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March 28, 2024

Newt Gingrich was not happy. It was the night of December 6, minutes before Raphael Warnock entered the U.S. Senate race, and on the Fox News show “Hannity,” people began to blame Herschel Walker. ) is about to lose. One of the culprits: TikTok.

Tik Tok? Mr Gingrich said the Chinese-owned social media platform, which didn’t even exist when Donald J Trump became president, should be banned “for national security reasons”. “But as long as it’s legal,” he continued, “we’ve got to learn to compete in places like this because Gen Z gets such a high percentage of information there.”

“We have to learn how to be competitive in it,” he added.

This is the point — and possibly the only point — that Mr. Gingrich and Annie Wu Henry agree on.

Ms Henry at 26 – or @Annie_Wu_22 as she is known Twitter, instagram with Tik Tok — had been a relatively low-level staffer since July on Senator-elect John Fetterman’s campaign against Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s US Senate race, when she took over Mr. Fetterman’s TikTok account.

“John already has a great communications team working for him, and he’s been a Twitter user himself for years,” Ms. Henry said during a video call from her apartment near Fishtown, Philadelphia. She’s wearing a sweatshirt and hoodie (“It’s trendy today,” she laughs). “But we were able to transfer his voice and his message to other platforms,” ​​she said.

Ms Henry said those other platforms were even “more important than normal” because Mr Fetterman was unable to compete after suffering a stroke in May.

Ms Henry has quickly become their “Queen of TikTok”, according to Mr Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello. The account has amassed more than 240,000 followers within three months, garnering 3 million likes and tens of millions of views. Ms. Henry can make fun serious, serious fun; her mantra — both in life and on TikTok — is “hug cringe.” That is, letting the world see you as your messy, authentic self.

Of course, you need to have a candidate who is willing to let you do this. “John isn’t an Instagram dude” — well-polished, orchestrated — “and it’s not him who makes him dance on TikTok,” she said. “But if we can use a weird, wacky voice and edit our message to be a little bit, okay, not messy, but not super polished, then that’s consistent with who he is, who this campaign is of.”

Some of her hits: video Dr. Oz brags about growing up in “South Philadelphia,” and then a map showing… New Jersey on the other side of the water, overlaid with Smash Mouth’s “All Stars” (“Somebody once told me the world would Get the hell out of me/I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed”).

another her More cutting examples: Psychedelic TikTok duo of heavy metal puppets on Psychostick’s “Numbers (I Can Only Count to Four),” Dr. Oz can’t count the number of houses he owns.

Although she did not create Response from Mr Fetterman For Dr. Oz’s infamous crudités video, in which he complained about the price of “crudités” and conflated Philadelphia grocers Wegmans and Redner’s, she did have an eureka fundraising moment.For any donation over $5, the donor will receive sticker It read: “Wegners: Let them eat Crudité.” Soon, the money was rolling in.

“Annie is like a force for this generation,” said a young political figure named Meme.He runs a twitter account called @organizer meme, an aggregator of clever political images and texts, is also a place where troubled young employees can vent without being caught by their bosses. (Memes, 25, works in politics and wants to keep his job, so he spoke on condition of anonymity.)

He considers Ms. Henry a close friend, even though they only met in Georgia for the first time in a non-virtual manner, when Ms. Henry made a last-minute decision to fly to Georgia and help Senator Warnock win the Asian-American vote in the runoff election.

“Young people often don’t trust campaigns that do things,” Memes said. “Annie is what happens when you trust young people to do what they’re good at.”

Ms. Henry grew up in a very conservative country town in York County, Pennsylvania, the only child of Tom and Beth Henry, both special education teachers. She was adopted in China when she was 13 months old.

Mr Henry said when her exhausted and excited parents picked up their new daughter, the nurse told them: “This daughter is very proud and she will get the life she wants.”

From an early age, injustice would make her head explode, her parents said. Her liberal but devout Methodist parents were desperate when they couldn’t let her go to church with them after their daughter learned what same-sex marriage was and their church didn’t allow it.

