“You know the LIBS are seething over this,” Joe Kinsey, an editor at the sports website OutKick, wrote on X while reposting a video of sorority girls doing a choreographed dance. Many of the girls were wearing red, white and blue outfits, though some were dressed as hot dogs. They waved American flags in front of a banner that read We Want You Kappa Delta. “Credit to these ladies for pumping out patriotism to kick off the 2025 school year,” Kinsley wrote.
It wasn’t only the display of patriotism that supposedly made liberals seethe. “The purple hair lesbians have to be furious that SEC sororities ARE BACK,” Kinsey wrote while reposting another sorority-dance video. This one had no clear Americana element aside from the matching trucker hats all of the dancing girls were wearing. Kinsey’s two posts were viewed nearly 40 million times.
Many other such videos have been shared on X in the past couple of weeks, as sororities have begun recruiting for the new school year. The videos come from TikTok, where sorority dance videos have long been popular. But they’ve been presented on X with a new gloss: Democrats, liberals, and leftists are enraged by pretty, mostly white young women who are dancing happily. It drives them up the wall when a woman is blond! Do not let a liberal see a woman smiling while wearing a short denim skirt.
The only thing that is missing is evidence of seething libs. Search around social media, and you might be surprised how difficult such reactions are to find. In fact, I couldn’t find a single one. When I asked Kinsey where he got the idea that people were angry about the sorority-recruitment videos, he didn’t point me to any specific examples. He noted that many people replied to his posts saying that they weren’t mad about the TikTok dances. But, he said, “I don’t believe that.”
By now, this is all familiar. Recall the recent controversy over an American Eagle ad starring Sydney Sweeney, in which the actress hawked denim jeans by making a pun about her genes. A small number of people on social media did get very angry, and posted about how the ad sounded like a eugenics dog whistle. Their reaction was then amplified by right-wing commentators eager to make the point that the left hates hot women. The fact that the situation involved Sydney Sweeney, a celebrity who had already been evoked in culture-war debates in the past, drove even more attention. It turned into a full-blown news cycle. (I am confident my grandmother heard about this.)
In both cases, this burst of bizarre posting is less a story about American politics than it is a story about social media and, specifically, X. Whatever else you may say about Elon Musk’s platform, it is the best place to watch a fake drama unfold.
Both of the videos that Joe Kinsey shared — of the girls with the flags and the girls with the trucker hats — were originally posted on their respective sororities’ TikTok accounts. But the versions he shared had been uploaded to X by what appears to be an account called “Calico Cut Pants,” which seemingly exists to move short-form videos from one platform to another. The account follows no one and is named after a sketch from the Tim Robinson Netflix show “I Think You Should Leave.” Other sorority dance videos have been pulled from TikTok and posted by an account called “Big Chungus,” which also posts almost nothing but videos from other sites, paired with incendiary rhetoric.
Accounts like these can bring in money by driving engagement on X, thanks to a revenue-sharing program that debuted after Musk took over the site. Both Big Chungus and Calico Cut Pants have Premium badges, which means they can get paid for generating activity, including likes and replies. According to X’s Creator Revenue Sharing guidelines, the company maintains some discretion in calculating the true “impact” of posts. For instance, engagement from other paid accounts is worth more than engagement from an unpaid account. It stands to reason that the best way to make money is to elicit some reaction to your content from the people who enjoy X enough to pay for it. Social media is replete with political outrage, and playing to either a liberal or conservative audience is likely to draw attention. (Certainly, plenty of accounts decrying MAGA values, real and exaggerated, exist.) But X, in particular, is a much more right-coded platform than it was a few years ago, and it makes sense to pander to the home crowd.
Consider “non aesthetic things,” an account that has 4.9 million followers on X, all from posting short-form videos — sometimes relatable, sometimes nostalgic, generally just mind-numbing. Its bio links to an Instagram page that is full of ads for the gambling company Stake. (None of these accounts responded to requests for an interview.) The non aesthetic things account shared a video of sorority girls at Arizona State University who were performing in jean shorts, most of them quite short, and cowboy boots. The X caption makes reference to “their JEANS”—a subtle nod to the Sydney Sweeney panic. This pairing of footage and wink was a solid bet to produce a big reaction.
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Given all the attention the Sweeney dustup received, returning to it is logical for engagement farmers. “BREAKING,” wrote a pro-Trump account called “Patriot Oasis” that almost exclusively posts short-form videos, “Sorority at the University of Oklahoma wearing ‘Good Genes’ is going VIRAL showcasing pure American beauty. Liberals are OUTRAGED online.” The caption suggested that the sorority is participating in some kind of activist response to the villainization of Sydney Sweeney, though there is no reason to believe that. The girls in the video never say anything about politics, Sydney Sweeney, genes, or even jeans. The sorority has been making similar dance videos for years.
Nevertheless, the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk reposted Patriot Oasis to his 5.1 million followers and asked, “Do you see the difference between conservative and liberal women?” Underneath his post, a Community Note generated by other users pointed out that the video doesn’t reveal whether the women are conservative or not. But that hardly mattered. Many others made the same argument in the replies to Kirk’s post, driving up engagement. Although the original post has since been deleted, Kirk’s repost has more than 3.8 million views.
Sorority dances worked well on social media even before they were inserted into a fake culture-war debate, because they are briefly hypnotic due to the weirdness of so many people moving in the same way while wearing such similar outfits. They offer the muted thrill of a flash mob. But plucked from their original context, they offer more. Someone finds them and puts them on X with just a phrase or two of framing and they blow up.
People watch the videos of young women dancing and gleefully share them, writing, for example, “nothing is more triggering to leftists,” and “at what point do you just give up if you’re a lib?” and “America is BACK and Democrats hate it.” There is no need to point to an actual instance of a leftist or lib or Democrat being triggered. It is easy enough to imagine how triggered they are.
Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where this was originally published, and the author of “Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It.” Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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