Today, in existential panic: Harris/Walz campaign uses real dril tweet in email

Here’s a new milestone for your personal scrapbook of internet culture creeping, ever more quickly and steadily, into shit that actually matters to people’s lives: The Harris/Walz presidential campaign reportedly included a dril tweet in an email it sent out to supporters today. Absurdist political tweets from the internet’s best sentence writer have now become part of the actual political discourse, so please adjust your personal level of “Whoops, the simulation is collapsing” alarm as appropriate.

If dril-ologists want to get specific, the presumably young (or at least desperately young-seeming) staffers for the Democratic campaign included a screenshot of a 2014 classic, the famous “please don’t put in the newspaper that i got mad,” to mock Donald Trump’s latest blood-pressure-raising rants to his followers. Which causes us to take a moment to really wonder how many conversations were had about this specific inclusion of internet ephemera. Were other dril tweets pitched? Did someone rule that the corncob tweet was too esoteric? Did someone stump hard for “everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag”? Oh, to be a fly on the wall as people who’ve had Tumblr accounts seize the reigns of genuine political influence.

The thing about dril, though, is that he’s not just a sort of free-floating expression of many things that are good, or at least funny, about modern internet culture: He’s also a dude, with a Twitter account, and what might be viewed as a slight irritation at being used as a prop by a political campaign. (We guess it’s a little bit like when musicians get mad that politicians they don’t like use their songs, except instead of “Born In The U.S.A.,” it’s a little online koan about how “theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron.”) Anyway, dril fired back by calling out the government for its ongoing support of Israel’s actions in Palestine, because that’s what happens when you try to suck the internet’s energy into your sanitized, fun political campaign: You get the angry shit, too. Someday, politicians will actually learn this, hopefully before the simulation collapses in full.