The New York Times is trying to reframe Vice President Kamala Harris’ past viral gaffes as “celebratory artifacts” following her rapid rise as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Fox News reports.
Amanda Hess, an internet culture critic for the Times, wrote an article titled “The Triumphant Comeback of the Kamala Harris Meme,” highlighting the surge in online content since President Biden endorsed Harris and exited the 2024 race.
Hess described Harris as a “highly memeable presidential candidate” and noted how previously unflattering memes and photoshopped images of Harris are now being repurposed to celebrate her candidacy.
“The same unflattering supercuts and Photoshop jobs once used to denigrate Harris have now been flipped into celebratory artifacts of her candidacy,” Hess shared on Tuesday.
CNN’s Van Jones has also praised Harris, saying she has transitioned “from cringe to cool” as liberals work to reshape her image.
Hess pointed out that Harris’ frequently mocked catchphrase, “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” has been reclaimed by her supporters. She explained that its “mild incoherence” makes it an appealing hook on TikTok, where fans remix and chop up her speeches like DJs.
“The redemption of the ‘unburdened’ meme is also a reaction to the genuinely concerning gibberish generated by the elder statesmen in the race over the past few months,” Hess wrote, referencing Biden. “Harris now presides over a post-coherence landscape, one where her occasionally meandering phrasing feels refreshingly low stakes. It’s a quirk, not an existential threat to American democracy. The ‘unburdened’ supercut shows a candidate who can memorize a line and capably deliver it on command — not something that could be said of Joe Biden, in the end.”
Hess further claimed that clips of Harris dancing and memorable quotes like “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” which were previously mocked by Republicans, have been embraced by her fans and reinterpreted positively.
“In the hands of her online fans, Harris’s word salad has been replated as hypnotic internet speak,” Hess wrote. “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 it into a winning general-election pitch.”
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