Monday, June 8, 2020

Fandom Fighting Fascism

Mr Rogers famously advised children, when confronted with scary things, look for the helpers. In these troubled times, the helpers are coming from unusual places... I'm talking about K-pop fans flooding right-wing agitators' social media feeds with fancam videos. More importantly, they also caused the crash of police apps meant to identify protestors. By flooding the stream of disinformation and race-baiting with harmless noise, they have effectively pulled off what could be likened to a denial-of-service attack.

Even better, the K-pop fans decided to turn their attention the right-wing QAnon conspiracy theorists, causing them all kinds of consternation:



Racist, homophobic right-wing dead-enders were especially stymied by videos of androgynous Korean boys, some with pink hair, such as these fellows:



In 2018, the odious Steve Bannon described a strategy to stymie the media by 'spamming' disinformation: "The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." I prefer the K-pop fans strategy of flooding the zone with sugar.

As a nice coda to this story, K-pop supergroup BTS and their management company donated one million dollars to Black Lives Matter. I guess I'm going to have to post one of their videos:




Those humorless right-wing creeps never stood a chance.

3 comments:

  1. I know very little about Kpop (or Jpop, although I've heard more of it), but these kids are deinitely all right.

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  2. It's pretty much the same as American commercialized pop, these guys aren't that different from any boy band.

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