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When U.S. President Donald Trump touched down in Tulsa over the weekend for his first major campaign event in months, supporters were anticipating a defiant new chapter in his so-called Death Star re-election campaign.

But hopes of a packed-to-the-gills venue thronging with adulating fansthe likes of which have become an unorthodox hallmark of the Trump presidencywere quickly dashed with one look at the crowd: fewer than 6,200 attendees turned out to fill the Bank of Oklahoma Centers 19,200 seats.

This probably came as a surprise to campaign manager Brad Parscale, who just five days before had tweeted that there were over a million ticket requests for the rally.

It wasnt long before it was revealed that teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans might have had a hand in Trumps embarrassing weekend, raising questions as to whether online youth could be learning to utilize tactics more commonly associated with right-wing trolls to pursue a decidedly more progressive agenda.

A couple of weeks before Trump was set to give his speech in Tulsa, TikTok users had apparently begun registering for tickets to the rally with no intention of attending, all with the express aim of seeing a pathetically underfilled arena when Trump took the stage on June 20.

Among the TikTokers leading the prank was 51-year-old Mary Jo Laupp, who posted a video encouraging people who wanted to see the arena barely filled or completely empty to reserve tickets to the rally and then simply not show up. Her video quickly went viral, amassing over 713,000 likes.

K-pop stans, whose recent mobilization around the Black Lives Matter movement has proven them to be formidable social activists, were also roped into the effort to inflate ticket registrations.

One participant told the New York Times that many of those taking part in the ruse deleted their social media posts announcing their participation after 24 to 48 hours so that their plan to derail the rally wouldnt leak into the more mainstream corners of the internet.

And when the rally turned out to be a spectacular flop, they took to social media to celebrate the big win, at times apparently incredulous of their own power.

When Parscale,Trumps campaign manager, took to social media to claim that radical protesters had interfered with turnout, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not one to shy away from calling out Trump on Twitter, pointed out the "radicals" weren't exactly the black-clad antifa thugs the term may have implied.

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, she tweeted.

Shout out to Zoomers, she added, referring to the generation born in the late 90s and early 00s. Yall make me so proud.

Trumps campaign team, however, has refused to acknowledge the possibility it got trolled by a bunch of teenagers on an app best known for viral dances, instead blaming the poor turnout on media reports.

Leftists and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking they somehow impacted rally attendance, dont know what theyre talking about or how our rallies work, reads a press release from Parscale.

The fact is that a weeks 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.

While it was unclear what fake news Parscale was referring to, the New York Times reported that six Trump staffers tested positive for COVID-19 ahead of the Tulsa rally.

While TikTokers didnt directly deny Trump supporters their seats at the BOK Centersince the rally operated on a first come, first served basisthe impassioned digital natives appear to have wildly inflated ticket registrations, and contributed to sky-high expectations for a packed house.

Leading up to the Tulsa rally, Trump boasted of never having an empty seat at a rally.

An outdoor spillover stage was even built for Trump to speak to supporters who presumably wouldnt be able to fit into the BOK Center, but it was dismantled when it became apparent that the arena was not going to be full, let alone overflowing with supporters.

With entire sections of seats at the BOK Center left empty, the disappointing turnout allegedly left Trump furious, NBC reported.

While autocrats and the alt-right have become notorious in recent years for pernicious trolling and using the levers of social media to undermine democratic causes, liberal Zoomers may be proving themselves equally adept at utilizing the same tools to progressive ends.

The combination of TikTok users and K-pops massive online army can be a formidable foil to the internet trolls. There is no doubt that these are often able to achieve their objectives, with dazzling impacts, Jennifer Yang Hui, an associate research fellow at Singapores S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), told VICE News.

However, social media activism isnt without its limitations.

Spectacular as the rise of social activism on platforms like TikTok may be, its effects may be short-lived, Yang noted, describing online activism as fierce but quick spurts of activities that fizzle out as soon as theyve achieved what they wanted.

According to Dr. Adrian Ang U-Jin, a research fellow at RSISs U.S. Programme, the Zoomers may have achieved a well-coordinated feat this time, but they remain limited in actual political participation.

Young people might appear to be engaged with social activism on social media platforms, but it is their grandparents who actually go out to cast ballots on election day, he said.

If nothing else, however, the events in Tulsa over the weekend proved TikTok is no longer just a mish-mash of catchy tunes and dance fads, and K-pop fandoms are capable of more than swooning over teen idolsup to and including delivering a stinging embarrassment to a notoriously thin-skinned sitting U.S. president.

