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Where’s Hawk Tuah?” squeals a boy straddling his bicycle outside a sports bar called the Ugly Duckling in Long Beach, Long Island. He’s got a buzz-cut and three friends with him, and they say they’re in the eighth grade, although they seem much younger to me. They’re begging a burly bouncer to let them inside the bar because they want to meet the most famous woman on the internet this summer, Haliey Welch. “She’s not getting here till past your bedtime,” says the bouncer, ignoring the encouragement of a grown-up walking by: “Don’t ruin the boys’ dreams!”
They persist: “Where’s Hawk Tuah?” Another woman passing the bar advises them, “Say ‘Pretty please, sir.’” No dice. “Maybe in 15 years,” the bouncer barks.
Haliey, a.k.a. “Hawk Tuah,” is currently going viral for being authentically, hilariously herself. Last month, some man-on-the-street influencer interviewers approached her on Broadway — not in Times Square but the honky-tonk bachelorette-party destination in Nashville — asking her to share some sex advice on-camera. Specifically, “a move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time.” Tipsily, she told them to just hawk a loogie. “You gotta give it that hawk tuah and spit on that thang! You get me?” she twangs in the video.
The 21-year-old from a town of barely 800 people in Tennessee was not prepared for what happened next. At the time, she was making minimum wage in a factory, had never set foot on an airplane, and didn’t even have an Instagram account. When the TikTok took off — it’s up to 14.3 million views and counting — an L.A.-based manager and Nashville-based publicity team signed her. Already she has 1.7 million followers, some of whom are clearly middle-school boys, and merch, including a $30 red-white-and-blue trucker hat that reads “Hawk Tuah ’24” and a T-shirt with a hawk on it. And now she’s doing paid appearances like this one at the Ugly Duckling.
Hers is not an unfamiliar story — unwitting nobody makes the internet laugh and then tries to not let that moment go to waste. The click-chasing mainstream media is there to help. Rolling Stone profiled her, calling her “a charming Gen Z Dolly Parton who’s rightfully becoming America’s Sweetheart.” She also has a distinctly red-state appeal. In the past few weeks, she’s been invited to sing onstage at a Zach Bryan concert, judged a bikini contest at a Hard Rock Hotel in Florida, and been interviewed on a Barstool Sports podcast, where she said she’d give problematic country singer Morgan Wallen the ol’ hawk tuah if she had the chance.
The Ugly Duckling party, which advertised itself with a photo of her in a skimpy top and a cowboy hat, started on Sunday afternoon, about 24 hours after former president Donald Trump was shot in the ear. When I arrived, I’d found a shitty sports bar next to a CityMd with 14 flat-screen televisions, 16 beers on tap, and a single blender whirling up piña coladas for some bros with neckbeards. (All the cocktails were served with little rubber duckies floating on top.) The men were wearing MAGA hats and flip-flops and T-shirts that read “Y’all” and “Butt Stuff” and “Arrest This” — the last featuring an illustration of Trump holding up two birds. Another guy wore a shirt showing another Trump under the catchphrase “If She Don’t Hawk Tuah, Don’t Talk Tuah.” It smelled like body odor and hot wings. I ordered a $5 Miller Lite in an admittedly naïve attempt to fit in. Nobody seemed to know when the woman of the hour would show up. Not everybody believed it would happen. “She ain’t coming. It’s all a scam,” says a man on the way out the door.
While eavesdropping on the kids outside, I lent a lighter to a tubby dude in a tank top who had driven 3.5 hours from Albany and paid $10 at the door for the chance to shoot his shot. “She seems like a sweetheart. I just want to meet her,” he told me, taking a puff of a joint. “America loves her.” Which is no small feat for a bitterly divided country on the day after an assassination attempt.
As the hours passed, the MAGA gremlins in the bar got antsier … and drunker, many of them leering at the door, waiting on Haliey to walk in. (Not quite January 6 vibes, but not not either …) Two lanky geeks started pacing the length of the bar, one of them wearing a SAW cap (“Live or Die, Make Your Choice”). Presumably to liven up the mood a bit, a beastly bro named DJ Teddy with a salt-and-pepper beard got on the decks and growled, “Let’s have a fucking day!” before pumping up the music. He played Fall Out Boy and AC/DC, then mixed lines from Trump rallies — mostly “I’m gonna come” — into EDM. Between songs, DJ Teddy garbled something about Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley Jr. Then, “You can’t take that motherfucker out!” Most everyone in the bar cheered. Obviously, no one seemed that interested in talking to the enby in the room.
