‘Kamala Is Brat’ and Coconut Tree Emojis Aren’t Going to Win the U.S. Election, FYI
I cannot escape Kamala Harris. There she is on my TikTok FYP, in a lime-green filtered supercut of awkward auntie dancing and snippets of speeches over Charli XCX’s “360” and in a different lime-green filtered supercut of her now iconic laugh, this one over Charli XCX’s “365.” And on my X/Twitter feed, the subject of analysis, and fangirling, and earnest hopefulness, and self-referential inside jokes that you only really get if you’re extremely online. And yes, also on my IG feed, as every news outlet I follow covers her nascent presidential campaign—and the fact that she’s, um, all over our social media feeds.
@flextillerson kamala harris edit to 360 by charli xcx. brat presidency #kamalaharris #kamala #biden #harris2024 #charli #charlixcx #brat #360 ♬ original sound - aly
Her sheer ubiquity, and the fact that weird, sometimes nonsensical memes have played an important role in encouraging that ubiquity, is obviously notable and worthy of consideration. But… I’m about to make the argument that the entire discourse around her memeification is perhaps putting a little too much stock in what is essentially an internet trending moment. Or at least, there’s a particular subset of commentary and critique that’s perceiving the viral moments as more meaningful than they really are. Because there are two ways to think about Brat, coconut trees and other Kamala-adjacent memes: as marketing tools, and as signifiers of political traction. And, those aren’t at all the same thing, which is why it’s a bit frustrating to see people loudly conflating the two.
Not to kill the joke by over-explaining it, but… we kinda do have to start with how we got here
But before we get into all of that, some backstory.
As we all know, sometimes the logic behind a meme doesn’t exactly make sense; it’s a funny reference that you can’t think too deeply about, otherwise it all falls apart (which is fine because it’s just a little joke, not like, government policy). And that is the ‘Kamala is brat’ thing in a nutshell. From what I can tell, it started with two social media posts published in early July: a “von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris” that was posted on X/Twitter on July 3 (4.1 million views, 6.3K retweets, 41K likes, 10K saves) and the first supercut I mentioned above (3.3 million views, 665.8K likes, 52K saves), posted on July 5. Both somewhat randomly linked Harris to British pop star Charli XCX’s new album, Brat. With its lime-green cover and Arial font, Brat was already highly memeable, but the addition of an equally memeable politician, a woman who overcame the Copmala nickname through what has been described as a “xanned out aunt routine,” really pushed things into overdrive.
Especially since it was, as The Cut points out, just after U.S. president Joe Biden’s “abysmal” debate performance in late June, when “calls for Biden to drop out [were] getting louder, [and] it became clear that the most obvious route would be for him to pass the baton to Kamala… The next three weeks were filled with speculation as to whether or not Biden would drop out of the race … and Kamala fancams.” The fancams were not only set to Charli XCX songs, to be fair—there were also a healthy number of TikToks set to Chappell Roane’s “Femininomenon”—but the Brat ones really captured the internet’s attention, in the way that random absurdity tends to do. The “Femininomenon” videos are too girlboss-adjacent to feel truly ludicrous, I think, and there’s just something so delightful about ludicrousness. So: when Charli XCX tweeted “Kamala IS brat” on Sunday evening, the meme was already established, but in the days since, it has gone super viral, even though Harris really isn’t a brat, at least not according to XCX’s own definition. (“That girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it.”)
And then, there’s the coconut tree. As TikTok user @campaign.papi explains, back in May 2023, the Twitter account RNC Research posted a snippet of a speech from a White House event, where Harris recounted a story about her mother telling her that she “didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree,” and in fact, exists in the context of “all in which you live and what came before you.” This… was an error in judgment for RNC Research, because while their tweet didn’t do serious numbers then, it introduced the coconut tree story to the internet, and the internet loved it. Again, absurdity plays a role in the virality of this concept—the image of falling out of a coconut tree is very funny, okay?—but here, there’s also a deeper meaning. Ignoring history and context is often a tactic of oppression; pretending that a conflict is happening outside of time, space and history allows oppressors to claim that the oppressed group’s behaviour is random and unjustified, and therefore that their oppression is warranted. (This is why so much of the discourse around Palestinian liberation involves demonstrating over and over again that this conflict did not start on October 7, for example.) If you belong to a marginalized group, this is probably something you instinctively understand, and have also received pushback for—and here’s Auntie Kamala with her endearing cackle, validating that experience, at least. No wonder the speech circulated on social media for months, slowly gaining traction, then very quickly taking on a life of its own. By the time last Sunday rolled around and Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris, the speech itself had been endlessly remixed, and coconuts had become a kind of shorthand for her political ascendency.