The ease with which Zoomers can connect on new platforms means young would-be activists may be able to bond together with the like-minded online, Yang said.

This also means that the youth will increasingly be a force to be reckoned with worldwide, shaping digital politics.

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TikTokers and K-pop Stans Are Claiming a Major Victory Against Trump. But Can They Keep it Up? - VICE

(Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for BN)

* Lawyers for the estate of the helicopter pilot accused in a lawsuit of causing the crash that killed Kobe Bryant and others wants the case removed from Los Angeles. Pretty sure people know who Kobe Bryant is outside of LA [Yahoo Sports]

* Lyft has settled a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice alleging that the ride-sharing service violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. [Tech Crunch]

* The Trump Administration is facing a lawsuit for failing to provide COVID-19 relief money to undocumented families. [Buzzfeed News]

* A lawyer for alt-right figure Richard Spencer has been allowed to withdraw from representing him in a case involving the 2017 Charlottesville violence. [Yahoo News]

* Check out this profile of a top Hollywood lawyer who wheels and deals while walking around 10 miles a day. Thats kind of the opposite of the Lincoln Lawyer [Wall Street Journal]

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

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Morning Docket: 06.23.20 - Above the Law

The Trump presidency is often billed as a phenomenon born from chaos.

It arrived in a flurry of tweets, online beefs and the sound of rules and norms bending and snapping like fragile floorboards under a listing democracy. But make no mistake: The strategy of this White House and the culture it has sought to embolden is anything but random.

Posting wild conspiracy theories one minute, racist phraseology the next and then acting as if Trumps initial choice of Juneteenth for his latest rally made the day that now commemorates the end of slavery famous rather than being a blatant swipe of disrespect is all part of a strategy that relies on obnoxious, overwhelming online bullying, and pulls from an insidious corner of the gaming world as much as it does the history books.

Every bit of language out of Trump and the White House can be parsed for not-so-hidden coded messages and disinformation designed to create an environment full of symbols, badges and allegiances that create an us-versus-them playing field.

The bulk of Trumps speech Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., relied heavily on fear-based rhetoric with violent underpinnings. It was delivered in broad strokes as if to define teams.

I know our people, Trump said, cheerleading his followers strength in battle after portraying the Democratic Party as anarchists and stoking fears of immigration, even trotting out the grotesque slur kung-flu to describe COVID-19. While many laughed at the low turnout at the BOK Center rally after excessive hype from the Trump team, the president succeeded in disseminating his toxic messaging to a global audience. Its a thread that has been ramping up in recent weeks.

It was present when Trump tweeted that last weeks Supreme Court decision against his planned repeal of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA for so-called Dreamers, was shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or conservatives. Such language in particular is designed to appeal to those on the right who feel their culture is under attack.

And it was more directly spelled out in a Wall Street Journal interview in which Trump said wearing a mask in the pandemic is a way to signal disapproval of him and that attempts to COVID-shame him wouldnt work. Thats not just bad health-advice, it turns a face mask into a uniform and citizens into adversaries.

The Trump world overflows with language and images that are stand-ins for symbols, all of which the campaign shrugs off when called out. On Thursday, it was reported that Facebook removed numerous Trump ads that featured an inverted red triangle, a figure once used by the Nazis to identify their political opposition. The Trump team claimed it was an antifa symbol, a far-left movement that Trump is trying to use as a scapegoat by branding adherents as some sort of mysterious, Darth Vader-like overlords controlling the American empire.

Its as if Trump is the orator of his own extremely dangerous alternate-reality game, a type of play that graphs itself onto the real world and utilizes key words as signals to an in-the-know audience. In a playful environment, its a cue to dig deeper into a singular universe. Here, its an endless tunnel that has followers view every living being and pop-culture item as a symbol of potential political opposition.

Its not just a deflection; its the construction of a whole other alternate story line. Its a fantastical conspiratorial plot Trump has spun since his birther days, one that will only get more intense in the lead-up to the November election.

Recent attention has zeroed in on the boogaloo movement, a far-right fringe subculture that has been tied to violence around the country. Its followers also celebrate provocative memes and tweets while wearing aloha shirts and believing broadly speaking that progressive ideas are bringing us to a bloody race war that they hope will lead to their goal of overthrowing the federal government.

