Kamala Harris’ return fits a degraded media moment

When Kamala Harris’ social media accounts fired back up this week, teasing a big announcement, there were predictions, laughter and some nervous anticipation. Harris initially rebranding her social media accounts into a youth outreach program called Headquarters_67 felt like a joke. Pokémon Go to the “Kamala HQ,” I guess. Alas, by dropping the 67, they’ve already given up the direct appeal to brainrot.

To be completely fair, there is nothing wrong with the former vice president rebooting her dormant “Kamala HQ” social media accounts ahead of this year’s midterms. The rebranded operation, now called simply “Headquarters” and transformed into a “new Gen-Z led progressive content hub” and progressive advocacy tool through a partnership with People For the American Way, promises to funnel young people into both online and offline action for progressive values. Or, in the words of Harris herself, it’s “where you can go online to get basically the latest of what’s going on, and also to meet and revisit with some of our great courageous leaders.” Headquarters retains the millions of followers accumulated during her 2024 presidential campaign and plans to expand to YouTube and Substack, developing long-form video content alongside rapid-response social media posts. This is why the Kamala HQ revival feels so perfectly emblematic of where we are — it is politics as content. 

The strategy is obvious. Our attention economy rewards s**tposting and snappy quote-tweet dunks over substance. Donald Trump’s “War Room” account on X, for example, has remained active since the election, relentlessly shaping narratives, flooding the zone and anchoring an online ecosystem that has been cultivated for a decade. Gavin Newsom’s relentless trolling of Trump has cemented the California governor as a Democratic darling, and his combative online presence, racking up millions of views with each carefully crafted takedown, is the clear inspiration behind the Kamala HQ accounts. The strategy works if your metric is clicks and viral moments.

As chair emerita, Harris will not have editorial control over the Headquarters content, according to the announcement, which raises its own questions about accountability and messaging discipline. But the larger issue is the strategic choice itself. On paper, it sounds like infrastructure-building, an ambitious laying down of the gauntlet. “Conservatives build permanent organizing infrastructure,” the announcement said. “Progressives have historically built machines that dismantle after Election Day. Headquarters is the end of that cycle.”

But in practice, Headquarters looks like yet another meme account launched into an already saturated market, set to arrive at a moment when Democrats could be doing something far more ambitious. The real innovation this moment demands is the rebuilding of our civic infrastructure. There have been so many media layoffs in 2025 alone that a party serious about information warfare could be hiring journalists, funding reporting and building an alternative ecosystem that actually works for them. 

Harris’ announcement came during the same week that the Washington Post announced another round of layoffs affecting more than 300 employees — one-third of its newsroom — in the latest round of bloodletting at the Jeff Bezos-owned journalistic institution. “The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it,” columnist Peggy Noonan lamented in the Wall Street Journal. “That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster.”

The Post suffered a mortal wound, as Salon’s Brian Karem argued, the day Bezos yanked the paper’s planned endorsement of Harris and lost a quarter of a million subscribers. The paper’s management reportedly spiking a news story about this week’s layoffs means the outlet is all but dead now.

But here’s the cruelest irony: There has been plenty of innovation in media. It’s just not the kind that supports quality journalism. The real innovation of the past decade has been in engagement optimization, algorithmic content distribution and the weaponization of human psychology to generate advertising revenue. Social media platforms innovated new ways to keep users scrolling. 

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The controversy surrounding Bari Weiss’ role in shaping CBS News’ new contributor lineup fits seamlessly into this picture. Weiss represents a particular archetype of our post-journalism era: the personal brand masquerading as authority. Her trajectory from New York Times opinion editor to Substack entrepreneur to apparent kingmaker within a legacy media institution perfectly encapsulates how we have confused platform with expertise and audience with authority. 

Substack, of course, is not inherently malign. It has given a home to talented writers and genuine experts who were poorly served by traditional institutions. But it has also become a haven for a specific species of pundit: the person who mistakes contrarianism for intellectual courage. The platform also reflects a belief that journalism’s primary obligation is to chase the audience rather than inform it. Now, such personalities migrate into legacy media institutions that once maintained at least nominal standards for expertise and institutional knowledge. 

The result is often human-created slop that serves the same function as artificial intelligence-generated filler: generating clicks, creating the appearance of content while contributing nothing durable to public understanding. So we get town halls with Erika Kirk, helicopter flights over Dallas with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and another platform for rapid response that’s tonally indistinguishable from the degraded discourse it ostensibly opposes. The assumption underneath all of it is brutally simple: Americans don’t want to read. They don’t want to think. They don’t want to be challenged. They just want vibes and enemies. 

This assumption is all the more seductive because it contains a grain of truth. The public does bear some responsibility for the coarse state of our information ecosystem. When people choose rage-bait over reporting, they contribute to the problem. Few want to reward the reporter who made calls to 30 police departments for rigorous reporting, but everyone wants to tweet news stories and grow their following. 

We are now in a moment where the only tools we seem capable of deploying in defense are the very ones that created the problem in the first place. Become slop or become obsolete. 

Harris should keep up the resistance — but she should resist the temptation to fight entirely on Trump’s terms. Yes, she needs to communicate effectively in the digital age and to reach voters where they are. But accepting that “where they are” is a degraded information ecosystem designed to reward the worst impulses in human nature means admitting that there is no possibility of rebuilding something more substantive. The slop epidemic — whether generated by AI or human hands, whether packaged as innovation or tradition — is not inevitable. It is a choice, and we are still capable of choosing differently.

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