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

[intel154]

Not allowed a defense? Why did he take donations for all those lawyers then?

[intel154]

Feedback is a gift, ever onward

[Bikkuri]

*** H/T to metmom ***
(metmom really made IBTZ!@!@!@!)


some nutcase semi-noob that seems to dissappear until needed seems to have popped back up to throw more of its B.S. around to see what reactions it could have.

So, it found out... not welcome here with the topping of some ions.









*** click the name to check ***

[nicollo]

NTY has achieved the triumph of post-modernist journalism:

now circulates as a symbol of the giddy high produced by her dizzy rise in a destabilized campaign

[Darksheare]

Funny, she left the border wide open.
How is that tough on crime?

[Bullish]

THEY'RE BACK!!

[Jane Long]

Sure, Zippity Zot n00b.

Great catch, metmom.

Thanks for the ping, Bikk!

[Jane Long]

Too perfect.

[SaveFerris]

Well, we hardly knew ye, Democrat NeverTrumper

[Allegra]

Oh, sneaky lil’ Never-Trumper. Slipping in here in 2017, barely making a peep and then coming out with those true Kamalulula colors when the opportunity strikes.

Good catch, metmom!

Bye, lefty troll!

[metmom]

Well, that didn’t take long.

A posting history that weird is a dead giveaway.

[Bikkuri]

[Col Freeper]

[Joe Boucher]

Crappola,
Bitch is unlikable

[TXBlair]

That form never fails to crack me up!

[Recovering_Democrat]

Obama wasn’t presidential material. Neither was Biden. The irony? Both were worthless for the same reason. BO because he had done nothing and was a noob...Biden had done nothing and had been there for 50 years.

Both were unaccomplished in life. Trump was. Mitt was, too, at least as a businessman...but he got owned by the left too quickly.

Reagan was accomplished—he had a REAL career before politics, and he had been an executive at the state level before. Reagan never got owned by the left.

The Bush clan was a wholly different animal: somewhat political, somewhat business. But again, got pwned by the leftists.