Any moment that can lead to mass unpredictability, be it Trumps calls to liberate states from stay-at-home health orders or large protests, exist, in their mind, to be exploited, and yet Trump continues to scream the word antifa as a call to arms. The president is creating a quest to look for conspiracies that dont exist such as the false Pizzagate claim that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring in a restaurant basement all the way providing a narrative to an antagonistic way of life and using this moment of protest following the killing of George Floyd to create further divisions.

In these pursuits theres no elaborate puzzle or tidy solution, but it does provide followers constant fuel to hunt for the next conspiratorial breadcrumb until fiction turns into a much louder fiction or at least results on Facebook, which became a favorite landing spot for boogaloo supporters. Think of it as a Monopoly board, only instead of passing Go, the little square reads Fake News.

When viewed as part of a larger, game-like strategy, such chaos starts to come into relative clarity. The Trump thesis for leadership and disarray, while speaking to dark corners of internet message boards or Discord servers, even reads as if lifted from the texts of Diplomacy, a complicated-yet-nerdy board game of yore that unwittingly outlined a Trump-era manifesto.

There are some people who need to win to be amused, reads a guide to a 1979 edition of Diplomacy, the game first sold in the late 1950s and popularized by Avalon Hill. But Diplomacy, the guide tells us, is not a game for such persons.

No, in fact the guide directly spells out an alternate win state: maintaining the illusion of a balance of power. This is a game, in essence, where a player can dominate by keeping the others fighting among themselves. The goal? He is concerned that no player, no alliance, will become strong enough to eliminate any of the others, particularly himself.

Winning, more or less, comes from creating a state in which no one else can win. And power is maintained by keeping others confused, frustrated and angry. This feels uncomfortably close to Trumps method of governing.

Of course, the playing board was set even before Trump took office with Gamergate, a 2014 movement that galvanized around a perceived loss of power among a segment of the gaming community made up largely of men who believe their worldview is threatened by the media and the introduction of diversity in games. This publication and others have cited Gamergate as a blueprint for Trumps vitriolic attacks and Twitter dragging.

Thats because it isnt all that different from the complaints of those today who are angry over toppled Confederate statues or even the retiring of the Aunt Jemima brand. Keep politics out of a games is essentially an alt-right rallying cry for maintaining a status quo games by, for and starring white men.

Its a so-called army the administration has sought to activate, to quote Stephen K. Bannon, who once oversaw Breitbart News and served as Trumps campaign chief executive, in an interview he gave with journalist/author Joshua Green.

Consider them activated.

Thus, the cultural war moves to its next battleground, be it whatever high-profile game, television show or tell-all memoir is released this week. All are mixed together into a melting pot of racism and fear to maintain a hold on the cultural conversation. Or, rather, to simply make it difficult for other voices to get the floor.

Like the game of Diplomacy, its not about winning so much as it as just not losing.

In March, when fears over the spread of the coronavirus seemed to be alternately gripping and splitting the nation, I dug out my copy of Diplomacy, which I inherited from my dad but have had a hard time since college finding anyone will to play. In the spring, unfounded theories that the virus had been manufactured in a Chinese lab were floated, as was the suggestion by Trump to try the controversial anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and even bleach to prevent COVID-19.

Such messages drowned out and clashed with very real health concerns. Feeling stressed and powerless, I thumbed through a number of recent books and articles, trying to make sense of our disregard of facts, even in the face of something that would appear to be nonpartisan, such as a virus.

None of them hit as direct and plainly as Rod Walkers eloquent The Gamers Guide to Diplomacy.

Players, wrote Walker of the board game, do not expect consistency, but they do expect rationality. Sometimes any excuse will do.

Walker then writes of someone who was once an in-game ally, wondering why Walker stabbed him in the back.

His answer? Because it was there.

We should brace for the same, and be prepared to not stop showing our spine.

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How game theory not chaos rules the Trump White House - Los Angeles Times

As the Trump administration spotlights the anti-fascist group Antifa as the source of chaos and anarchy engulfing the countrywide protests for equal rights and justice, little, if any, has been said about White nationalists who have infiltrated the protests with the objective of creating a popular pandemonium. Surely, Antifas looters and anarchists, among others, should face justice; nevertheless, underestimating or turning a blind eye to the premeditated actions of White nationalists is a recipe to promote violence on a national and global scale. In fact, White nationalism as a movement has become a transnational crusade as ideologically and operationally dangerous as the Salafi-Jihadi Islamic State.

