The Chinese Communist Party is using TikTok to launch a sophisticated campaign to undermine and evade President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on China, according to a report.

The report, from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), alleges that the CCP is behind a trend of videos that urge consumers to buy directly from Chinese companies that claim to produce goods for American brands, or to use other potential tariff evasion techniques.

Following Trump’s April 2 announcement of the “reciprocal tariff,” viral TikTok videos began urging consumers to bypass American brands and buy directly from Chinese manufacturers at cheaper prices. TikTok is accused of being heavily influenced by the CCP, and due to its ownership by Beijing-headquartered ByteDance, it is subject to Chinese law requiring it to assist and cooperate with national intelligence work.

The report comes as a 145% duty on goods imported from China goes into effect as part of Trump’s plan to promote free and fair trade between the United States and China. Trump levied tariffs across the board against countries across the world, but China was always seen as the main target of the “Liberation Day” tariffs.

One of the videos featured in the report shows a man claiming his factory has created goods for “most of the luxury goods around the world,” including Gucci, Prada, Coach, and Louis Vuitton.

“The USA and its little European brothers are trying to refuse Chinese goods,” the man says in the video. “Why don’t you just contact us and buy from us. You won’t believe the prices we give you.”

Many of the videos, which have received more than 50 million views on TikTok alone, show Chinese influencers in factories promoting products like shoes and bags made by Chinese companies.

According to the NCRI report, the messaging is amplified by TikTok’s highly-persuasive algorithm known for shaping attitudes and behavior.

“When CCP-linked influencers encourage Americans to ‘cut out the middleman,’ what they’re really promoting is a system designed to defeat tariff enforcement while appearing trendy and harmless,” NCRI co-founder and director Joel Finkelstein told The Daily Wire.

A TikTok spokesperson disputed the report in a statement to The Daily Wire and claimed it was an attempt to harm the Chinese-owned company.

“NCRI is attempting to peddle false theories through yet another bogus ‘report’ on TikTok,” the spokesperson said. “While NCRI’s own ‘analysis’ acknowledges tariff-related content exists across U.S. social media, its conclusions that single out TikTok are unfounded, inaccurate and a deliberate effort to malign our business.”

Finkelstein says most reports on the viral TikTok trend overlook the CCP’s role in orchestrating the trend. The Chinese have a clear interest in undermining U.S. tariffs, through both the loopholes highlighted but also boosting negative sentiment in the United States.

“We started this investigation because the mainstream coverage — NYT, Bloomberg — framed this as just a curious trend, maybe suspicious, but offered no evidence and no method,” Finkelstein told The Daily Wire. “No one was asking: what if this isn’t just viral content? What if it’s a state-directed operation? We explored that hypothesis — and the data is overwhelming.”

In the 13-page report, NCRI outlines how the CCP is behind the viral trend as part of a campaign to undermine Trump’s tariffs.

According to the report, the social media trend coincides with the CCP Ministry of Commerce announcing its “Shopping in China campaign” which encourages foreigners to consume Chinese goods and the announcement of  “major consumption promotion campaign for foreigners” in the CCP newspaper People’s Daily on April 11.

NCRI accuses TikTok of amplifying the content produced by CCP-affiliated influencers in the CCP’s top-down “Shopping in China campaign.”

NCRI conducted a test of the “algorithmic stickiness” of the videos, which are often tagged with “#sourcing,” and found that videos showed more than 4X higher “stickiness” than videos on other trending topics.

“Our testing showed that TikTok’s algorithm promoted #sourcing content at over 4X the rate of other trending topics — including NHL content during playoff season,” said Finkelstein. “That kind of stickiness suggests the platform isn’t just surfacing this material — it’s actively reinforcing CCP-aligned messaging with every swipe.”

The English-language content is tailored to young Western consumers, particularly women, and performs better on TikTok than on other platforms. According to NCRI, it often features anti-Western tropes like “Why pay greedy American middlemen?” While similar #sourcing posts on Instagram remained steady, their presence on TikTok surged.

On Instagram, the number of engagement of identical #sourcing videos remained constant, even as TikTok’s surged, according to NCRI.

NCRI accuses bot accounts of amplifying the videos on X with often identical captions. The group alleges that some of the social media chatter is encouraging people to use “triangle shipping,” a tariff evasion that routes goods through a third country before their final destination.

As an example, NCRI presents the case of a TikTok Account, Nihao Jewelry, which was “accused of using triangle shipping and invoice fraud by disgruntled customers,” according to the report. NCRI’s report also shows one-star reviews of the company, including one that alleges a customer’s package was shipped to Jamaica.

