podcast
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Every Thursday on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish explores the animating forces of this extraordinary American political moment. It’s not about the horse race, it’s about the larger cultural ideas driving the conversation: the role of online influencers on the electorate, the intersection of pop culture and politics, and discussions with primary voices and thinkers who are shaping the political conversation.
Coconuts, brat, and Kamala Harris: What Does it Mean?
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Jul 25, 2024
Every presidential campaign eventually finds ways to take advantage of the cultural moment. Vice President Harris’s current moment in the viral sun happened as soon as she became the frontrunner of the Democratic ticket. How and why did it happen? Audie talks with two observers: researcher Nina Jankowicz, who studied online gendered abuse and disinformation against women in political life. And Deja Foxx, who worked on Harris's 2019 campaign when she was just 19 years old, leading the digital team’s influencer and surrogate strategy.
Episode Transcript
Deja Foxx
00:00:01
Oh my God, I feel like I'm going to get in trouble for saying this. But you know those copy and paste texts that are super raunchy and have lots of emojis in them?
Audie Cornish
00:00:13
There are few social moments more awkward than trying to explain a meme you saw online.
Deja Foxx
00:00:19
And they come around during like really...like often times it's like holidays or big news moments. Are you familiar with these?
Audie Cornish
00:00:28
No.
Deja Foxx
00:00:30
Okay.
Audie Cornish
00:00:31
Those text videos. Images carved up by the internet into communal jokes that no one can explain as fast or as well as they can pass them along. Now, depending on what side of the joke you're on, it can feel like a groundswell or a tsunami.
Kamala Harris clip
00:00:47
Everything is in context.
Audie Cornish
00:00:49
For instance, Vice President Kamala Harris is in the middle of a reputational reversal of fortune.
Kamala Harris clip
00:00:56
My mother used to she would give us a hard time sometimes and she would say to us, I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?
Audie Cornish
00:01:07
Republicans immediately lined up attacks after this Harris speech last year, the Republican National Committee posted it on their War Room YouTube channel, and the online comments are not surprising. High as an FN kite. Please, God save us from this nonsense. And cackles did you even go to school or sleep your way through that as well? But now the meme makers of TikTok have given it a new life. Every presidential campaign finds a way to take advantage of the cultural moment. But Vice President Harris's current moment in the viral sun happened as soon as she became the frontrunner of the Democratic ticket. How and why did a Republican joke on Harris become a pop culture triumph for her nascent campaign? I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment.
Audie Cornish
00:02:03
Before we get into the whole coconut thing, I want to say that women politicians across the board can have a rotten experience online. And yes, people have researched this.
Nina Jankowicz
00:02:13
We selected ten candidates across the US political spectrum, and we also added three women who were international candidates at the time.
Audie Cornish
00:02:22
'This is Nina Jankowicz she co-founded a nonprofit called the American Sunlight Project.
Nina Jankowicz
00:02:27
And I also wrote a book on online abuse called How to Be a Woman Online.
Audie Cornish
00:02:31
She led a study in 2020 that looked at all these politicians, looked at more than 335,000 abusive comments and social media posts, and found the majority of it focused on the vice president. And the majority of this content was gender based or sexual in nature. When we checked in with her this week, things had not really change for the better.
Nina Jankowicz
00:02:53
I also recently checked to see what it was like on deepfake forums, deepfake pornography forums where a lot of women in public life unfortunately find themselves lately. And there are over ten pages of deepfake porn films depicting Vice President Harris as of this morning, which is pretty crazy. So hundreds of videos that have been viewed thousands of times of nonconsensual deepfake pornography of the vice president, it's pretty shocking. And the idea there, of course, is to demean her, to humiliate her, to push her out of public life, to make her seem unfit for public office.
Audie Cornish
00:03:27
And this is before we get into the race related comments that have made their way into more mainstream spaces about, say, her citizenship, about her biracial identity.
Nina Jankowicz
00:03:38
This narrative that she is a quote unquote DEI candidate, a diversity, equity, inclusion and candidate.
