Jun 22, 20202 min read

Ocasio-Cortez thanks ‘TikTok teens’ she says ‘tricked’ Trump campaign

Kids these days.

Trump’s big campaign rally in Tulsa wasn’t as big as promised — the arena seats more than 19,000 people but only a reported 6,200 Trump supporters occupied the general admissions sections. Why? Both sides of the political aisle were armed with answers.

The man leading the president’s re-election efforts explained away the no-shows.

“Radical protestors, fueled by a week of apocalyptic media coverage, interfered with @realDonaldTrump supporters at the rally,” Brad Parscale explained. “They even blocked access to the metal detectors, preventing people from entering.” Trump, for his part, took to the stage and backed that assessment, saying the media’s urging of his supporters not to attend on top of the protesters outside kept the crowds away. “We begin our campaign,” Trump said. “The silent majority is stronger than ever before.”

But New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t buying it, and she shared her appreciation with those she believes duped the Trump administration:

“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,told 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.”

And Parscale followed up denying the validity of the reports.

“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.”

He added that the “phony ticket requests” didn’t factor into the calculations.

Source: MarketWatch, Shawn Langlois