June 21, 2020

K-Pop Stans and TikTok Teens Mobilized to Derail Trump’s Tulsa Rally

TikTok

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If you believe President Donald Trump, nearly one million people registered for his June 20 campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But come Saturday, fewer than 6,200 people showed up, according to the Tulsa fire department. Large swaths of the 19,000-seat arena were empty,  the New York Times reported, and the outdoor overflow venue was such a ghost town that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence cancelled appearances there. 

Maybe Trump’s popularity has fallen just that far. Maybe Tulsans were worried about catching the coronavirus. And maybe a horde of K-pop fans and TikTok users successfully pranked the president’s campaign into thinking its rally would be packed to the rafters. 

Since June 11, when the Trump campaign asked supporters to register for the event using their phones, social media users been encouraging each other to reserve tickets (for free) to the Tulsa rally with no intention of showing up. 

“I just registered for Trump’s rally, and I’m so excited—to not go,” one user posted on TikTok.

@emilysdcp

GO REGISTER! And don’t forget to not show up! Take those seats away! #trump #trump2020 #2020 #trumprally #republican #tulsa JK #blm #lgbt #voteblue

♬ original sound – vividdreamergirl

Others made similar announcements while dancing the Macarena.

@thiqbish

Duet your confirmation that you took seats to the trump rally (which I’m tOOTTTALLLY going to use wink wink)with @indiefilmprotagonist #greenscreen

♬ Macarena – Bass Bumpers Remix Radio Edit – Los Del Rio

 

Thousands of fans reportedly joined in the effort.

On Twitter, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) thanked the teens for their service. “KPop allies, we see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice too,” she added. 

It’s not the first time K-pop fans have mobilized en masse for political or social causes in recent weeks. When the Dallas Police Department launched an app for users to send in videos of “illegal activity” taking place at Black Lives Matter protests, K-pop fans crashed it with videos showing their beloved stars dancing and singing. When white supremacists planned a day of action online, attempting to make the racist hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter trend on Twitter, K-pop fans flooded the hashtag with more fancams. And when K-pop boy band BTS donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter, its army of fans matched the contribution within 24 hours. 

In a statement, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale blamed the rally’s poor attendance on protesters and “fake news media” warning people of the risk of catching coronavirus, which has killed nearly 120,000 people in the US.

He also implied that the real purpose of collecting sign-ups for the rally was to harvest the contact information of people who may later be spammed with fundraising requests and targeted political advertising. 

Campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh echoed this in an interview with Bloomberg: “Leftists always fool themselves into thinking they’re being clever,” he said. “Registering for a rally only means you’ve RSVPed with a cell phone number. Every rally is general admission and entry is first-come-first served. But we thank them for their contact information.”

I wonder how well Team Trump’s data specialists are dealing with their new spreadsheets of minors and BTS fangirls.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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