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What Is The 'KHive' And Why Is It Seeing An Ironic Resurgence? Speculation And Memes About Kamala Harris Replacing Joe Biden As The 2024 Democratic Nominee Explained
If you're a Democrat, independent or anti-Trump voter, you best start believing in coconut trees.
After a somewhat disastrous performance last week in a presidential debate against Donald Trump, President Joe Biden has faced serious calls to drop out of the 2024 Election, as critics believe him too old and too senile to do the job for another four years. Furthermore, reports indicate that he's considering it, which would certainly be a bombshell shakeup to an election in which neither candidate has a high approval rating.
Thus, eyes have turned to perhaps one of the most likely people to take up the campaign should Biden drop out: Kamala Harris, his vice president who has spent the better part of the last four years dropping surreal soundbites.
Four straight minutes of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” It’s incredible. I had no idea she used it this much. pic.twitter.com/TClfC1EyH6
— John Cooper (@thejcoop) June 29, 2024
This has put her critics in an interesting spot. While they're not exactly gaga over Harris, any alternative to Biden looks attractive at the moment, which has resulted in an ironic resurgence of the KHive, only this time, it's emerging in the form of a meme.
What Is The "KHive"?
If you can stomach it, try to think back to the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, when about 19,000 Democrats tried to secure the nomination to unseat Trump. During this time, multiple candidates had supporters who voiced tribalistic loyalty to their preferred politician, often in embarrassingly cringe ways — think "High Hopes" Buttigieg supporters and Elizabeth Warren staffers getting what many thought looked like Holocaust tattoos.
Candidate Harris' online supporters dubbed themselves the "KHive" or "K-Hive," coined by Joy-Ann Reid in 2017.
This group developed a reputation for being zealously antagonistic online, particularly to supporters of more progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. There were reports of KHive supporters being homophobic, racist and anti-semitic against such people online.
One story covered by Huffington Post included a line that read, "A recent high school graduate who supported Bernie Sanders said a volunteer organizer for Harris’s presidential campaign tweeted that he 'hoped I would be r--ed in a gas chamber by MAGA n-zis' (the teen is Jewish)."
In one instance after Roe vs. Wade was reversed, a KHive member posted a widely mocked thread in which she blamed a wide cast of characters including politicians, podcasters and celebrities for participating in the events that led to the reversal. After Know Your Meme covered the thread, she even included the writer of this article in the thread.
What Is The "KHive" Resurgence Of 2024?
While many online leftists don't exactly identify with KHive, the thought that Kamala Harris could replace Joe Biden as the nominee for the 2024 election offers hope to some for Democrats' chances to retain the White House (though this is true for nearly any potential replacement, such as Pete Buttigieg or Michelle Obama, but Harris, as Vice President, is the likely favorite to take up the campaign).
This has led to ironic KHive memeing coming from former Sanders and Warren supporters, a trend that currently has the name of getting "coconut-pilled," a reference to one of Harris' several bizarre viral soundbites.
This can best be interpreted more as progressive brains breaking than a sincere pivot of opinion towards the vice president. One user compared the wave of memes to the Morbius phenomenon, when viewers memed about the flop of a movie so hard that Sony rereleased it, only to have it flop again.
Still, for Democrats who have given up on Joe Biden's ability to win in 2024, much less lead the nation, some feel it may be time to rally around Kamala Harris, whether they want to or not. In such a situation, the only thing to do, it seems, is meme.
For the full history of KHive and Kamala 2024 be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entries for more information.
