Because that’s what does, and they’re very effective at it. “We also need conservatives who are in touch with the culture. “I think, for a long time, conservatism has been really buttoned-up and boring and stuffy,” he says. But Walker sees himself as a much-needed breath of fresh air. Walker’s videos may come across as performance art, parody, or just the expected product of a life of privilege. “I laser my whole body,” Walker informs me with a grin. (It doesn’t hurt, either, that his father is a good friend of Trump’s.) In a vast sea of white and blonde, Walker cuts a rare figure: a gay Black man in Cartier and Gucci who also happens to be a two-time world-champion competitive cheerleader with a six-pack and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Among the internet’s underbelly of young conservatives, like and Walker has differentiated himself, becoming a household “Young Republican” among the Gen-Z demographic and even getting invited onto Fox and One America News. Walker is, in his own words, a “free-speech radicalist” and a Christian “conservative populist.” He has declared, among other things, that “illegals” don’t belong here and that white supremacy is a liberal fantasy created on college campuses. But when we speak, Walker admits he had reported an account for being critical of his own - perhaps a reason he had been suspended. Online, Walker has been touting the TikTok ban as yet another sign that “groupthink psychos” are eager to cancel him. He is in the process of moving apartments in West Hollywood, and when I ask to see something he had brought with him, he pulls out his student Bible without even leaving his chair. “Because I’m right about my political commentary, leftists, who are typically wrong, want to shut me down,” Walker says, Zooming with me from his parents’ place in Dallas a few weeks later. Caption: “GUESS WHO’S BACK #american #conservative.” When his TikTok got reactivated a few days later, Walker uploaded a video of himself pulling into his driveway in a Mercedes G-Wagon, scored by Doja Cat.
For the past eight months, he had been recording sassy, highly stylized screeds on familiar right-wing talking points, from immigration and election fraud to cancel culture and bathroom bills, which would then ricochet across the internet in the form of righteous backlash, supportive shares, and one angry dunk from Kathy Griffin. We creators need to be able to transcend our content.One day in February, Christian Walker, a junior at UCLA and the son of Hall of Fame football player Herschel Walker, opened TikTok to find that his account with more than 400,000 followers had been suspended. “If Instagram shuts down, people will stop consuming this shortform content and move on to YouTube or some other platform. “As a Gen Z creator, I think it’s important to adapt to whatever platform and content the audience wants to consume,” said Shah. This was largely because many people replaced their social lives with social media, allowing the rant-style videos to stand in for conversations in the age of increasing Zoom fatigue.īut it also begs the question: How long could this trend last? And what would it mean for the creators who get known for this style?įor many creators, their young age and ability to juggle multiple professions while making these videos also makes them less vulnerable to worrying about becoming obsolete. For many creators, lockdown-prompted boredom was a big advantage that allowed them to level up their views and followers.
For this new generation of creators, virality comes with an accessibility that can either make them famous overnight, or leave them looking for more than their 15 seconds of fame.
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