When Your Name Becomes a Meme
This one’s been brewing for a while, but finally rose to the top of my list to talk about. Remember early in the fall when “Let’s Go Brandon!” started circulating through conservatives, signs and bumper stickers started popping up, and the meme starting appearing everywhere? I even saw a baseball cap worn at Game One of the World Series by an otherwise respectable young business man with the slogan emblazoned on it.
What’s the orgin of this meme? Well, Brandon is actually a real person, Brandon Brown. He’s the perfect American story – started racing go-carts when he was 8 years old, and over the past 20 years worked his way all the way up to driving in NASCAR stock car races. But he’s not some fancy schmanzy high paid driver sponsored by Mountain Dew. He has his own car, funded by himself and his father with minor sponsors. He started running out of money this year, and as a final appeal for sponsors, he posted an ad on social media saying “put your name on my rear”, and that landed him two sponsors with enough money to keep racing. With that extra money, he raced at Talladega and brought home the victory. In the excitement of the win, he didn’t notice the event that threatens to wreck everything he’s earned.
In the live post race interview on the track broadcast on national television, some assholes in the stands started chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden!” over and over. As the chant grew, the interviewer tried to make light of the chant, saying the crowd was chanting, “Let’s Go Brandon!” and a meme was born. Like everything else that occurs in the right wing echo machine, the meme took on a life of its own, even being repeated on the US House floor, and by governor Ron DeSantis who rebranded the Biden administration as the “Brandon administration.”
Ha ha. It’s super funny to use someone else’s name as a swear word, right? Brown at first thought it was funny right up to the point where sponsors started backing away from him, not wanting to get embroiled in partisanship, especially when the name of the sponsored person is being used in a phrase substituting his name in an expletive that implied the word “fuck”. Right wingers often ignore the fact that the fully HALF of all Americans who disagree with them also spend money. Sponsors of television shows, sports teams, and yes, NASCAR sell their goods to everyone, not just radical partisans who believe that their political opponents must be denigrated and even eliminated from the public stage. That belief is called eliminationist, and is exactly what bred the violent insurrection that actually attempted to murder those who disagreed with their leader and overthrow the US government. Most responsible companies don’t want to be associated with that kind of hatred because it’s bad for business. Brown is even trying to get ahead of this issue by changing the meme from “Let’s Go Brandon!” to “Let’s Go America!” in an attempt to walk the fine line between not pissing off the NASCAR base and not losing sponsors. It’s not easy, and most likely impossible.
The “Let’s Go Brandon!” meme perfectly encapsulates a key feature of the right wing noise machine – they repeat these kinds of memes so much that it develops callouses in the users’ psyches to the point that hateful and violent rhetoric it is no longer shocking to them. Why do I say that? I say that because it’s true. Think about it – at the beginning of the pandemic that’s now killed almost 1 million Americans, Dan Patrick actually said that old people needed to die for the sake of the economy. Instead of being excoriated for such eliminationist rhetoric, Far right Americans AGREED, screaming, “Right! The economy is more important than old people!” Tucker Carlson feeds a continuous stream of this radical hate speech every night on national television. Hate speech is now embedded in the DNA of the right wing and drives the public policy they espouse.
People repeating this hate speech don’t give a flying shit about the consequences of that hate speech, but the damage is real and gets people hurt and even killed. Brandon Brown is the innocent victim as this massive meme threatens to destroy his sponsorship chances and career just so they can say “Fuck Joe Biden!” in public and get away with it. The real tragedy here is not that this kind of behavior is a flaw of conservatism today, it’s a feature.
Read some about Brandon earlier where he says he doesn’t want to be involved with politics. Ok, but then he had to get involved with politics by shifting the narrative to inflation, which we know is a favorite thing with repugnanticans blaming Joe Biden. He is a face of NASCAR, and nonpartisan he’s not. His sponsors should dump him and NASCAR in my opinion.
1And in red states at college football games, they don’t use “let’s go brandon”, they flat out chant “f.ck Biden”. Suspect that’s still the chant at NASCAR races. F.ck NASCAR.
Prior to every bar fight, there’s a necessary escalation of macho memes.
2We’re in that escalation now.
Wanna bet on who’s gonna get shot?
Great piece Jefe. Thanks for the link to the Kindred essay, because to me at least, it’s one of those things that help bring perspective to ideas already thought about.
3Good one, thanks & Merry Christmas, C
4President Biden takes calls for the Christmas season Norad Santa Tracker, a nice thing for the kids this season, when an idiot phones in on probably a secure phone line to the White House, and ends his comments with “let’s go Brandon.”
Perhaps the caller will find out how capable the President and his administration are when someone with a badge shows up at his front door? Ho, ho, ho! Enjoy Christmas in jail sucker.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/parent-uses-right-wing-slur-during-biden-call-norad-santa-n1286595
5And what you said about about it being a feature of conservatism instead of a flaw is right on the money.
6They’re doing everything they can to make that ideology the basis for everything their party stands for.
And by extension everything America stands for.
As if it always has been.
For some it has. But the more it’s normalized, the less people who’ve been unengaged completely are apt to see it as radicalism.
And more like returning to the fold.
A video blogger I had been following that tracks Tesla news became incensed over Biden giving full backing and credit for progress on EVs to GM and not Tesla. He went full out overboard on a rant (not worth repeating) and started selling “Let’s go Brandon” merchandise.
It is amazing to me how all these guys chanting/wearing/posting “Let’s go Brandon” don’t seem to realize that the statement they are making is about themselves, not Biden.
7This cruelty is NOT a FEATURE of “conservatism.” It is the very ESSENCE of what the Republican party and its supporters believe. There is no policy — only hate.
8Unfortunately, our current South Dakotra Governor is part and parcel of this type of behavior:
https://dakotafreepress.com/2021/10/24/party-of-bullies-noem-sdgop-proudly-vulgar-and-vile/
9I live in the red corner of a very blue state. My town has 4 villages, one populous, largely immigrant and blue, 3 very rural and red. There’s actually a Let’s Go Brandon store (formerly a Trump 2020 store) on the edge of town, and several rural businesses have the signs on their property. I wonder what kind of marketing do they think they’re doing with those. Clearly they’re offending most of the town’s residents. Do they think they’re being clever?
10@ lazrgrl:
I wonder how many of those stores are funded by grassroots groups like ALEC and the Koch brother.
11“Let’s go Brandon” took off like a rocket but “Truck Fump” didn’t get off the ground. I guess libs have more taste than the RWNJs.
12@Ralph Wiggam #12 – IIRC, “Buck Fush” did pretty well. Not as well as “Let’s go Brandon,” but certainly better than “Truck Fump.”
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m tired. I just can’t get up the enthusiasm to fight the war of insulting slogans. I prefer the witty responses I see on Twitter. For example, the responses to Fled Cruz’s #MyBodyMyChoice hashtag in regards to the vaccine… 😉
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