MAGA’s latest trolling campaign is not just 'dumb'

Megyn Kelly at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 15, 2023

MAGA Republicans have found a new way to troll liberals and progressives during the Summer of 2025: posting sorority dance videos online and claiming that they are "triggered" by them.

The videos are appearing on TikTok, YouTube and X, and MAGA pundits are claiming that liberals and progressives are deeply upset by images of young sorority members dancing in miniskirts and short shorts — especially if the women are white and blonde.

In a biting article published on August 22, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that this trolling campaign is not only "dumb" — it is also totally hypocritical in light of MAGA Republicans' history of attacking women for enjoying themselves.

Countless MAGA Republicans, for example, were furious when an old video of now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) dancing surfaced.

"It's not mysterious what’s happening here," Marcotte argues. "Republican pundits found a massive success distracting the MAGA base from Donald Trump's Jeffrey Epstein scandal by pretending there was some major progressive outcry against a sexy ad featuring Sydney Sweeney. Liberals didn’t really care, and right-wingers were forced to create AI videos to manufacture 'evidence' for this non-existent outrage."

The Salon journalist continues, "Eager to keep distracting the public from Trump's myriad of scandals and failures — while also having an excuse for public horniness — MAGA influencers tried to cook up a similar fake controversy about sorority dances. But what makes this all especially pathetic is that, typically, MAGA social media prefers to throw a screeching fit about the loose morals of women who dance in online videos."

Marcotte goes on to cite specific examples of MAGA Republicans becoming furious over videos of women dancing.

"Last summer," she explains, "MAGA posters rage-stroked over a video deemed 'Gen Z boss and a mini,' which featured women in an office dancing and chanting about how they see themselves in the world. Right-wingers fumed, 'This is cancer'….. This followed a similar freakout during Mardi Gras last year, when X users melted down over a video of a group of college-aged girls dancing to hip-hop at a gas station in Louisiana. This, in turn, followed another MAGA tantrum over a college-era video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., dancing with friends, which was held out as proof that she was a 'clueless nitwit'."

Marcotte adds, "After years of dancing videos being wielded as a rhetorical weapon against women's rights, we're now expected to believe, as right-wing pundit Megyn Kelly declared, that MAGA wants young women to be 'hot and together and free and unmasked in every way.' This was self-evidently dumb, and not just because of the obsessive re-litigation of a pandemic that ended when all these sorority girls were barely out of junior high. Thanks to Republicans overturning Roe v. Wade, young women aren't as free as they were before. It's a reminder of how depraved right-wing attitudes are around sex that they expect young women to be 'hot,' but to not have sexual desire of their own — much less act on it."

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.