“Triangle shipping isn’t just a loophole — it’s a deliberate tactic promoted within CCP-aligned sourcing networks to disguise origin, exploit customs blind spots, and move goods outside the reach of U.S. tariffs,” Finkelstein said. “What makes triangle shipping especially dangerous is that it’s being normalized through viral content.”

NCRI further points out that in several Reddit communities, users are discussing triangle shipping — including one who translated a Mandarin-language article, reportedly from a Chinese seller, explaining how to use the method.

On Friday, the de minimis exemption — a shipping loophole that allowed goods valued at $800 or less to enter the United States duty-free — expired. According to Finkelstein, its expiration prevents Chinese sellers from committing invoice fraud by falsely undervaluing shipments to qualify for the exemption.

In another review of Nihao Jewelry shared in the NCRI report, a customer alleges that the company under-invoiced as a way to use the minimis exemption before it expired.

The Daily Wire cannot independently confirm allegations against Nihao Jewelry.

ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is facing pressure from U.S. lawmakers to divest from TikTok in order for it to remain available in the country. The Supreme Court has held that the so-called TikTok ban is constitutional on the grounds that concerns about the Chinese government using TikTok to harvest the private data of millions of Americans are legitimate.

TikTok was fined roughly $600 million in Europe on Friday for improperly transferring user data to China.

Normally when some influencer posts a video that I find annoying and I feel the need to respond to it, I save it for my Daily Cancellation segment. Today, however, I am going to break that rule. I am going to begin with a video from an allegedly conservative influencer named Emily Wilson.

What makes this video relevant, aside from the fact that it just simply annoys me, is that it echoes a message we’ve been hearing with increasing frequency from women on the Right with, in some cases, very large platforms. Emily’s platform isn’t very large, but it is sizable enough. She has half a million followers on Instagram. I’m sure she’s a nice person. I don’t know her and have no issue with her personally. But she represents a growing, or at least increasingly evident, problem on the Right. The problem, in a word, is feminism.

Feminism is not compatible with any meaningful definition of conservatism. Whatever conservatism is trying to conserve — like marriage, the family, western civilization itself — feminism militates against. And yet many feminists have become mouthpieces in the movement, and are accepted as such, as long as they wear a MAGA hat and say that they don’t like illegal immigration or whatever.

So with that in mind, let’s listen to just the latest submission to the ever expanding conservative feminist genre:

Not to pick on @emilysavesusa because I’ve been seeing a lot of girls on the right counter signaling the ‘trad’ stay at home mom lifestyle lately also, but I think this message is ridiculous.

Being a SAHM is not being ‘trapped’ by a man. That’s feminist BS. It’s also not… pic.twitter.com/2iiwnYCb0T

— Sarah Stock ✟ (@sarahcstock) May 1, 2025

Well, I am cringing. But not because of the trad wives. I’m cringing at this lame, half-baked attack on stay-at-home moms. And I’m cringing even more at the fact that women with these kinds of views are still embraced as “conservative.”

Try to imagine the opposite of this. Imagine a Left-wing influencer who advocates for every Left-wing policy under the sun but then comes out one day and says, “You know what? I think a woman’s proper place is in the home, raising her children.” It’s impossible to conceive of any Left-wing woman ever saying such a thing. And if she did, she would be immediately excised from the movement. That’s because leftists understand that supporting so-called traditional gender roles is fundamentally antithetical to their worldview. You literally cannot be a leftist and hold that view.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

The same is logically true in the reverse. Attacking gender roles is fundamentally leftist. Which means you cannot be conservative if you hold fundamentally leftist views. You have every right to express those views. But you should not be embraced as a conservative, much less listened to as a spokeswoman for the movement. 

Now let’s go through some of the specifics here. Emily says that a woman should have a job and her own income so that she isn’t “trapped” by a man. She envisions the relationship between husband and wife as inherently competitive. Marriage is a zero sum game where both husband and wife are competing for control. Again, this is a fundamentally leftist conception. It is a recipe for divorce. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with a wife earning money. As I’ve conceded many times, a family may feel that they need two incomes in order to survive. Or they may want a second income. Or the wife might have a job that doesn’t require leaving the house and going to an office every day. But if she’s earning money as an escape hatch because she doesn’t want to be “trapped,” that is a very bad sign.

If you want to understand why it’s a bad sign just imagine how it would sound if a man adopted this philosophy. A woman on X commented yesterday that a wife needs a “backup in case their man can’t fulfill his providing roles.”