“I think because she was adopted from China and there were hardly any other races in our town, she probably felt like a loser,” her father said. “Sometimes she gets picked on. But when she sees others get picked on, she gets mad.”

She got her first smartphone in high school and tweeted about the 2012 election before voting. Four years ago, she led Black Lives Matter protests in her predominantly white hometown.

It was her father who first told her about Mr. Fetterman. “When he was mayor of Braddock, I admired him for really helping the down and out and standing up for the common man,” Mr Henry said. “When he announced he was considering running for the Senate, I told Anne, ‘This is someone you need to consider. This is someone you can support.'”

She graduated from Lehigh University in 2018 — her honors thesis was on the intersection of identity and social media — and went on to work on a string of jobs: organizing for several local politicians in Philadelphia and doing social media for a wedding company. pay bills.

At the start of the pandemic, she wrote an article that gets attention About dealing with her ethnicity for the first time, and being genuinely intimidated as an Asian American in a country where the president has called Covid-19 the “Chinese flu.” Wearing a mask in public, she reminds herself to “look friendly” and not to sneeze or cough.

Last year, she posted her first viral tweet with a friend: stop hating asian memes It garnered millions of views with the help of retweets from celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and Ellen Pompeo.

Mr. Fetterman’s digital director, Sophie Ota, hired her in late July. Ms Henry said the next few months were a blur. There are no rest days. Not having time to check what the experts had to say about the predicted “red wave”, Ms Henry and the rest of the staff worked tirelessly to turn off the news.

Ms. Henry is also one of the only people on the campaign trail who owns a car, meaning she drives colleagues from one part of the state to another, about 1,000 miles a week; jokingly, she already remembers Traveled the Pennsylvania Turnpike and knew all the best rest stops and coffee shops. (At one point, the compliance officer who oversees employee expenses looked at how many lattes she was buying and wondered who she was buying them for each day. They were just for her.)

While she and Mr. Fetterman are often in separate locations, she shows up early at events so she can snap and post photos of crowds, teams and people. In most cases, there is a tracker: a person from the Oz team who monitors what is going on.

“It’s very common,” Ms. Henry said, “but the guy was mainly looking to see if he could record John talking nonsense so they could make fun of John’s health.” He also recorded John’s children.There are multiple ways to do this where you are no Rude and disrespectful. ’ Ms Henry concluded with a contemptuous remark: ‘And he used the camera.

In addition to her relationship with Fetterman, Ms. Henry is quite well known online. Her personal Instagram account (which has more than 80,000 followers) communicates how to get involved in fighting racism and protecting abortion rights by taking selfies with rally mates like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker or actress Kerry Washington .

Ms Henry has not been shy about supporting low-paying political jobs while juggling a side hustle or two. She works not just with nonprofits promoting reproductive rights or protecting democracy, but also with the occasional skin cream or vibrator manufacturer.

Political gizmos and pop culture references — “just a few references to people I respect” — fill her apartment. Her doormat reads: “In this house we understand that basic human rights are not politics Question, science is fact not opinion.welcome

Scattered around Taylor Swift, there are signed books by Jimmy Carter and Gloria Steinem on the coffee table. Next to her door is a tote bag that reads: “Friends don’t let friends miss the election.”

After months of disorientation, she’s trying to get back to her real life — answering emails, paying speeding tickets and, perhaps most importantly, snagging tickets to an upcoming Taylor Swift concert. (She and Mr. Fetterman’s wife, Giselle, have a “text message connection” to Taylor Swift, she says.) She is single and unemployed, but like many of her peers, she isn’t alarmed.

“I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, and I don’t necessarily want to know,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever have this great dream job.” She said she didn’t think she wanted to work at Hill Recent Instagram Posts She looks a lot like Jackie O, who mysteriously visits the White House.

She’s enjoying being a celebrity for the first time. She said she was walking down the street recently and a man rolled down his car window and yelled, “Are you Annie?” “I said ‘yes,’ but was a little surprised/confused,” she texted me. He then yelled, “Thank you for everything,” and sped away.





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