0
At a gathering Trump held in Tulsa Yesterday (June 20), it was reported that a million people had registered for tickets, but only a few thousand actually showed up. Its thought that this is due to an undercover campaign, run by K-Pop fans, largely on TikTok, to sabotage the event.
Fan of Korean pop bands reportedly worked together with other social media users, to register possible hundreds of thousands of fake tickets, to ruin Trumps rally.
This isn’t the first time K-Pop fans have shown up to do activism work though, they also flooded an app set up by the Dallas Police Department, meant for members of the public to send in videos of protesters, with FanCam videos of their favourite K-Pop artists, causing the app to crash, and the drowned out the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag, using the same wording, but for anti-racist messages.
The work these fans put in meant that the arena was expected to be filled, and instead had a pathetically small gathering of people. With the timing of the gathering, K-Pop fans may well have prevented many people from attending the possibly dangerous, and irresponsible, event.
As if that wasn’t bad enough for the President, Tom Petty’s 1989 song ‘I won’t back down’ was played at the rally, and now his estate have issued Donald Trump’s election campaign a cease and desist order.
Petty’s family also released a statement on the late musicians social media, stating ‘Trump was in no way authorised to use this song to further a campaign that leaves too many Americans and common sense behind.
Both the late Tom Petty and his family firmly stand against racism and discrimination of any kind. Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate. He liked to bring people together.’
The statement continued, making clear that the song was intended ‘for the underdog, for the common man, and for EVERYONE’, ending with ‘we have issued an official cease and desist notice to the Trump campaign.’, Petty’s family Adria, Annakim, Dana and Jane Petty, signing off on the statement.
Many things can be said about Trump, and having large gatherings during a pandemic, but the surest thing to be said, is that Trump surely wasn’t expecting his rally to be ruined by fans of Korean pop music, and Tom Petty’s family to be rightly angry at his campaign for using his music.