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.