After Dril Tweet Appears In Harris-Walz Campaign Email, Social Media Debates Merits Of Being 'Too Online'

It's no great leap of logic to say that the online outreach portion of Kamala Harris's campaign staff is, to put it mildly, very online.

The campaign has leaned into Brat, the Charli XCX album that's become an internet darling, and recently released a camo hat that sure looks like it's modeled after merchandise for another pop star for the internet-savvy, Chappell Roan.

While most of these nods to online culture have been reasonably well-received in a summer where Harris's campaign seems to have all the momentum, the use of a Dril tweet in a campaign email sent out yesterday has social media divided on whether the campaign is starting to lean too heavily into "being online."

Yesterday, former President Donald Trump held a press conference at the Mar-A-Lago that included a bevy of false claims, including a claim that the crowd at the January 6th storming of the Capitol was bigger than the crowd for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and another claim that no one was killed at January 6th (five people died, including Ashli Babbit and Kevin Greeson).

The email sent by the Harris-Walz campaign team was intended to highlight the false claims Trump made during his press conference and contrast their campaign with his. The Dril tweet could be seen as a meme intended to poke fun at Trump's demeanor during the event.

Pulling up old Dril tweets to comment on current events has long been a common meme, but the use of a Dril meme in an official campaign email rubbed some the wrong way.

Among those not amused was Dril himself, who used the tweet to criticize the current administration's involvement in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Others felt including a Dril meme was cringe and esoteric, while others were delighted to see a recognizable, "cool" meme used by the campaign.

Of course, campaigns using popular memes have been our reality since 2016. Hillary Clinton tried (and mostly failed) to utilize memes in her campaign, once tweeting Delete Your Account to Trump, while Donald Trump Jr. made a photoshop of his father as Baby Yoda and Joe Biden's social media team notably leaned into the Dark Brandon memes in recent years.

Unfortunately, "Is using Dril memes cringe?," the greatest thread in the history of forums, is ongoing after 12,239 pages of heated debate.