Newt Gingrich was not happy. It was the night of December 6, minutes before the US Senate race in Georgia was called for Raphael Warnock, and more on the Fox News show “Hannity,” pointing the finger at Herschel’s imminent loss. One big culprit: TikTok.
TIC Tac? The Chinese-owned social media platform, which didn’t even exist at the start of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, should be banned “for national security reasons,” Gingrich said. “But as long as it’s legal,” he continued, “we have to learn to compete in a place like that, because that’s where Gen Z gets such a high percentage of their information.” »
“We have to learn to be competitive internally,” he added.
This is one – and probably the only – point that Mr. Gingrich and Annie Wu Henry would agree on.
At 26, Ms. Henry – or @Annie_Wu_22, as she’s nicknamed ChirpingInstagram and TikTok – had been a relatively low-level staffer since July during Senator-elect John Fetterman’s campaign against Dr. Mehmet Oz in the US Senate race from Pennsylvania, when he took over the TikTok account from Mr. Fettermann.
“John already had this amazing communications team working for him, and he’d been a Twitter guy himself for years,” Ms. Henry said, on a video call from her apartment in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. He wore sweatshirts and a hoodie (“very branded today,” she laughed). “But we’ve been able to move his voice and his message to other platforms,” she said.
And those other platforms were still “more important than they might have normally been,” Ms Henry said, as Mr Fetterman could not be on the trail after his stroke in May.
Ms. Henry has quickly become, according to Mr. Fetterman’s director of communications, Joe Calvello, their “TikTok Queen.” The account garnered more than 240,000 followers in three months, with three million likes and tens of millions of views. Mrs. Henry has managed to make it seriously entertaining and entertaining; and her motto – in life and on TikTok – is “kiss the face”. In other words, she lets the world see you as your messy, authentic self.
“Trust the young”
Of course, you must have a candidate who is willing to let you do this. “John’s not an Instagram guy”—polite, well-groomed—”nor would it be his place to put him on a TikTok dance,” he said. “But if we can use some sort of weird, offbeat sound and change our message to be a little, well, not messy, but not super polished, that fits who this is, who this campaign is for. »
Some of his hits: Video of Dr. Oz bragging that he grew up “south of Philadelphia,” followed by a map showing that across the water is… New Jersey, superimposed on “All Star” by Smash Mouth (“Somebody once told me the world was gonna roll me / I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed”).
Another of hers other sharp examples: A trippy TikTok duo of heavy metal puppets in Psychostick’s “Numbers (I Can Only Count to Four)” with Dr. Oz unable to count the number of houses he owns.
While she did not create Mr. Fetterman’s answer At Dr. Oz’s infamous raw food video, in which he complains about the price of “raw vegetables” and confuses Philly Wegmans and Redner’s grocery stores, he had a eureka fundraising moment. For any donation over $5, donors will receive a sticker that reads “Wegners: Let Them Eat Crudity.” Very quickly, the money came in.
“Annie is like this generational force,” said a young political operative known as Memes. She maintains a Twitter account called @Memes organizer, an aggregator of clever political texts and images, which also serves as a place for harassed young employees to let off steam without being reported to their bosses. (Memes is 25 years old, works in politics and would like to keep her job, hence the anonymity.)
She considers Ms. Henry a close friend, even though they had just met not virtually for the first time in Georgia, when Ms. Henry made a last-minute decision to fly to Georgia and help secure the Asian vote for Senator Warnock in the second round. .
“Young people often don’t trust campaigns to get things done,” Memes said. “Annie, this is what happens when you trust young people to do what they’re good at. »
“He’ll Get What He Wants”
Mrs. Henry grew up in a deeply conservative rural town in York County, Pennsylvania and is the only child of Tom and Beth Henry, both special education teachers. She was adopted from China at 13 months.
When her exhausted and overjoyed parents received their new daughter, Mr Henry said, the nurse told them: ‘This one is very proud, she will get what she wants in life. »
From an early age, his parents said, injustice made his head explode. His liberal but devout Methodist parents were desperate that they could not get their daughter to attend church with them once they learned of same-sex marriage and that their church would not allow it.
