In October 2021, a sports reporter was interviewing live on the air the winner of an auto race in Talladega, Alabama, when the crowd in the background began chanting a crude message about President Joe Biden. The reporter misunderstood or deliberately mistook the words ‘F- Joe Biden,’ and on air said the crowd was chanting ‘Let’s go Brandon,’ referring to Brandon Brown, the driver she was interviewing.
The phrase quickly spread among radical conservative group opposed to Biden, and soon became the euphemism for their previous profanity, even among members of Congress. T-shirts, bumper stickers, and caps with the phrase ‘Let’s go Brandon’ quickly spread thanks to social media, and the conservatives even made money from sales of the items.
You might think that would’ve been more or less the end of it, but if you do, you’d make the same mistake these groups did. You would be underestimating the wiliness and adaptability of an old, very experienced politician.
When Biden announced his plans to run for reelection in April 2023, one of his campaign pages included a drawing of him with red eyes – a copy of an image created by some fringe conservatives in 2022 with the label ‘Dark Brandon,’ an attempt to paint Biden as a sinister individual.
Turned out, though, that Biden supporters liked the Dark Brandon image, and began using it to tout his policy victories. Wily as always, he adopted it for his campaign, and now it’s marketing Dark Brandon T-shirts and coffee mugs along with such slogans as ‘best worn while vanishing Malarkey.’ One of his campaign ads show the president drinking coffee from a Dark Brandon coffee mug with the slogan, ‘I like my coffee dark.’
One culture reporter, writing about the Dark Brandon transformation, said it’s transforming the public’s image of the octogenarian from a bland, uninteresting figure to something a shade more exciting.
Some of the same people who were giddy at using ‘Let’s go Brandon’ when it was being used against Biden, such as the hosts on Fox News, were outraged at the president’s turning the insult back on its authors, and worse, that he’d be making money from it.
Referring to his Dark Brandon coffee mug, one Fox News anchor said, “This mug is, like, about trying to present him as tough and badass when we know he probably wears diapers and he falls off his bike. So, it’s not working, and it’s a problem.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but I hear a lot of ‘sour grapes’ here, or maybe a kind of uncomfortable kind of ‘it’s not funny when you do it back to me.’ It is without a doubt the epitome of hypocrisy. Not unlike the playground bully who whines and cries when the kids he’s tormenting gang up and turn on him.
One thing’s for sure. The airheads who came up with ‘Let’s go Brandon,’ picked the wrong target and are now regretting it, and the rest of us were treated to a fantastic lesson in dealing with bullies. This is something I learned many decades ago from my grandmother. When someone is bullying you, take their insults and attacks and smack them square in the head with them. – NWI