Recently the social media giant Facebook removed multiple account networks connected with White nationalist Proud Boys and America Guard, designated as extremist hate groups bythe Southern Poverty Law Centerandthe Anti-Defamation League (ADL). These groups encouraged their members to bring guns to the Black Life Matters-led protests suffusing the United States. Among the many charges facing those arrested by federal authorities, the most serious charge involved three men in Nevada linked to a far-right extremist group Boogaloo advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. These individuals and groups, though loosely affiliated, are an integral part of the White nationalist ideology that has transcended national borders and is expressed in civilizational terms.

According to the ADL, White nationalism is a term that originated among White supremacists as a euphemism for White supremacy. Eventually, some White supremacists tried to distinguish it further by using it to refer to a form of White supremacy that emphasizes defining a country or region by White racial identity and that seeks to promote the interests of Whites exclusively, typically at the expense of people of other backgrounds.

The ADL adds that over time, White supremacists of whatever sort adhere to at least one of the following beliefs:1) Whites should be dominant over people of other backgrounds; 2) Whites should live by themselves in a Whites-only society; 3) White people have their own culture that is superior to other cultures; and 4) White people are genetically superior to other people.

Anti-Semitism is also paramount for White nationalists, most of whom believe that Jews constitute a distinctive race infused with parasitic and evil roots, bent on destroying Western civilization. These defining traits of White nationalists, who apprehensively operated on the margins of European and American societies, gradually developed into a transnational ideology congealing around their sacrosanct right of survival.

The central theme of their ideology can be traced to Renaud Camuss Le Grand Remplacement [The Great Replacement] in which he argues that the flood of black and brown immigrants into the European continent will eventually amount to an extinction-level event of White native Europeans. Witnessing the impact of rising immigration to France, the emergence of subcultures, and failure of multiculturalism as an integrationist policy, Camus believes that Western societies are variably subject to ethnic and civilizational substitution. The act of replacement, for him, is civilizational.

Although he denied any genetic conception of races, his literature has been appropriatedby far-right and White nationalist groups throughout Europe and the English-speaking world. However, these groups added to Camuss central theme of Great Replacement a variation of concepts meant not only to widen the popular base of White nationalism but also to infuse it with an actionable immediacy. For example, Richard Spencer, a public face of White nationalism, embraced Camuss arguments, though identifying himself as an Identitarian. Although the term has also French roots in the work of Alain de Benoist, Spencers ilks used the term in a utilitarian fashion to deflect racial superiority and underscore the differential right in diversity. In other words, Identitarians claim the exclusive right to their own culture and territories in the face of what they perceive the gradual act of civilizational replacement.

The intellectual defense against this existential identity threat had been expounded by French journalist Guillaume Fayes Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age (2010 in English); The Colonisation of Europe (2016); and Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (2019). Faye lambasts Western liberalism and unrestrained immigration, which has taken a form of massive colonization settlement of the West by peoples from the Global South. He harshly criticizes European leaders for helping bring the demise of Europe and asserts that Islam is carrying out a hostile takeover both of France and Europe.

Fayes arguments, complementing those of Camus and Benoist, have become an infallible script of White nationalism. Spencer, along with Greg Johnson, has been promoting Fayes arguments and open about the influence of Faye on his thinking as an identitarian. References to Faye and Benoists appeared regularly in the alt-right andpro-Donald Trump forums on Redditand4chan. Steve Bannons alt-right Breitbart has promoted their work, too. According to Southern Poverty Law Center, there has been an observable shift at Breitbart.com to an outright embrace ofWhite-nationalist Identitarian movementsacross the continent. And that, in turn, has meant that propaganda from these movements has been transmitted whole to its readers across all its platforms, including the U.S. and elsewhere.

Thanks to this cross-pollination of ideas going back to the history of slavery White nationalism has transformed into a malleable global ideological crucible in which radical movements and slogans are churned out to stop this Great Replacement. Today the most referred slogan for White nationalists is the 14 Words. The slogan states: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children. The other widespread slogan that has become a rallying cry and a catchphrase on fliers is: You Will Not Replace Us.

During the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, organized by Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch, Jason Kessler, Augustus Invictus, Baked Alaska and others, demonstrators chanted Jews will not replace us. The event was ostensibly asserting the legitimacy of White culture and supremacy.

One of the earliest violent manifestations of White nationalism was carried out by the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik who perpetrated Norways biggest massacre since World War II. Hours before the deadly attack in January 2017, Breivik e-mailed a 1,500-page manifesto to 5,700 people, titled2083A European Declaration of Independence. In the document, Breivik, proclaiming himself a savior of Christianity, attacks multiculturalism and the threat of Muslim immigration to Norway. In October 2018, Robert Bowers opened fire during Shabbat services, at Pittsburghs Tree of Life synagogue, killing eleven and wounding seven. This was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history on a Synagogue known for helping immigrants.