Well what if a man decided to have a back up in case his woman didn’t fulfill her wifely duties? Most people would find that objectionable, for good reason. The whole point of marriage is that you are devoting yourself entirely to your spouse. Two become one flesh. It is not possible to make that level of commitment while at the same time actively building yourself a nest egg just in case you want to leave. Saying the vows and pledging yourself to your betrothed means not having an exit plan. It means you burn the boats like Cortés and turn towards that wilderness and journey into it together, come what may.

She also says that men want to be mentally stimulated. The implication is that stay-at-home moms are too stupid to provide that sort of stimulation because all they think about is their “sourdough bread.”

This is absurdly dismissive and insulting to millions of good, godly, intelligent women who, while staying home with the children, are also capable of having intelligent conversations with their husbands. It also assumes that a woman who sits in a cubicle all day will somehow have more interesting things to say to her husband at the end of the day. Having a job as a woman does not make you smart or interesting. I hate to break it to the working women of the world, but your husband is almost certainly not intellectually stimulated by your job or your stories about your job. If he was able to choose between listening to a story about your office drama or listening to a story about what you did with the kids that day, he would prefer to hear about the latter. This is the sort of thing you would know about men if you listened to them when they try to tell you what they want, instead of declaring what you think they should want.

But the biggest problem — and the objection you hear most often from these feminist types — is the claim that somehow the stay-at-home mom arrangement is implausible, or even impossible. Emily declares that your chances of finding a man who can provide for you while you stay home and raise the children are, “Slim to none. Actually none,” she says. There’s no chance that it works out for you. There’s no chance that it works out for you or anyone you know. And yet it has worked out for countless people. It’s worked out for my wife. It’s worked out for many families that I know personally. It’s worked out for billions of human beings across the globe and through history since the dawn of civilization. Emily has written off the most normal and historically common practice as not just difficult but, according to her, literally impossible. And not just impossible, but also absurd and grotesque.

There’s a lot of this kind of thing going around. During my conversation with Tucker Carlson this week, we talked about the absurdity of gay adoption and gay parenthood.

Here’s a clip of that exchange that Tucker’s team posted:

Should gay couples be able to adopt? Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson discuss. pic.twitter.com/q3I5vRRzVF

— Tucker Carlson Network (@TCNetwork) May 1, 2025

Plenty of people on the Right, or Right-adjacent, took great exception to this. Glenn Greenwald is one of them. He tweeted in response:

One has to be morally deranged — or totally ignorant of the grim realities of kids lingering without parents in orphanages, shelters and foster care, only to be expelled at 18 with no support — to believe that that dark hell is better for kids than being adopted by gay couples.

Morally deranged, he says. The view that two men should not be allowed to adopt children was held by nearly everyone in this country, and everyone across the world, until very recently. Barack Obama was against gay adoption when he first ran for president. So was every other elected Democrat. Any elected Democrat over the age of 50 was probably, at one point, opposed to both gay marriage and gay adoption. In fact, gay adoption was so obviously wrong to so many people for so long that it wasn’t even discussed. It wasn’t debated. It was just intuitively understood that children need a mother and a father. We won’t let two men adopt children for the same reason that we wouldn’t let a polyamorous polycule adopt a child. Children need a mother and a father. We are not going to deliberately put a child into a disordered environment where he is not only deprived of a mother or a father, but the role of mother or father has been replaced in an unnatural and confusing way.

This was always understood. Now, in the blink of an eye, what was always understood is “morally deranged.” The thing that everyone believed forever until approximately last Tuesday is not just wrong but shocking and upsetting and baffling. This is the game that’s played. And I, for one, am entirely sick of it.

Not everything that is old or traditional is automatically good, of course. Slavery is old and traditional — and still practiced in non-western countries. It’s also very bad. But there are basic truths about how human society is fundamentally structured. Truths that have withstood the test of time. Truths that have, while civilization held fast to them, it flourished and advanced in remarkable and seemingly miraculous ways. Truths that, minutes after our society abandoned, immediately led to decline and chaos and confusion. One of those truths is that a child needs a mother and a father. Only a man and a woman can have a baby, or should. Another one of those truths is that men and women are different, and so have different roles in the home and in society. This was an idea so basic that there wasn’t even a term for it. We only started labeling it “gender roles” at the moment that we decided to abandon it. And I would say that the results of that decision have not been good. Divorce, broken homes, declining birth rates, 60 million dead babies. And those are just the early returns.

That’s why we cannot be embarrassed to hold to a system that is ancient and timeless, and proven, tested, and vindicated by the testimony of our ancestors and by thousands of years of human experience beyond that. As conservatives, if that is not worth conserving, then nothing is.