached on that agency’s threat to the homeland alone.