Team Kamala is very good at marketing
Harris’ own team helped propel this virality, of course. Immediately following Biden’s social media endorsement, the Biden and Harris HQ X/Twitter account rebranded as Kamala HQ, with a Brat-inspired header and a new bio (“providing context,” obviously). The tone is now notably sassier (Thursday’s post about how “the Harris campaign wishes a happy IVF Day to everyone except @JDVance” was perfectly pointed and also genuinely funny) and makes excellent use of ironic parenthetical commentary. But, Harris herself has very smartly avoided any direct references to the memes… because that would definitely ruin the fun, as Variety critic Allison Herman noted on X/Twitter, saying, “kamala if you’re reading this do NOT acknowledge the coconut memes. I repeat: do NOT acknowledge the coconut memes. the children will turn on you.”
It’s clear her team recognizes that the memes’ organic nature is the key element of their success—and it’s actually very savvy to understand that you can reference and allude to internet culture to positive effect, but if you outright mention it, it kills the joke. Weaponizing that balance is great marketing. Atlantic staff writer Shirley Li gets at this—and what it says about our current cultural moment—in a recent essay: “What’s been particularly fascinating to watch is the rapid embrace of Harris as Brat-coded,” she writes. “Rather than reject a political campaign’s transparent attempt to connect with younger voters—the typical response when corporations or government officials attempt to jump on a meme bandwagon—the target demographic appears to be happily creating more memes, helping maintain Harris’s online visibility while the candidate works to establish her platform ahead of next month’s Democratic National Convention. Crucially, XCX herself sparked the connection, while Harris has not acknowledged the memes directly, publicly interacted with XCX, or tried to incorporate Brat language into her talking points. Instead, Harris’s campaign has leaned into Brat for her, a move that would be considered cringeworthy if dorkiness weren’t seen as an asset these days. Harris is the punch line and appears to be in on the joke. She can be seen as trying too hard and being too casual about the social-media chatter. The effect is a strategy that feels just uncool enough to be cool, obviously calculated but also creative—and genuinely funny.”
Team Harris is definitely leaning into the separation between social media team and candidate to absolve her of cringe (if anyone thought she was posting these memes herself, they definitely wouldn’t work). I’d also argue that this uncool/cool dichotomy is what allows the youth-coded, internet-brained part of her campaign strategy to fit in with her larger approach, which relies on the more traditional trumpeting of past successes, emotionally resonant messaging and, of course, star power—in this case, tacit support from Beyoncé, who allowed her to use the song “Freedom” as the soundtrack to her first campaign video. Which, to be fair, isn’t new; memeability has always been a key part of political success. We’ve just never called it that, even though we understood the concept—what Vox’s Rebecca Jennings defines as “the talent of a candidate to transcend politics and become a legible cultural brand.” As Jennings goes on to argue, “memeability is Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall, and it’s Howard Dean’s awkward scream that lost him the 2004 Democratic nomination. Candidates have always attempted to stage this kind of virality—Hillary Clinton’s “I’m just chilling in Cedar Rapids” Vine, for one—but the moments that truly take off lock into the absurdist, chaotic energy of the internet and are almost impossible to predict. Clinton never cracked that particular formula, whereas Harris has done it while barely even trying.”
Of course, she didn’t really need to try, because she was basically handed an internet persona that her team just had to avoid undermining… which unfortunately they are already doing.
But Team Kamala is perhaps not very good at reading the room
Over the course of the week, we’ve seen a massive groundswell of support for Harris’ campaign. On Sunday night, mere hours after Biden endorsed her, 40,000 Black women joined a Zoom call to figure out how to support her presidential run, and raised a reported $1.5 million in funds by the end of the night. On Monday, 53,000 Black men held their own Zoom fundraiser, which resulted in an additional $1.3 million for Harris’ campaign. Over the next few days, South Asian women held their own Zoom, raising $275,000, as did AANHPI women, Latinas and LGBTQ+ people. On Thursday night, more than 100,000 (and some reports say upwards of 150,000) white women, including celebrities like Pink and Connie Britton, raised more than $1 million—and broke Zoom records. At the same time, there was a lot of social media chatter about how people were suddenly feeling weirdly optimistic, and the importance of pragmatism when engaging in the political process, and the momentousness of electing the first Black and female president. I also saw more than a few disagreements between a majority of people who seem ready to get behind Harris, regardless of her political imperfections and without pushing for any promises around her party’s support—not to mention funding—of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and a smaller group who can’t stomach voting for her for exactly those reasons, no matter how momentous it would be. Also, even more people were making and posting memes. It all feels very unprecedented and important.