“I think because she was adopted from China and we had very few other ethnic races in our city, she may have felt like an outsider herself,” her father said. “Sometimes she was harassed. But when she saw someone else being harassed, she was furious.
He got his first smartphone in high school and was tweeting about the 2012 election before he could cast his vote. Four years ago, she led Black Lives Matter protests in her predominantly white hometown.
And it was his father who first told him about Mr. Fetterman. “When he was mayor of Braddock, I admired him for really helping depressed people, for standing up for the ordinary person,” said Mr. Henry. “When he announced that she intended to run for Senate, I said to Annie, ‘He’s a man you have to think about. He’s someone you can support.
She graduated from Lehigh University in 2018 – her honors thesis focused on the intersection of identity and social media – then worked a variety of jobs: organizing for some local Philadelphia politicians and managing payroll for a company of weddings to pay the bills.
Early in the pandemic, she wrote an attention-grabbing essay about coming to terms with her ethnicity for the first time and genuinely feeling scared as an Asian American in a country where the president called out Covid-19” the Chinese flu”. Wearing a mask in public, she reminded herself to “appear friendly” and not to sneeze or cough.
Last year, she made her first viral tweet with a friend: a Stop Asian Hate meme that has been viewed millions of times, aided by reposts from celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and Ellen Pompeo.
Sophie Ota, Mr. Fetterman’s digital director, hired her in late July. The following months, Mrs. Henry said, were confusing. There were no days off. There was no time to check what the experts were saying about the predicted ‘red wave’, and Ms Henry and the rest of the staff listened diligently to the news.
Mrs. Henry was also one of the few people in the country to own a car, which meant she took colleagues across the state, driving some 1,000 miles a week; the joke was that she had memorized the Pennsylvania Turnpike and knew all the best rest stops and cafes. (At one point, the compliance officer, who monitors employee spending, looked at how many lattes she was buying and wanted to know who she was buying coffee for each day. They were just for her.)
Although she and Mr. Fetterman were often in different locations, she showed up to events early so she could take and post photos of the crowds, the lines, the people. Most of the events had a tracker – a guy from the Oz team who tracked the events.
‘It’s very common,’ said Mrs Henry, ‘but this boy was mainly there to see if he could record John getting his words wrong so they could make fun of John’s health. He also recorded John’s children. There are ways to do it where you are not rude and disrespectful. Mrs. Henry had a last word of contempt: “And she was using a video camera.“
Ms. Henry has quite a high profile online outside of her connection to Fetterman. Her personal Instagram account (which has over 80,000 followers) alternates information on how to engage in the fight against racism and the protection of abortion rights with selfies with fellow rallies such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker or actress Kerry Washington.
And Ms. Henry isn’t shy about backing low-paying political work with a side hustle or two. You’ve partnered not only with nonprofits that promote reproductive rights or protect democracy, but also with the occasional manufacturer of skin creams or vibrators.
Political tchotchkes and pop culture references – “just little references to people I admire – fill her apartment. Her doormat reads: “In this house, we understand that basic human rights are not political issues and that science is a given. fact, not an opinion.”
Taylor Swift merchandise is scattered, and autographed copies of books by Jimmy Carter and Gloria Steinem lie on the coffee table. Next to her door is a bag with the inscription: “Friends don’t let friends lose elections.”
She’s trying to catch up on her real life after the turmoil of the past few months: answering emails, paying a speeding ticket and, perhaps most importantly, snatching tickets to Taylor Swift’s next concert. (She and Mr. Fetterman’s wife, Giselle, have a “linked text” about Taylor Swift, she told her.) She’s single and unemployed, but like many of her peers, she doesn’t panic.
“I don’t know how this is going to play out, and I don’t necessarily want to know,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll have this kind of dream job forever. She said she didn’t think she wanted to work at Hill, though a recent Instagram post from her shows her very Jackie O mysteriously visiting the White House.
And he’s enjoying that first taste of fame. She said she recently walked down the street and a man rolled down his window and yelled, “Are you Annie?” “I said ‘yes’, but a little surprised/confused,” she wrote me. Then he yelled “Thanks for all you’ve done” and ran away.
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