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. 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. 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. Caption: “guess who’s back #american #conservative.”
“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. 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. Online, Walker has been touting the TikTok ban as yet another sign that “groupthink psychos” are eager to cancel him. But when we speak, Walker admits he had reported an account for being critical of his own—perhaps a reason he had been suspended. “Because why not?” he says, laughing.
This story is from the March 29 - April 11, 2021 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the March 29 - April 11, 2021 edition of New York magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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