Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mocked the Trump campaign after the attendance at what she called the “white supremacist” Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally Saturday evening had a lower-than-expected attendance.
The New York Democrat said teenagers used the social media platform TikTok to inflate the numbers of people who claimed to be attending in response to a tweet from Trump reelection campaign manager Brad Parscale that blamed “radical protesters” for scaring supporters away.
“Radical protestors, fueled by a week of apocalyptic media coverage, interfered with @realDonaldTrump supporters at the rally. They even blocked access to the metal detectors, preventing people from entering,” Parscale tweeted.
“Thanks to the 1,000s who made it anyway!” he added.
Radical protestors, fueled by a week of apocalyptic media coverage, interfered with @realDonaldTrump supporters at the rally.
They even blocked access to the metal detectors, preventing people from entering.
Thanks to the 1,000s who made it anyway!https://t.co/eM2nohMEy6
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) June 20, 2020
“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,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response.
“Shout out to Zoomers. Y’all make me so proud,” she added, referring to Generation Z.
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
Shout out to Zoomers. Y’all make me so proud. ☺️ https://t.co/jGrp5bSZ9T
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 21, 2020
A large swath of TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music, known as K-pop, say they reserved tickets with the intent of not attending the event. They also encouraged others to do that same but deleted their posts within a day or two so that the Trump campaign would not see.
“It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,” YouTuber Elijah Daniel, 26, who participated in the effort, said, according to the New York Times. “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.”
Trump campaign rally on Saturday was his first in months because of the coronavirus pandemic.
He and his campaign bragged that nearly a million people were requesting tickets for the event, which was held in a stadium that can hold roughly 19,000 people. The campaign scrapped a speech to an overflow crowd outside of the venue.
Trump said during the event that “some very bad people outside” tried to sabotage the rally.
“I’ve been watching the fake news for weeks now, and everything is negative. Don’t go, don’t come, don’t do anything. Today, it was like I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump said. “We had some very bad people outside. We had some very bad people outside. They were doing bad things.”
Parscale later responded to Ocasio-Cortez’s claim.
“Leftists and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking they somehow impacted rally attendance, don’t know what they’re talking about or how our rallies work,” he said. “Registering for a rally means you’ve RSVPed with a cell phone number and we constantly weed out bogus numbers, as we did with tens of thousands at the Tulsa rally, in calculating our possible attendee pool. These phony ticket requests never factor into our thinking. What makes this lame attempt at hacking our events even more foolish is the fact that every rally is general admission – entry is on a first-come-first-served basis and prior registration is not required. The fact is that a week’s worth of the fake news media warning people away from the rally because of COVID and protestors, coupled with recent images of American cities on fire, had a real impact on people bringing their families and children to the rally.
Parscale also slammed the media for how it reported on the matter.
“MSNBC was among outlets reporting that protesters even blocked entrances to the rally at times. For the media to now celebrate the fear that they helped create is disgusting, but typical. And it makes us wonder why we bother credentialing media for events when they don’t do their full jobs as professionals,” he said.
