After President Joe Biden announced his exit from the 2024 electoral race and immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement on the Democratic ticket, memes started going viral with a clip of Harris talking about a “coconut tree” in a 2023 speech.

These memes even generated weird dance remixes, and social media users have begun adding coconut emojis to their screen names and online bios. But those unfamiliar with her speech might feel confused about all this, its meaning, and whether it’s all intended as a fun compliment or an insult.

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The coconut line came from a speech that Vice President Harris delivered during a May 2023 swearing-in ceremony for commissioners on the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics. In other words, she was speaking to government appointees who would pursue economic and educational advancements for Hispanic Americans.

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During her speech, she emphasized that the commissioners would not only work to help upcoming generations of Hispanic Americans, but also to address the needs of their parents, grandparents, teachers, and communities that helped raise them. “Because none of us just live in a silo,” she said. “Everything is in context.”

She continued, “My mother… would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

This one moment from an otherwise low-profile speech gained attention at the time for several reasons: First, it showed the usually-serious Harris in a lighter, joking moment. Second, her Indian-born mother’s quotation embodied the sort of folksy, off-kilter wisdom that older generations are often known for. Third, Harris punctuated the story with broad physical gestures and her familiar laugh.

A clip of her comment immediately gained notoriety among commenters and right-wingers who accused her of being drunk, stoned, or behaving strangely. The YouTube channel for the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) GOP War Room reposted a video from her speech at the obscure meeting in order to draw attention to it, hoping it would turn people against her.

Even @RNCResearch, a profile on X (formerly Twitter) run by the re-election campaign of former President Donald Trump posted a video of her comment, intending to share it as a strange or embarrassing moment.

But the opposite happened.

The moment immediately generated memes as content creators referenced her line in subtitles added to still frames of TV shows, photos, illustrations, and crudely drawn webcomics that only served to highlight the comment’s inherent, de-contextualized strangeness.

However, these memes have found a new life now that Harris has become the first woman of color to be a major party presidential nominee. In other words, the Republicans’ plan to use the clip as some sort of attack ad backfired.