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On Tuesday, when Vice President Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate in her bid for US president, she commemorated it by sharing a video of her calling the Minnesota governor and asking him if he’d like to join her campaign. In the clip, he appears in a T-shirt, khakis, white sneakers, and a camouflage baseball cap.
In politics, this is known as “appealing to the base”—looking like an average (yet electable) American. For pop culture followers, it was known as “appealing to Chappell Roan stans.” Over the last year, during the singer’s meteoric rise, Roan has been selling camo caps emblazoned with “Midwest Princess” in orange block letters. Once Walz officially joined the ticket, the campaign began selling a similar hat with “Harris Walz” on it.
Soon, everyone wanted to know: Has Chappell seen this?
Eventually, she did. Later on Tuesday she reposted an image on X showing a side-by-side comparison of her hat and the Harris campaign’s with the caption “Is this real[?]”
Indeed it was, and according to reporting from my colleagues at Teen Vogue, the 3,000 hats that were initially made sold out in 30 minutes. More than $1 million worth of hats have now been sold, officially making it a liberal status symbol. (The Harris campaign later gave the outlet an update, saying 47,028 Harris-Walz camo hats had been sold, bringing in $1,878,524.) As the hat, and its similarities to Roan’s merch, began to spread, the jokes sprang to life.
“This is the Bushwick x Los Feliz unity our nation needs,” wrote podcast and TV personality Desus Nice, referring to the hip enclaves in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims shared Roan’s tweet on Threads saying, “Chappell Roan posting the Harris-Walz camo hat is some kind of Gen Z inception.”
You say “inception,” others say “reclaiming the narrative.” Yes, the hat could be a subtle (or not subtle) attempt by the Harris-Walz campaign to get a Roan endorsement. When President Biden was still running for reelection, she’d turned down an opportunity to play a Pride event at the White House, and so maybe the hat was a move to make her reconsider. (A rep for Roan didn’t respond to a request for comment.) It could also be an attempt to make camo do for Harris-Walz what red has done for Donald Trump.
In the years since Trump started wearing them, the red Make America Great Again hat has become a symbol of not only Trump’s campaigns for the US presidency, but also for the values he and the GOP stand for. Red hats became symbols, memes of their own. Kanye West wore one to the White House; supporters wear them at rallies.
The language of the MAGA cap also became something translatable. The Strand bookstore in New York made a line of hats that said “Make America Read Again” (albeit in white); in 2020, LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers wore red caps that read “Make America Great Again Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.”
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Now a different cap, a new take on the headwear of the American working class, has entered the mainstream. Naturally, there’s already a backlash. Meghan McCain, daughter of politician John McCain, posted on X, “Putting someone in a camo hat doesn’t make them a moderate or appealing to red-state people. No one is that dumb.” Respondents quickly noted that her dad did the same thing when he was running for president with former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. And truly, when the “this you?” accusations start flying, the meme has taken off.
By Wednesday, Axios was reporting the Harris-Walz hats were “DC dem’s new status symbol.” But it was also something else: simply a symbol. Following in the footsteps of “brat” and “weird,” the hat is now this week’s political meme. Like all memes, it could have a short shelf life, but because the hats are physical objects in the real world, they may have long closet lives.
Derek Guy, aka Menswear Guy, who cringed a bit at the “weird” discourse last week, wrote in Politico on Thursday that Walz was turning casual clothing into a “political boon” in a way other politicians, who seemingly put on brand-new boots to go meet farm workers, can’t. “You have to go back decades to find a politician who can really pull off a casual look,” Guy wrote. Camo hats may feel like an awkward way for a campaign to appeal to working stiffs, but on Walz—like Roan—they work. New meme, (slightly) different green.
Loose Threads
Drake drops a load. Of music. And videos. And just stuff. In a move which might remind you that before he lived rent-free in Kendrick Lamar’s crosshairs he was an auteur, Drake released a giant trove of new audio and images on a site called 100gigs.org. Yes, it’s really 100 GB, and while fans are still trying to parse through it, at least one outlet has already said it “puts the ‘dull’ in self-indulgent.” Oof.
David Lynch has emphysema. The legendary director announced his diagnosis earlier this week on X, claiming it was the result of “many years of smoking.” Which, to be clear, he loves. He’s quit, and says he’s “had many tests, and the good news is that I am in excellent shape except for the emphysema.” For those worried about his filmmaking career, he says, “I will never retire.”
Less than stellar. There were some weird rumors floating around that some of the original 70-mm Imax prints of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar were destroyed. Paramount, the studio behind the movie, disputed those rumors to Variety, though, and still plans to rerelease the movie later this year.
For the GOAT. Here’s someone making a very nice card for US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles.
