Trae Crowder the contract administrator had wanted to become Trae Crowder the stand-up comic for a long time. He looked at the Pickup Pastor’s video again and figured if that dude could rant for two minutes and get millions of views on Facebook, maybe he could, too. He decided to adopt a character, the Liberal Redneck. It wasn’t really a character, because Crowder is truly both a redneck and a liberal, but he exaggerated it. He took off his glasses and put on a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off it and a ragged ball cap on his head. He cranked up his accent to full East Tennessee twang, stepped onto his back porch, held out his phone selfie-style, and began ranting about the Tennessee legislature’s passage of a bill designating the Bible the state’s official book.

That first video got more than 70,000 views on Facebook. “I was over the moon about that,” Crowder says. “I was thrilled.” He tried again the next Wednesday, April 20. This time, he kept the cap but jettisoned the shirt entirely and went straight back at the Pickup Pastor’s brand of transphobia. He ended his screed with this:

You’re freaked out. The thought of a man wantin’ to be a woman disgusts you, because like most things that disgust you, you lack the capacity to understand it — you know, homos, algebra, shit like that. And y’all ain’t gon’ change. I realize that now. But that’s OK, because the rest of us are tryin’ to ensure that the next generation — you know, your kids — grow up in a world that’s a little more open-minded. And that’s happenin’ whether you like it or not. Bye!

“My wife and I stayed up that night a little bit watching it, and it was going up, but it still wasn’t insane or nothing,” Crowder remembers. “I went to bed, and when I woke up, my phone was damn near froze up from all notifications that were on it. But I still had a day job; I had to get to work. I was just like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I just went to work, and my phone was buzzing in my pocket, and I couldn’t get it to stop. My battery died by noon because my phone was going bananas, and I happened to be really busy at work, so I didn’t really get a chance to look at it until that afternoon. I snuck onto Facebook at my work computer, and I was just like, ‘Holy shit!’ At that point, it was in the millions. And it kept building.”