KHive. Brat. Coconut-pilled. Unburdened by what has been. If you’re a healthy, sane person who doesn’t spend your every waking moment on the internet, the Kamala Harris discourse is bound to be baffling. The public talked relatively little about the vice president after her failed presidential bid segued into a position in the White House. That is, until President Joe Biden quit his reelection campaign and Democrats quickly coalesced around his 59-year-old heir.
The memes were swift. If you have the good fortune of not knowing what any of the terms above mean, consider yourself blessed. But if you’d like to learn, here’s an explainer to help you get through the election.
Beyonce’s fans call themselves the BeyHive, and Harris’s supporters call themselves the KHive. Pop stars and politicians always, unfortunately, have had rabid fan bases in common. And Harris’s is getting bigger.
“Kamala IS brat,” pop star Charli XCX posted mere hours after Biden’s campaign resignation, baffling boomers, Gen Xers, and most millennials all at once. Discussion of this inscrutable declaration made it all the way to CNN.
Charli XCX released her sixth studio album, Brat, in June. The cover, a simple lime green backdrop to the word “brat” in a pixelated, old-internet-style font, was made to be memed. And that’s exactly what the Harris campaign did, with its cover image on X reading “Kamala HQ” in the same iconic styling. Weeks before the Harris campaign began, media outlets had been proclaiming that we are living in “brat summer.” Harris just embraced it.
But what does “brat” mean, exactly? Calling a sitting vice president a “brat” would have been an insult in ye olden days, methinks.
“You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown,” the singer explained on TikTok. “But [she] kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”
Yes, you’re right, it still doesn’t make sense. Don’t worry about it too much.
People who are Very Online like to talk about being red-pilled or blue-pilled, a reference to The Matrix. To be “coconut-pilled” means to be part of the KHive. It’s a reference to one of Harris’s famously strange proverbs. “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” she said at an event last year. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
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The infamous coconut comment, while odd, actually makes some sense. Not so Harris’s favorite phrase, “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” repeated ad nauseam at various events and now throughout all corners of the internet.
The Harris team has embraced the memes, and Politico has ludicrously dubbed her “Gen Z Meme Queen.” Though the jokes aren’t her doing, she’s not missing an opportunity to capitalize on the free publicity. Luckily for Harris, yesterday’s gibberish is today’s pandering to Generation Z.