Audie Cornish
00:03:44
So the big lesson that Big Tech took away from the last election is to do less, not more, to step in. Their moderating was attacked as censorship, their attempts at rules and guidelines, suppression. And that's really allowed people to run wild with what Nina Jankowicz calls malign creativity.
Nina Jankowicz
00:04:03
'So what I mean by this is the social media platforms rely in part on artificial intelligence for their detection of abuse or other materials that go against their terms of service online. Just as a simple example, instead of writing the word bitch, people would write B exclamation point T-C-H, and this is enough to get around unless you program the artificial intelligence to recognize this as a slur, it's enough to get around that sort of hate speech. And there are other instances of it. For instance, rather than writing the word Jews, people all write juice. Now, the way that this manifests itself when it's being deployed in online abuse against women is typically in images and nicknames. So if you just search Kamala Harris, you'll still find some abuse. But if you search things like Joe and the hoe, pee pads and knee pads, Cumala Harris or heels up Harris, you're going to find a lot more vitriolic abuse and frankly, probably some threats in there as well.
Audie Cornish
00:05:10
The flip side of all this is that supporters and fans can turn the tide using this same algorithmic toolkit and loopholes.
Nina Jankowicz
00:05:18
I think there's always been a really refreshing antidote to gendered abuse, which is the kind of flash mobs that we've seen in response to it. So one example, of course, is the Taylor Swift deepfake pornography that was trending on Twitter earlier this year. When that happened, Swifties immediately mobilized and squatted on the hashtags that were allowing the the deepfake porn to trend in order to depress those videos in, search results. Make it more difficult for them to be found by users.
Audie Cornish
00:05:56
'So that's how we get to the whole coconut, brat k hive meme-nado hitting your social media feeds and group text right now. Thanks to Nina Jankowicz, author of How to Be a Woman online. After the break, I'm going to talk with one of the social media strategist on Kamala Harris's last presidential campaign back in 2019.
Audie Cornish
00:06:18
Welcome back to The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish. You know, it was the Obama campaign that first embraced social media. The Trump campaign had it in a chokehold. So it kind of goes without saying that it's likely that to the victor of TikTok goes the spoils of 2024. And Deja Foxx was an early adopter of that platform. She worked for the Kamala Harris campaign during the then senator's failed 2019 run. And Deja was 19 at the time. She's 24 now.
Deja Foxx
00:06:46
When I worked on the Kamala Harris campaign in 2019, in the primary, TikTok was brand new, right? It was a dancing app for teens. No elected officials were on it. And it by no means had the kind of staying power and influence or economy around it that it has now. And I reflect back on my time on that campaign. I was only 19 years old. I was a TikTok user at this point. Though I was the youngest person in my office, the youngest person across any of the campaigns at that level of leadership, and one of the youngest in history to do that kind of work. And I think that's also an important note to make that one of the reasons that I was able to be youngest and be in these positions of leadership was because these platforms have changed so quickly.
Audie Cornish
00:07:45
When I was an intern. At one point, like I was helping to make websites for the company I was working for, and the vibe was very like, you know how to do this? Bits and bytes. There was this real sense of like, them not knowing, but I do think politicians who have embraced social media over the years know a lot more. So can you talk about what's a typical day on the job, working with a campaign or for a campaign? As a surrogate? As an influencer?
Deja Foxx
00:08:16
So when I was on the campaign, I think what you have to note is that that position didn't exist before I got there. So I got to kind of create it. And I did any number of things. Some days, for hours on end, I would be watching my TweetDeck, right? My Twitter search, monitoring the narrative so I would see. And this this was challenging for me. As someone who saw myself so much in this candidate, I would monitor threatening narratives. I would monitor narratives that were race and gender based attacks.
Audie Cornish
00:08:52
You're saying narratives? What does it actually mean when you're when you log on?
