Of the millions of people on the video-sharing platform TikTok, only one has ever used the song “Hütten-Mix,” a jaunty techno-polka song performed by the Slovenian group Atomik Harmonik.
And only one TikToker has ever used the song “Hütten-Mix” in multiple videos, including one in which the song is set to a still image of a uniformed soldier cradling a baby, in the folds of an American flag, with the words “DEFEND LIFE” in all-caps.
That user appears to be none other than Doug Mastriano, the far-right Pennsylvania state senator who is moving toward a 2024 Senate bid after a landslide defeat in last year’s governor race.
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During that 2022 campaign, Mastriano leaned heavily on the preferred social network of the MAGA movement: Facebook.
Far less widely known, but hiding in plain sight, seems to be Mastriano’s prolific use of the Chinese-owned social media app, which currently happens to be public enemy No. 1 in his own political party.
On TikTok, Mastriano appears to post regularly to some 3,000 followers from an account with the handle “doug4gov” and the display name “Doug MASTRIANO.”
Emails from The Daily Beast to accounts associated with Mastriano and his political operation to confirm the authenticity of the TikTok account were not returned.
But it is highly unlikely “doug4gov” is an imposter or fan account. In February, the account posted a video of Mastriano near the train derailment site in East Palestine, Ohio, throwing rocks in a polluted creek and talking to the camera.
That post is one of the rare Mastriano TikToks that generally fits with the style and format used by most politicians on the platform. What separates him from many public figures who use TikTok—and unites him with many ordinary but strange Americans—is his apparent zeal for posting inexplicably random content for everyone to see.
Indeed, to journey through Mastriano’s TikTok page is to whipsaw between boomer-friendly conservative memes and cat videos; friendly tweets posted by the likes of Lou Dobbs and Swiss tourism videos; screenshots of news articles about political enemies and commentary-free videos of hornets’ nests, birds, and gingerbread houses.
The main through line: a concerning amount of obscure, decades-old electro-polka music, and a smattering of traditional Swiss “alphorn” tracks.
The platonic ideal of a Mastriano political TikTok, for instance, might be one from last year that displayed a grainy screen capture of a TV news show declaring him the winner of the GOP governor primary—set to the track “Sag mir Quando, sag mir wann” by DJ Bellissimo, a techno-polka artist from the 1990s.
Most of Mastriano’s TikToks from the 2022 campaign trail were remarkably bizarre—like a video showing a still selfie of him and two other men visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, set to a thumping EDM version of the Hebrew song “Shalom Aleichem.” Another was a slideshow of photos of him at campaign events with women, set to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
Since his 2022 election defeat, Mastriano’s content has taken a more bizarre turn. In February, for instance, he posted a video showing cartoons of a duck in various situations with the caption, “got any grapes?” set to a sped-up song by the artist Justine Skye.
Last December, he reposted a video in which a faint, neon-yellow horse appears during a crowded and violent protest in the Middle East; the original user suggested it was an “apocalypse horse” that emerged during the 2011 protests in Cairo, Egypt.
But the most unusual thing of all about Mastriano’s presence on TikTok may be that he, an ultra-right Republican politician, uses the app at all.
If Mastriano runs for Senate this election season—as he has repeatedly teased on social media—his use of the app in a fervently anti-TikTok political environment would stick out more jarringly than the combination of electro-polka and Lou Dobbs.
In Washington and elsewhere, GOP officials have quickly coalesced around the position that TikTok poses an unacceptable danger to U.S. national security. Alleging that its parent company, Chinese-owned ByteDance, uses the app to conduct surveillance on Americans, many influential conservatives have pushed for an outright ban of TikTok.
Many Democrats share these concerns and reject the use of TikTok. Lawmakers in both parties joined together earlier this year to support a ban on the app for official U.S. government devices.
But for Republicans, their hardline stance against the app has fit into the party’s broader, anti-China political messaging. Conservative media, for instance, has gone after politicians like Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) for their use of TikTok.
The email accounts linked to Mastriano and his political operation did not respond to questions about his views on TikTok and national security or his response to fellow Republicans who want to ban the app.
During his 2022 campaign for governor, in which he lost to now-Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) by 15 points, Mastriano did not talk or post online much about China. One exception is that he endorsed conspiracy theories that China used hacking techniques to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. (Mastriano, who has endorsed many conspiracy theories, attended Donald Trump’s speech in Washington on Jan. 6.)
The smattering of TikTok defenders in politics are almost exclusively Democrats. They believe the app is a valuable tool to reach young people. More to the point, figures like Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) have argued that calls to ban it fit into “anti-China hysteria” and xenophobia. Republicans who oppose a ban, like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), do so on free speech grounds, but do not use the app themselves.
It’s not hard to see Mastriano’s unreserved embrace of TikTok becoming a theme in the 2024 GOP primary for Senate in Pennsylvania. David McCormick, the hedge funder who is reportedly making moves to run again after his primary defeat in 2022, has talked and written extensively about the threat China poses to American superpower status, though he has not always embraced the hard right-wing line on the issue.
If Mastriano has any concerns about the political liability of TikTok in a 2024 campaign, however, he’s not showing it.
His most recent post, in fact, is a screenshot of an opinion poll—one that shows him leading McCormick and other rivals for the GOP Senate nomination.
