Have A Beer: Tik Tok/ K Pop Gambit Edition
Tristan Young @talltristan
Even by the comically dystopian and baffling absurdity that has defined American electoral politics for the last couple cycles, the past 24 hours have been wild. A quip recap of what the hell just happened. For the better part of a month the Trump campaign has been hyping- threatening, really- his first major campaign rally in over three months due the pandemic rendering most traditional methods of campaigning untenable. The event, hosted in Tulsa, Oklahoma had been besieged by a twin set of controversies. To host one of these rallies, which are well documented to be polluted with white supremacist rhetoric and dog whistles, in Tulsa, the site of the 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre, one of the worst racist incidents in American history, is of course deeply offensive. They originally tried to host it on June 19th/Juneteenth, the anniversary of the ostensible end of slavery in America, which is especially unconscionable. The campaign eventually caved to public outrage and moved it to June 20th. Furthermore; we are still in a pandemic! This was set to be the largest indoor gathering since the outbreak, in stark defiance of the Trump administration’s own guidelines regarding safety measures. That the Venn Diagram for Trump’s hard core base and those that have been groomed to express a deep and irrational distrust of any kind of institutional science is essentially a circle led many to fear this could be a super spreader event.
But Trump did it anyway! What’s more, he and his campaign manager Brad Pascale repeatedly hyped the record-breaking attendance they expected based on ticket requests. 200 000 they said, then 300 000. Not any empty seat in the room, with tens of thousands more in overflow outside, which Trump would also address. Flash forward to half a day after the event and things didn’t quite turn out that way. Nearly half of the event space was empty. The overflow area outside? Occupied by a few dozen people, and was dismantled shortly after it became apparent that the crowds weren’t materializing. Not exactly the thunderous relaunch of a campaign flagging due to world disruptions and dazzling levels of incompetence.
So what happened? Enter K-pop and Tik Tok. As these particular musical genres and social mediums have become more and more synonymous with Gen Z zeitgeist, the Zoomers are using them as tools to exert their technological savvy, in increasingly public and activist ways. It started earlier in the year when K-pop behemoth BTS and their surrogates urged all of their follows on Tik Tok to flood white supremacist hashtags such as #whitelivesmatter with videos of their music, basically rendering the racist forums unusable to those who would populate them. This time their tactics have grown more sophisticated. Spreading across K-pop Tik Tok accounts were encouragement and instructions to snatch up as many free tickets to Trump’s rally as possible, and to then bail. Those hundreds of thousands of attendees that Parscale was hyping? A not insignificant amount ended up being Tik Tok trolls. This offensive is doubly effective as all the user data the Trump Campaign collects from attendance forms, which they intend to utilize and weaponize, ended up being fake.
It wasn’t so long ago that presidential campaigns were defined by the occasional policy speech, an photo op in Iowa, and a negative ad accusing your opponent of having a secret love child. All classics. We have now entered the phase of insurgent guerrilla campaign tactics carried out by deep web operatives loosely organized only by their shared fear of authoritarian electioneering and love of Korean pop music. If that sounds to you like a disturbingly apt description of late stage democracy, then yes, you need absolutely need a beer. Let’s dive in.
For EP45 of BORP we tried some beers by Off The Rail and Wildeye. First up was Off The Rail brewing out in East Van. For several years Mickey has been trying to hunt down their Comet Launcher IPA. Comprised predominantly of Comet hops, it has been a tricky beer to find as Comet hops are no longer in production and thus quite rare these days. When Mickey finally came across a bottle he jumped on it right away. Comet hops are full of pine and grapefruit notes, with fairly a high alpha acid content, lending itself well to the double IPA that the Comet Launcher is. The ABV is not the main indicator of what makes a Double IPA but the alpha acid percentage being much higher. This one had a toasty golden and dark brown color that translated to very obvious malt characteristics on the nose. The malts had a very pronounced toffee and molasses aroma to them. On the palate the bitterness is very well masked, making for something more sessionable than you’d expected for an IPA. Everything had a rustic, smoky, charred flavour to it. Definitely the kind of beer that will warm you up, but also sneak up on you after you’ve been at it for a bit. Don’t fall into the campfire!
Next up was Wildeye brewing from North Van. We tried their Put The Lime In The Coconut IPA. While the can explained a flavour profile of lime and coconut, it did not specify the hops precisely. Since coconut is a fairly specific and uncommon flavour in beer it was pretty easy to determine they were using Sabro hops on this one. The nice thing about the beer is it didn’t have that artificial coconut “flavour” taste, but actually expressed real coconut water in all of its rich, slightly salinated glory. The beer also had just a hint of a green haze to it that we thought was very interesting. Elsewhere in the beer we picked up on over ripe fruit like bananas and apricots. The whole thing kind of smelled a bit like a daiquiri, which is to say this is a great IPA for summer. One of the stranger IPAs out there, but these are strange times so go hard.