Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | News | March 5, 2025
My kids’ middle school holds an annual talent show fundraiser, but the twist is that it’s the teachers who provide the talent. It’s a brilliant idea: The teachers go all in, it’s cringey as hell, and the kids love it. The genius of it is that the teachers — who throw together Dad bands or choreograph dance numbers to ’90s boy band songs — know it’s cringey and embrace it. That kind of self-awareness endears them to their students, who, for one night a year, get to watch their teachers make absolute fools of themselves.
Related: Yesterday, Cory Booker spearheaded a campaign in which 22 Senators made TikTok videos repeating nearly the same script, all of which led with the phrase: “sh** that ain’t true.” Watching Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and 19 others say “sh** that ain’t true” is exactly as cringey as it sounds, even if the minute-long message that follows, about how the President is doing nothing to bring down inflation, Musk is cutting vital government services, and he’s being given access to our private data, is right on the money. Here’s one example:
Trump promised he’d lower costs on day one.
— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) March 4, 2025
It’s just more sh*t that ain’t true.
Trump, Musk, and the GOP have done nothing while prices have risen and the economy has slowed.
From pardoning violent felons who attacked police to proposing a budget that would gut Medicaid,… pic.twitter.com/Iq3bYk49uW
And look: This whole thing should’ve come and gone quietly as a lame publicity stunt, and it probably would have if conservatives hadn’t decided to mock it. And that, as Puck News pointed out, is where the campaign — whether by accident or design — really succeeded. MAGA put together a supercut of the clips, and every right-wing troll who retweeted it, including Elon Musk and Libs of TikTok, only amplified its reach.
Never mind Elon Musk’s retweet to his 220 million followers, by noon, the Libs of TikTok supercut had already racked up 37 million views on X (and that number had climbed by 5 million since 11 a.m.). Sure, the blue checks retweeted it to dunk on the video, but as liberals should know better than anyone by now, that’s exactly how the message spreads.
It seeps in. That cringe video with a unifying message will be seen by tens of millions of people, far more than the two or three million who might catch it on cable news. And while the right-wing crowd mocks it, the content itself will be hard to ignore. Maybe 30 million people watched Trump’s address to Congress last night—maybe—but 100 million people have now seen the counter where, for once, the Dems all spoke in literal unison.
This is the way. Maybe next time, kick it off with a Katseye dance number, let the Internet recoil in horror, and then hit them with a positive alternative to what the Republicans are offering, which appears to be tanking the economy, firing the government employees responsible for collecting taxes, and repeating the lie that America is in its golden age.