Deja Foxx
00:08:56
Right. So sometimes it's under hashtags. They tend to be things that are without fact but feel often very bitey right there. They're these these sort of call and responses. And like I said in this particular campaign, they were often race and gender based attacks leveled against Kamala Harris. And so some of my days would be spent monitoring those particular narratives around her race and her gender and the attacks against her online and how those narratives were building. Who was supporting them? But I also had another side of my work, which was a lot more hopeful, and that was that I got to think a lot about not only high level surrogates. Right? Like you're celebrities, but I really got to think about who we are, our trusted messengers. So something I'm really proud of is that when Kamala Harris would visit HBCUs, I would get really deep into like, who were their student leaders who hold actual influence on this campus, right. Who do people look to and trust? And I would put together these lists and invite them to our events and make sure that they were feeling in the fold. Similarly, I got to start a campaign while working there called This is What a President Looks Like, where we sent out mere decals and signs to our field organizers, and we got back all of these amazing images of and this makes me want to cry, but just the most amazing images of little girls seeing themselves quite literally reflected in these mirrors that affirmed that they are what a president looks like, right? That they were seeing themselves in a candidate for the first time. And that was an initiative I was really proud to ideate and implement.
Audie Cornish
00:10:51
Meaning, did you come up with that hashtag?
Deja Foxx
00:10:52
Yeah, yeah you did. And I got to come up with.
Audie Cornish
00:10:56
But then she didn't get very far right like that. Campaign falters and she falters with it. And I don't know what that moment was like for you, but the whole point of going viral, of doing your kind of work is to help project momentum, right?
Deja Foxx
00:11:14
Yes and no. So I have worked in politics, like I said, for about a decade now. I've worked in in politics for almost half of my life. And I recognize that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and that the thing that keeps me going in this work, when often I feel like we are further behind than when I started, especially within a reproductive rights space, is that when you invest in people, you never lose. And I believe that the content we created on that campaign was an investment in changing the way people saw themselves, saw her, saw each other, thought of what it meant to be qualified and electable and what was possible. And I think that it laid the groundwork for where we are today.
Audie Cornish
00:12:03
Yes, interesting, because as soon as it became apparent that Kamala Harris might be the next Democratic nominee, there was an explosion of memes about her. Positive ones.
Deja Foxx
00:12:19
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:12:20
Also, some negative ones, right?
Deja Foxx
00:12:21
Sure.
Audie Cornish
00:12:23
But immediately, what are the ideas that you noticed? People latched on to that. You were like, I remember that meme from four years ago, why is it coming back now?
Deja Foxx
00:12:33
More so than meme, I think format was really interesting. So we saw this sound begin to go viral, right? Like a TikTok audio. And that audio is the do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?
Kamala Harris clip
00:12:47
You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?
Audie Cornish
00:12:51
And she makes this comment and then she laughs after, and especially on the right. And among people who really dislike her, they're they're often criticizing her laugh. So this starts as a meme that is dismissive of her calling her drunk, saying, this is an insane person. Why is she talking like this? And this is where you come in to help me understand how these things get flipped into what it is now, where people are texting me Etsy products that say, I fell out of a coconut tree. You know what I mean? Like it happened so quickly. But first, just talk about that element of shift, of taking...
Deja Foxx
00:13:32
Sure.
Audie Cornish
00:13:33
...A bit of information that's being seen as a negative and somehow changing that.
Deja Foxx
00:13:39
Right. So I want to say that there's and I no pun intended, there is context to this clip, which is twofold. One, she has a history of viral sounds. Whether you go back to the vice presidential debate and I'm speaking Mr. Vice President, Mr. Vice President, I'm speaking.
Kamala Harris clip
00:13:56
"...400,000 a year appeal the Trump Tax credit. Mr. Vice president I'm speaking well I'm speaking."
Deja Foxx
00:14:02
Which had incredible edits and went super viral on TikTok or the we did it Joe sound.
Kamala Harris clip
00:14:09
"We did it. We did it Joe."
Deja Foxx
00:14:12
Which was also everywhere. This is not an isolated incident. And this is actually something we were playing with back in 2019 when we weren't allowed to have our own TikTok account. We did try seeding some sounds, but imagine TikTok was different then, which was audios of her in speeches and debates. And so this was this was actually a strategy that we were playing with even back in 2019. However, fast forwarding to this moment, now, this particular sound, this particular audio, this was an organic moment. And the reason I think it moved from...something that could have been dismissive to something that has had this incredible response from young people, from Gen Z, is that she feels like a real person.
