K-Pop Fans & TikTok Teens Successfully Sabotage Trump's Tulsa Rally
President Trump promised "big crowds" at his controversial rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma this weekend. Unfortunately for him, the event epically failed to deliver due to a successful ploy by hundreds of teenage K-pop fans and TikTok users, the New York Times reports.
On the day of the rally, Trump's hopes of a bustling right-wing rally were quickly shattered as there were plenty of empty seats inside the arena, and literally not one person showed up for the outdoor events. Trump's campaign had previously reported that over 300,000 people had already registered to attend the rally, and even canceled planned events outside the rally for an anticipated crowd that did not materialize. Because as it turns out, K-pop stans and teens had mobilized to reserve tickets to the rally.
TikTok users and K-pop stans claim they registered hundreds of thousands of tickets for Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After POTUS urged followers to register for free tickets, the teens began sharing the information amongst themselves, organizing their followers to register for the rally and not show.
“That arena is not full. The outside: empty. They couldn’t even get 19,000 people there and they had bragged that there was going to be a million,” Joy Reid reported on MSNBC. “[Parscale] was played by young people and K-pop fans who ordered tickets with no intention of going.”
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale had claimed on Twitter that “radical protestors” had “blocked access to the metal detectors, preventing people from entering.” However, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez countered: "Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID."
Trump's rally in Tulsa was especially controversial, as it fell on the Juneteenth weekend and the city has an especially painful racial history. Understandably, social media is lauding the zoomers for crashing the right-wing event.
This is not the first time the fanbase has become involved in social activism. Last month, fans banded together to crash an app used by the Dallas Police Department and reclaimed racist hashtags on Twitter like #WhiteLivesMatter.