Trump always exaggerates attendance at his rallies, but the one in Oklahoma in 2020 killed Herman Cain and likely also helped kill his campaign after being punked by K-pop fans. Mothlike Tucker Carlson attacked BTS because to suck up to Trump, he apparently wants the full K-pop treatment and hoped to do some trumpian mischief as reciprocity for the 2020 sabotage. Back then, Trump tried to either ban or convince corporations to buy TikTok, but failed as his revenge scheme got thwarted by Microsoft and Oracle. The #BTSarmy might be more formidable than Ukraine’s.
(Sunday 20 June 2020) President Trump’s campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday, but it failed to deliver. Hundreds of teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they’re at least partially responsible.
Brad Parscale, the chairman of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, posted on Twitter on Monday that the campaign had fielded more than a million ticket requests, but reporters at the event noted the attendance was lower than expected. The campaign also canceled planned events outside the rally for an anticipated overflow crowd that did not materialize.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said protesters stopped supporters from entering the rally, held at the BOK Center, which has a 19,000-seat capacity.
But reporters present said there were few protests. According to a spokesman for the Tulsa Fire Department on Sunday, the fire marshal counted 6,200 scanned tickets of attendees. (That number would not include staff, media or those in box suites.)
TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.
“It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,” said the YouTuber Elijah Daniel, 26, who participated in the social media campaign. “K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want.”
Many users deleted their posts after 24 to 48 hours in order to conceal their plan and keep it from spreading into the mainstream internet. “The majority of people who made them deleted them after the first day because we didn’t want the Trump campaign to catch wind,” Mr. Daniel said. “These kids are smart and they thought of everything.”
www.nytimes.com/...
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Things have gotten very bad for Joe Biden, both public-facing and internally. What are they doing about it? Well, they broke glass in case of emergency and invited a Korean pop group to speak at the White House today. Watch.
KIM NAMJOON: Hi, we're BTS and it is a great honor to be invited to the White House today to discuss the important issues of anti-Asian hate crimes, Asian inclusion, and diversity.
CARLSON: Yeah, so we got a Korean pop group to discuss anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States. Okay. Good job, guys.
www.mediamatters.org/...
(2020) As reported by the New York Times, the scheme stemmed from a 11 June tweet from the Trump campaign promoting free registration online and via cellphones. The scheme exploded on the TikTok app, where young users implored followers to join in.
“Trump has been actively trying to disenfranchise millions of Americans in so many ways, and to me, this was the protest I was able to perform,” Erin Hoffman, an 18-year-old New Yorker, told the Times, adding that she reserved two tickets and persuaded a parent to book two more.
Following Saturday’s abysmal turnout, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale blamed Black Lives Matter protesters outside the BOK Center for the small crowd, claiming they “even blocked access to the metal detectors, preventing people from entering”.
[...]
The Trump campaign pushed back, accusing Ocasio-Cortez of encouraging a foreign-owned platform to interfere with US elections and politics. TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.
www.theguardian.com/...
Upon learning of Carlson’s comments, Twitter (rightfully) lost its shit, exploding with memes and fervent prayers for ARMY to decimate the Fox figurehead into oblivion. “He doesn’t know the force he just awoke,” one user tweeted — and anyone unfortunate enough to have made even a lighthearted joke about BTS online would call that assessment an understatement. Force? More like an unrelenting, 24/7 onslaught of pain. In short: RIP to Tucker’s mentions.
www.rollingstone.com/...