Audie Cornish
00:14:59
Does it feel like it's an opportunity to reintroduce her to the public? So, and I ask this because you've gone through it, right? You actually tried to do the work in her first campaign. And so all these years later, for people suddenly to be like that laugh, it's actually amazing. And part of her heritage like that must feel very different for you. Am I getting that wrong?
Deja Foxx
00:15:21
No, no, you have it.
Audie Cornish
00:15:23
It's part of Gen Z discovering things again, right? Like they're like you're watching Sex and the City. We're watching Girls. Also, Kamala's laugh is great.
Deja Foxx
00:15:30
Not you coming for me.
Audie Cornish
00:15:32
I'm just saying. Right.
Deja Foxx
00:15:34
No, it's so true.
Audie Cornish
00:15:35
What? Okay.
Deja Foxx
00:15:36
You know what? You know what, though? I will say that it's...
Audie Cornish
00:15:38
Tell me with your finger in the air, Deja. Okay?
Deja Foxx
00:15:40
It's not just Gen Z.
Audie Cornish
00:15:42
Okay.
Deja Foxx
00:15:42
Who's rediscovering Kamala Harris, right? I think she has been right in front of us. She has been qualified this entire time. And I think people are now geeling a little more open to getting to know her.
Audie Cornish
00:15:57
But what I see is the internet, TikTok and this generation bringing her into a kind of cultural relevance that wasn't there before. So when Charlie XCX tweets that she's brat, like, of course, all these ridiculous, you know, commentary in mainstream media, but anyone who's heard that album knows that she is grappling with vulnerability. Not being perfect, not being the perfect woman.
Deja Foxx
00:16:23
How hard it is to be a woman.
Audie Cornish
00:16:25
Yeah. She talks about whether or not she wants to have children or not. And we're in an age where, you know, there's a lawmaker who's saying Kamala Harris can't be president because she's not a mother, right? Dismissing her stepchildren. There is something that for people who do know, if you know, you know, you could understand why that Charli XCX reference could overlay and dovetail with the Vice President. And if you don't know, it's just a weird way that both the artist and the politician are brought into relevance. Tell me I'm wrong because, like, I'm old, but do you know what I mean? It feels like it was the right two people to mash together in internet land.
Deja Foxx
00:17:02
Yeah, I see the connection that you're making. And I also think that there is something particular about who are young women and girls looking to today, right? To understand what it means to grow up in a public eye. Young women and girls are being forced to come of age, to go from girlhood to womanhood in the public eye in a way that is just unprecedented. And I think that they have two kinds of people to look to. They look to their divas and their pop stars, and they look to politicians to see what it means to become a woman in front of everyone.
Audie Cornish
00:17:40
Right. And what they've seen, if I think about the last ten years, are women who try to be perfect and end up being completely torn down.
Deja Foxx
00:17:47
I mean, even going as far back as something like a Britney Spears, right?
Audie Cornish
00:17:50
Yeah.
Deja Foxx
00:17:50
Who I think is like maybe just before my generation, but really marks this moment where we watch people enjoying the spectacle of a takedown of women who are just trying to step into womanhood. Right? Who were were becoming themselves in front of everyone. And I think just even going back to our conversation around format and the changing landscape of the internet, every kid that has a TikTok right now, every young girl, every video she puts out, has the potential to get millions of views right and to get millions of or hundreds of thousands of comments and pieces of feedback about what she wears and how she acts and how she talks and how she dresses and how she looks right. Like we are living in a time where we are getting instant feedback. Our platforms are incredibly visual. And I really do believe that there is a connection in this moment that is on full display with a brat, convergence around who we look to...
Audie Cornish
00:18:54
And, you know, it's funny.
Deja Foxx
00:18:56
...to tell us what it looks like to be a woman in public.
Audie Cornish
00:18:58
I'm fascinated by you saying this, because it hadn't occurred to me that there would be a generation that actually would feel kinship, because they're also in the public eye. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm still thinking you're private somehow and you're not really private. You're all kind of used to...
Deja Foxx
00:19:19
Eternal perception. To be eternally perceived.
Audie Cornish
00:19:24
It's also it's also a very interesting point to make in this moment, because of course, one of the things that is absolutely come to the forefront in the negative internet posting world about her is her romantic past.