More security guards arrived. The little boys on the bicycles reappeared with eight more little boys. I overheard them plotting to rush the guards. Some of them were old enough to have braces.
I grew up in a small town in Tennessee not far from where Haliey did (we used to go boating on the same lake), and so at some point, my redneck PTSD kicked in and I got so overwhelmed by all the Trumptalk on the stereo system — “I’m going to make America great again! I’m going to make America strong again!” — that I had to take another breather (cigarette break) outside, where an uncannily good Donald Trump impersonator had pulled up, pursing his lips and shaking hands with all the boys in line. “She’s coming, Harry. We’re here for you buddy,” I heard one husky guy reassure his husky friend in a Hawaiian shirt dotted with parrots.
MAGA. Hawk Tuah. MAGA. Hawk Tuah. Almost four hours into the “party,” I find myself reading “The Second Coming” on my phone. Surely some revelation is at hand!
Finally, at 7:45 p.m. — yes, probably around those boys’ bedtime — a Sprinter van pulls up outside.
Haliey steps out wearing a teeny-tiny butter-yellow dress and her fake blonde hair in a pony. Like a young Britney Spears, she smiles and waves to the preteen paparazzi on the bicycles. “Legend shit,” says the man in the Hawaiian shirt before dapping up his friend.
When Haliey enters the bar via the back entrance, the men swarm her, not paying much attention to the red velvet rope the bar has installed around her booth. “Hey guys, let her settle in for a minute,” says DJ Teddy. No one listens to him. I watch several men hold their phones up over the crowd and zoom in to get a better look at her or at least her chest. Two couples start making out, one of the guys grabbing his girl by the throat.
Haliey meets and greets the boys one by one, shaking hands and giving hugs and taking selfies. “This is so fucking crazy,” one in a Yankees cap tells me. “It’s like seeing Taylor Swift!” DJ Teddy starts playing “Fat Bottomed Girls.” The scene makes me so depressed that, though I agree to take a photo for two guys in green MAGA hats, I can’t bring myself to bother her. I feel like I’m back home at a grocery-parking-lot carnival and she is some kind of adorable freak-show attraction. Politely, Haliey says nothing more than “hi” and “thank you” and, at some of the men’s requests, “hawk tuah.” She smiles just a little less tightly when one of the women at the bar, most of them wearing booty shorts, introduces herself to her. Some of the men, delighted at this one-in-a-lifetime opportunity, start pumping their fists. Others dance wildly to “Born in the U.S.A.”
The ordeal lasts for barely an hour, at which point the bar closes the petting zoo to let Haliey eat some cheesecake in peace. “I have a newfound appreciation for how creepy men can be,” her male manager tells me, “But she’s taking it like a champ… She’s a girl.” In the morning, he says, she has a 6 a.m. flight back home to Tennessee for a quick respite before heading to a country-music festival in Alabama, then a Jake Paul fight in Tampa, and her first trip out to L.A.
A few days later, I get her on the phone to ask her how she found the event. “Those boys” — by which she means the ostensibly grown men, not the middle-school admirers — “were creepin’ me out,” she drawls over the phone from her friend’s house. “They were throwin’ themselves at me,” adding that she gets quite a few requests for “toe pics” or for her to start an OnlyFans in her DMs. “It’s kind of weird. It freaks me out a little bit. I don’t like all that attention.” She says she has no idea how the appearance at the Ugly Duckling came together. Presumably it was set up by her new team, which is hoping to sign her to a podcast deal and sanitize her image a bit. (“No more lewd content,” the manager had told me).
What does she want, though? To maintain her life in a small town with her “granny” and her dog, a miniature heeler named Ellie that she describes as a “shithead.” She is more of a “stay-at-home person,” she says. Her granny is “tickled to death.”
Did she notice all the Trumpiness at the Ugly Duckling, I ask? She admits she tried avoiding getting snapped in a photograph with the Trump impersonator, but she’s not so keen on talking about her own views. “I don’t know much about politics. I don’t talk about things that I don’t know.”
But I can’t quit thinking about all those creeps. And about my home-state girl getting thrown to the wolves. Haliey seems less pressed. “I’m there for the women. I’d sit there all day long and talk to the women,” she tells me. After our call, her publicist sent me an email: “I personally feel like Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” is her theme song in this era right now — having fun, seeing the world and just wanting to hang out with her friends (or go home and watch movies with her dog haha).”
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