So sure, I understand why Harris’ campaign would feel confident about her chances of not only securing the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency. I also get why a big part of the wider discourse has been focused on how the memes might translate to political action, especially for young people—and, for some on the left, hand-wringing over just how easily the youth seem to be swayed by a sassy tone and the most superficial indications of ‘progress.’ However! I would like us to give everyone posting the memes a little more understanding and credit, and also be a little more credulous ourselves. On the understanding front, I also get the feeling of tentative optimism, if we’re being honest. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I, personally, can engage in a political system where elected officials are totally disinclined to actually do what their constituents want and demand. Like, what does democracy even mean if the fundamental premise—we vote for a person or party who promises to represent our interests, and then they represent our interests—can so easily be ignored? So seeing Democrat powerbrokers throw their support behind Harris, has been kind of… reassuring? Yes, it’s obviously about pragmatism and holding onto power through any means necessary, but frankly, it’s scary to think about what it means to live in a society run by politicians that do not feel even a little bit beholden to their constituents, so seeing this behaviour from Biden, Nancy Pelosi, a whole slew of sitting Democrats, the Obamas, the Clintons and others is something, I suppose. (The bar is definitely in hell.) As digital and political strategist Annie Wu Henry told The Guardian this week, “It went from being just shitposting to shitposting into reality and as it became more and more real people also understood what power this could actually hold and what this could actually mean… It’s about the potential for something new, it’s about a political party that can be agile and make adjustments based on what they are hearing from the people. I think it is really exciting and bringing a lot of energy and hope to folks that haven’t felt this way in some time and for young people that maybe haven’t had a moment of hope like this in politics before.”
But also? I think we should remember that posting jokes on the internet, and even donating money to a political campaign during a moment of collective hopefulness is one thing; what happens in the voting booth months from now is another. Especially if the candidate who’s been going viral for her perceived relatability to the youth—and the careful implication that she’s more progressive than Biden, especially on the matter of Palestine—behaves in such a way that implies the relatability thing was pandering, and not true progressiveness. But who would do that, right?
Well… about that.
While Harris was not present for Benjamin Netanyahu’s address in Congress this week (the one where the politicians who did attend gave him a standing ovation for repeating debunked lies about Palestinian savagery), she did meet with him privately, and she made sure to assert her belief in “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Of course, she also expressed “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza” and the “dire humanitarian situation” and called for an immediate ceasefire and a two-state solution, which is stronger language than we’ve gotten from party leadership in the past. Still, I’m willing to bet that messaging feels disappointingly lacking to the people who have spent the last 10 months inundated with photos and videos of Palestinians starving to death, maimed after Israel has shot or bombed them, frantically searching for their loved ones—or their loved ones’ bodies—and begging for the world to see their humanity and help them. Especially when taken in combination with the statement she released criticizing protests against Netanyahu, including protesters’ burning of the American flag (which, btw, is legally considered protected speech)—and especially the part where she equated their actions to antisemitism.
I cannot profess to know exactly what’s going to happen with Harris’ popularity among young, progressive and/or racialized voters. But if I could tell her team one thing, it would be: political support is fragile, and if it's not grounded in actual political action, it could very well be fleeting. So the memes are fun and cute, and if they’re accompanied by truly progressive policy that reflects the world people actually want to live in, they could be a huge weapon in her marketing arsenal. But if they're just aesthetic, then the support they’ll garner is just as superficial. And in fact, this would have a damaging effect, as young socially aware people generally don't appreciate being pandered to.
Which is why I think we’ve been putting too much stock in what the memes ~mean~ this week. They mean people like a little jokey joke, and they love the idea of being empowered to elect a politician who feels relatable and reflects their values. But if Harris’ path forward is just a lime green tinged update of the status quo, I think she’ll see just how quickly people will stop laughing.
And Did You Hear About…
The Times’ (legit disturbing) profile of Ballerina Farm owner/tradwife influencer Hannah Needleman, and the Jezebel recap, in case you don’t subscribe.
The person causing chaos in NYC via fake And Just Like That filming notices.
Choreographer Lyrik London’s Cowboy Carter dance film. (There’s also one for Renaissance, just in case that is also relevant to your interests.)
This really interesting Dazed piece on the gender gap in reading.
Culture critic Taylor Crumpton’s essay on how Love is Blind USA (unironically) made her believe in love again.
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