Deja Foxx
00:19:40
Sure. That was absolutely one of the narratives I used to, I used to monitor. Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:19:45
You're always saying narratives like that makes it sound way more romantic than what it knows here.
Deja Foxx
00:19:50
The reason I say narratives is because they are stories that people are tapping into time and time again with different kinds of content. Rather, it's something as simple as just a tweet or it's something you say some off color comment from your uncle over dinner or something. As far as a deep fake, right? But they all contribute to this larger narrative, which is that because she is a woman, she must somehow have cheated her way to that she is unqualified because she is a woman, right?
Audie Cornish
00:20:20
You're just for consumption and judgment in a way that's just like you're ugly. Like that's what I'm telling you today. You know what I mean? Like, people just feel like it's okay to tell you anything. I feel you getting emotional, and I can understand because I've talked to people who have done moderation for websites and things like that. You just see the worst of the internet, right? So I can't imagine doing it for a campaign. What we're seeing now is, a fandom arise, right? Or at least the memeification of her...
Deja Foxx
00:20:51
K Hive. Rise up.
Audie Cornish
00:20:52
The K hive. Right? So the first thing you need is a nickname, and then the next thing you need is a team color, which they now have lime green.
Deja Foxx
00:21:00
Purple and yellow also used to be our team colors.
Audie Cornish
00:21:02
Purple and yellow. Yeah. And there's also a kind of lightheartedness to it that I think people are enjoying, as you said, remixing her voice, etc. of course, the minute someone like me is doing a story on this, we're in the danger zone, right? Like, of course it means, oh no, it's not fun in mainstream anymore. No. Business Insider, the writer Kate Notopoulos, who covers technology and culture. I followed her for a long time. She said Kamala's brat summer could end sooner than she'd like if Harris and the Democrats do, the one thing that would kill the vibe.
Deja Foxx
00:21:38
Is it acknowledge it?
Audie Cornish
00:21:38
Embrace the memes. One coconut emoji too many in Harris HQ could be verging into cringe, losing the coveted brain rot demographic.
Deja Foxx
00:21:49
Oh man.
Audie Cornish
00:21:50
There's a lot to translate there for people.
Deja Foxx
00:21:54
Line by line. Word by word.
Audie Cornish
00:21:55
Line by line. But I'll just say it means if you lean too much into something that's supposed to be countercultural, you can undermine the coolness of it.
Deja Foxx
00:22:04
Facts.
Audie Cornish
00:22:05
Really? How do you know when you're gone too far? How many coconuts is one coconut? Too many?
Deja Foxx
00:22:10
Too many. What is the coconut that breaks the coconut trees back? Right. Like...and this, I think, is where the work that I used to do around influencers and surrogates becomes really important because they can do that work, right. They can say those things, they can create and uplift the messages that are rising organically without overdoing it or making it feel cringe. Right? And so this is where trusted messengers, I think, are really, really important.
Audie Cornish
00:22:41
But there's the candidate as well. Right? Like.
Deja Foxx
00:22:44
Yeah, yeah,.
Audie Cornish
00:22:45
You have to tell your candidate like whatever, don't don't try and replicate the meme. Don't do it. Dance. You probably got people on staff who are older being like, you know, it would be great. We should really lean into this thing with your you're nodding and smiling. You must have sat in a meeting where people tried to have you lean into something and you were like, you're killing the vibe. Please stop.
Deja Foxx
00:23:05
Yeah, right. And I think that's why it's also important to have young people in the room in positions of leadership when we are doing digital work, because young people have this sort of native understanding, right?
Audie Cornish
00:23:21
Your antenna is sharp.
Deja Foxx
00:23:23
Right? And it is just so thin. The line between like, this is fun. And then this is this is cringe, right? This is this has gone too far.
Audie Cornish
00:23:33
And I always describe cringe as second hand embarrassment. That's the cleanest way I can describe it. For people who can't picture what it is.
Deja Foxx
00:23:40
Like getting the ick. Like, you know...
Audie Cornish
00:23:41
That doesn't help. That's yet anothe term.
