The Triumphant Comeback of the Kamala Harris Meme

The New York Times ^ | July 23, 2024, 12:33 p.m. ET | Amanda Hess is a critic at large who writes about internet culture.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Kamala Harris is a highly memeable presidential candidate. She dances in a loose and enthusiastic manner. She has an idiosyncratic speaking style. She laughs easily, including at herself. This has not always worked in her favor.

When Harris said, in a May 2023 speech, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?,” a Republican YouTube channel snipped the clip from its context and tossed it to commentators, who used it to compare Harris to a daffy talk show host or to joke that she sounded high. Videos of Harris dancing at campaign events were labeled “cringe.” The stickiest anti-Kamala meme of the 2020 election — that the former prosecutor Harris “is a cop” — united leftists, Black Twitter and Republican trolls in an internet-wide project of framing Harris as either a reactionary or a hypocrite.

Now these images have been reversed. Since President Biden bowed out of the race and threw his support to Harris, the familiar old Kamala memes have risen again. It’s their interpretation that has changed.

In the hands of her online fans, Harris’s word salad has been replated as hypnotic internet speak. Her confounding coconut tree quote — “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” she went on to say — now circulates as a symbol of the giddy high produced by her dizzy rise in a destabilized campaign. Her dance moves have been set to Charli XCX songs and filtered through Charli’s lime-green “Brat”-era branding, bathing Harris in her chill hot-mess pop star glow. Even “Kamala Harris is a cop” has been reclaimed, with an exaggerated wink, by supporters eager to fashion...

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TOPICS: Humor
KEYWORDS: amandahess; cackles; california; coconuttree; kamalaharris

[Allegra]

[oldtech]

Not only is Kamala a failure, but it didn’t take any serious person but a very short time to understand that. Now I hear that she is willing to compare her accomplishments to Donald Trump’s. What a joke that is! Bringing that subject up against Trump’s accomplishments in a debate should make for the shortest debate we’ve ever witnessed. She may be a lot of things, but she surely is NOT presidential material. She must think all us voters are complete idiots. She has her looks maybe, but that won’t run a country.

[Allegra]

[intel154]

Yep, “she was maybe too tough on crime as a prosecutor” is definitely a winning argument for a candidate with 34 felony convictions

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

She talks like she’s high addressing a classroom of 2nd graders.....and cackles.

[escapefromboston]

Trump isn’t going to vote for Harris anyways.

[Prince of Space]

I was wondering what happened to you! The first of your paltry SIX posts was in September 2017. Then you must have been in prison or something because you didn’t pop up again until May 2024. And now you’re back with your sixth inane post that continues to bash Trump. I think you took a wrong turn because DU is the other direction. You’re welcome…and now GFYS!

[intel154]

Thanks, I try to go for quality over quantity on my posting

[intel154]

Well, he did donate to her campaign for attorney general, so I wouldn’t rule it out

[gibsonguy]

“The Triumphant Comeback of the Kamala Harris”

Ugh we knew to expect this but it is still nauseating

[gibsonguy]

“The Triumphant Comeback of the Kamala Harris”

Ugh we knew to expect this but it is still nauseating

[wiseprince]

The Democrats put outnsome BS and the media repeats it like clockwork. Absolutely no effort to show objectivity.

[SC DOC]

[metmom]

*Smug* is the perfect word to describe her attitude.

[metmom]

They are correct.

[metmom]

Tulsi and Kennedy could both be a force to be reckoned with but the democrats won’t have them.

They are not DS players, or commie enough for them.

[metmom]

IBTZ ping to post 27

[roving]

Deep thoughts with Kamala Harris: “We’re all now unburdened by what has been. And burdened by what could be. In time. That place could be now. In time and space.”

[metmom]

Thanks, I try to go for quality over quantity on my posting

You failed on that, too.

You’re going to have to try harder.

IBTZ

[roving]

Which will be tossed out. It wasn’t allowed a defense.