Similarly, the March 2019 Islamophobic attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, amounted to the deadliest mass shooting in the countrys history. The perpetrator Brenton Tarrant was reportedly radicalized when he traveled to Europe. He felt taken aback by the omnipresence of immigrants, their crimes and the paralysis gripping the dispirited native populations, who, he considered, are dying out. He also issued a manifesto entitled The Great Replacement.

Steeped in anti-Islam, the manifesto refers to nonWhites as invaders who threaten to replace White people. Tarrant confessed to using guns so as to frighten people and create conflict, especially in the United States over gun laws, as well as balkanizing the United States into warring racial factions. Significantly, he argued in the manifesto that:

The radicalization of young Western men is not just unavoidable, but inevitable. It should come as no shock that European men, in every nation, and on every continent are turning to radical notions and methods to combat social and moral decay of their nations and the continued ethnic replacement of their people. Radical, explosive action is the only desired, and required, response to an attempted genocide.

Tarrants manifesto is unequivocally a testament to the transnational spread of White nationalisms ideology and the urgency to stop the act of civilizational replacement. This act of terror was followed by another attack on an American synagogue in Poway, California. On April 27, 2019, John Timothy Earnest entered theChabad of Powaysynagogueon the last day of the Jewish holiday ofPassover. Approximately one hundred people were inside the synagogue. Earnest shot and killed one person and wounded the Rabbi of the congregation before his rifle jammed. A massacre was avoided. Earnest issued a manifesto that blended historical anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism and racism. Wrapping himself in the mantle of Christianity, Earnest faulted the Jews for their endless crimes against God and humanity and for committing a genocide against the European race. He wrote: It is unlawful and cowardly to stand on the sidelines as the European people are genocided around you. I did not want to have to kill Jews. But they have given us no other option.

No sooner, in August 2019, Patrick Crusius, twenty-one years old, entered the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire on shoppers at a packed Walmart store, killing and wounding scores of people. The El Paso shooting was one of the most brutal assaults on Hispanics in U.S. history. Crusius also issued a manifesto The Inconvenient Truth explaining his act of terror. Confessing his support of the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto, Crusius asserted that this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas . . . They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion. . . . Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read the Great Replacement.

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Domestic Threats in the Era of Nationalism - The National Interest

In its evening newsletter then, the White House blasted the service under the headline Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda. The crime, as described by Dan Scavino, Mr. Trumps social media director, was positive reports on how China had handled its coronavirus outbreak. Mr. Trump promptly picked up the chorus. If you heard whats coming out of the Voice of America, its disgusting, he told a White House news briefing on April 15. What things they say are disgusting toward our country. And Michael Pack would get in and do a great job.

What evidently rankled the White House was a clip showing people celebrating the lifting of the lockdown in Wuhan, which accompanied a straightforward account by The Associated Press. V.O.A. officials were dumbfounded. It just came out of the blue, said Amanda Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran of Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer, who announced her resignation Monday as director of the V.O.A. The deputy director, Sandy Sugawara, formerly of The Washington Post and United Press International, also resigned.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Sugawara did not link their departures to the long-delayed confirmation of Mr. Pack, who becomes head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent organization of the V.O.A., Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and some regional foreign broadcasters. In her farewell message, Ms. Bennett assured V.O.A. staffers that Michael Pack swore before Congress to respect and honor the firewall that guarantees V.O.A.s independence, which in turn plays the single most important role in the stunning trust our audiences around the world have in us.

It may be that Mr. Pack will respect the firewall he is sworn to maintain. His past is patchy he hired Mr. Bannon, an icon of the alt-right, as a consultant on two documentaries, including one about Adm. Hyman Rickover. He is also under investigation by the District of Columbia attorney general for possibly channeling money from a nonprofit group he oversees to his for-profit film production company. And he was confirmed along party lines. Before that, he had worked at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Council on the Humanities and served as president of the conservative Claremont Institute.

None of that confirms that if left to his own judgment, Mr. Pack would do Mr. Trumps or Mr. Bannons bidding, especially if it meant flouting the V.O.A.s legally mandated independence. What is certain, given Mr. Trumps record and his statements about V.O.A., is that this is what the administration expects and will forcefully demand. Mr. Trump wants a bullhorn, not a diplomatic instrument, and he insists on loyalty.

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New Boss May Test Voice of Americas Credibility - The New York Times