Deja Foxx
00:23:44
All right. Okay, okay, okay. We're just adding that to the dictionary, you know.
Audie Cornish
00:23:47
No, please do. People are gonna we'll have a glossary in the show. Episode notes. No, I don't want to have that kind of show. But I do want to acknowledge the fact that. Like any slang it dies when it goes mainstream.
Deja Foxx
00:23:59
Facts. Yeah, because I think there is something to about. Memes are meant to feel like insider language, right? Like memes and slang are about building community at their core, right? That there is a certain group of people who understands them and can tap into them is what makes them potent, right? That is how we develop and the kind of the ways the internet communities have developed is around the ways that we are interpreting and creating these kind of inside jokes in the form of, of memes or these these sorts of insider communications.
Audie Cornish
00:28:21
What do you see as the difference between what happened with President Joe Biden and the quote unquote dark Brandon meme? Right. This is the idea that he's been through a lot of memes, but this is the idea of turning around something that was an insult and making it into, like, a cool thing. And what we're seeing now with the vice president and her moment of viral fun.
Deja Foxx
00:28:45
'Sure. I think it comes from. I think the central difference lies in where does it originate? Right? Are you creating something in-house and then trying to sell it to people and push it? Or are you taking something that's organic and reinterpreting it in-house? Right. So where is the origination? And I think what's so special about this brat moment is that it did originate online. And this is again where I feel like we just do not give teenage girls the credit they are due for the impact that they have, especially now that social media, is such a huge part of our lives. Right? I think young people spend something like 3 to 5 and on average, consume 3 to 5 hours of vertical video a day, like something crazy. And it is teen girls who are leading in building these strategies, building these communities online can't even vote yet. Right?
Audie Cornish
00:29:49
Right.
Deja Foxx
00:29:49
I bet a lot of them can't, but they are having an incredible impact on the narrative landscape of how we are talking about, this candidate, how we're talking about this election. I mean, we're literally talking about it right now.
Audie Cornish
00:30:04
I know, I know.
Deja Foxx
00:30:05
And it probably started in some teenage girls bedroom.
Audie Cornish
00:30:07
And I think it's also like, if you're 16 or 17 or 18 or 20, you've witnessed the MeToo movement. And even though it did not yield like a huge cultural change, it did change our ability to see things. Right? It's our ability to see something as sexist or misogynist or to question the power dynamics of something. I think if there's any legacy from that as a movement that is more the legacy then like a wave of arrests or something like that. So if you're a young girl, you're probably way more attuned to how are they talking about this female candidate than a young girl in 2015 or 2014? Would've been for Hillary Clinton?
Deja Foxx
00:30:52
Yeah. And again, I'll I'll add that they young, young women, teen girls have a kind of power in creating and shaping narrative right now that is sort of unprecedented. From their bedroom, they can make, create, send something out into the world. And even if they only have 100 followers, that fan could still get millions of views, could still land in a CNN segment. Right? And if I could tell young women and girls anything in this election, it would really be to own that power, right, to own the social media super power you have and and to go out there and, like, show them how it's done. Like the best things in this election are going to come from you are going to come from the organic messengers out there saying what they feel, telling their own stories, showing why they're connecting, why they're going to get out and vote, how this is going to impact their lives, and also just bringing joy and fun to this. Right? The best things in this election are going to come from teen girls online. They're going to come organic. They're probably not going to come from from people on the inside.
Audie Cornish
00:32:12
Well, Deja Foxx, thank you so much for talking with me about this, fellow young person. What a conversation we have had.
Deja Foxx
00:32:23
My pleasure, I love let me talk about the memes. Let me talk about the pop girls.
Audie Cornish
00:32:28
Deja Foxx is an activist and social media strategist. She worked on the team that ran Kamala Harris's social media during her 2019 run for president.
Audie Cornish
00:32:39
That's it for this episode of The Assignment. If you loved it, please leave us a review and make sure to hit the follow button as well as do all the sharing you want. The assignment is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Graelyn Brashear and Lori Galarreta and also Genesis Magpayo, thanks so much for your help this week. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is executive producer of CNN audio. We had support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseriy, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lenni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks, as always to Katie Hinman and thank you for listening.