Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your crashed hashtag of music news and criticism.

I'm your host, John Garamonica. It's been another adventurous roller coaster week.

It's been a good dream.

It's been another adventurous roller coaster week in the Stan Fan Political Activism Nexus.

What you have seen over the last three weeks are different standums getting activated,

whether organically on their own or sometimes in concert with the artists that they are

supporting to advocate for political causes and one of the myriad offshoots of

the protests and activism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

And there was something that happened about a week ago with the president who held a rally in Tulsa and arrived

at the rally to find that there were many many many seats that were empty, even though, according to the campaign,

hundreds of thousands, potentially a million tickets, had been quote unquote reserved.

And very quickly after that realization that the

arena was not full people started taking credit the Times wrote about this

Taylor Lorenz wrote about it folks on Tik-Toc in partnership with K-pop stands spoke up and said that they had almost done a collective action to reserve tickets as a way of duping the Trump campaign

into thinking all these people were interested in coming to this rally when in

fact it was a far far smaller number of folks who actually came to the rally. Now that tied in with some

other acts of activism that came from K-P-P-P-P-Stan groups and again this is all stuff that I have not interviewed K-pop fans about.

I'm just telling you what the news headlines are.

Crashing White Lives Matter hashtag and filling it with fan cam videos and other things to basically dilute hate messages, sending fancam videos to

apps created by police departments, which were designed to accept footage of basically protest behavior and looting behavior, but were crashed with footage of K-pop idols, and also raising money. And this was something that was true with BTS and the BTS fandom which is called Army.

You were listening to euphoria by BTS at the beginning of the show.

So there have been several iterations of the Stan Activism Nexus over the last few weeks.

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