A political earthquake has shaken up the presidential race.
Was it Joe Biden dropping out a little more than three months before election day — a move with no precedent in the past half century?
Don’t be silly.
Could it be the assassination attempt on Donald Trump two weeks ago, and the energized Republican National Convention that began only days later?
Wrong again!
How about Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate?
That’s three strikes.
No, pinky-out publications such as the Atlantic, Guardian and New York Times — so serious! so respectable! — are insisting that the Washington game-changer worth endless analysis is the word “brat.”
Those deluded lunatics claim that the four little letters, which could refer to either Veruca Salt or a grilled German sausage, will galvanize Gen Z into voting in droves for Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
How utterly moronic they are.
Journalists’ barely veiled giddiness comes, in this instance, because “brat” is a popular new album from singer Charli XCX, which has led to young cultural lemmings, with zero identity other than stupid catchphrases, referring to June through August as their “brat summer.”
What does this have to do with the aspiring Democratic Party nominee?
Well, the singer wrote on X that “Kamala IS brat” — dumb, meaningless — which caused one of Harris’s official X accounts, @kamalahq, to then change its banner to the avocado green color of the album.
Screw the southern border. Like children when the pizza man rings the doorbell, the media sprinted to their keyboards to declare that Harris had already captured the youth vote in a single day.
Their explosion of social media posts (which also make hay of an old quote about a coconut tree) proves, they assert, that Harris’ image has softened: She’s cool and is now and forever the pol kids wanna take a selfie with.
CNN called it “a strong endorsement for the candidate.”
The Times went further, saying, Charli XCX “blessed the Harris campaign with the greatest asset possible: online relevance.”
(If you think that simply being a rare pinch-hitter presidential candidate in a historic cycle is what actually caused the veep’s online spike, how very uninformed you are.)
CBS, reviewing Harris like she’s “Twisters,” dubbed the candidate “Gen Z’s ‘brat summer’ icon.”
Those free political ads are certainly grabbier than the sober reality: Nobody will remember this in a week!
Don’t these slaphappy people know that a meme is just an ephemeral joke?
You look, you laugh, you leave.
You never linger.
Remember when Hillary Clinton became a jokey meme for wearing sunglasses while sternly staring at her phone in 2012? Four years later she was giving a concession speech at Javits.
Fame and celebrity play into Harris’ situation, of course, and it’s true that Hillary’s husband, Bill, is a prime example of pop culture tipping the scales of presidential races in the past.
But the world has changed since the 1990s — when then-candidate Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show” was considered a watershed moment in American politics that, arguably, helped him win the White House.
Now, a president sitting down for an interview on a late-night talk show barely registers. A-listers’ gushing comments about them, tuned out.
The country barely has the attention span for a former president nearly being shot in the head.
What, then, makes the media believe that Kamala’s “brat summer” is somehow different?
That cute pictures with annoying sayings will push a blase generation — one that prefers short YouTube clips over movies — to the polling place to fill in the circle next to Harris?
That young people are already passionately in love with a vice president who was largely kept out of the spotlight for three years due to persistent gaffes?
Wishful thinking is what.
This post was originally posted by NYPost
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