![]() Mostly it was predictable: It spawned a typical string of back-and-forth attempts to wrest the meme from its original ironic moorings each served only to weaken it. A linguist tried hard to make the meme sound important, like both a victory for the right and a deeper intersection of linguistics and culture than it probably was. Liberals tried to reconfigure it into a sincere “Thank You, Brandon” meme that flopped on arrival. Trumpists used it everywhere, including in Congress, and it was immediately swallowed up in money grabs from conservative merch hawks. Stavast translated the background noise on the spot into “Let’s go, Brandon” - instantly spawning that thing Trump-loving shitposters love most: a code for something they want to say publicly but can’t, disguised as something banal.įrom there, the meme took what are by now pedestrian routes into the mainstream. When cries of “Fuck Joe Biden!” broke out in between races, NBC’s Kelli Stavast was interviewing race winner Brandon Brown after his first career win. The “Let’s Go Brandon” meme originated from a reporter’s mistaken (or possibly strategic) mishearing of a crowd chant at the Talladega racetrack in October 2021. But from there, it’s very, very complicated. “Dark Brandon” combines two subgenres of pro-Trump memes and attempts to subvert them both. It was probably inevitable that internet culture weaponized in his favor would originate from - where else? - the far right. Enter: popular memes that turn him into his own polar opposite, e.g., an aggressive, red-eyed, one-man army/supergenius. Biden has committed to staying out of the limelight and getting work done mostly behind the scenes, allowing for the rejuvenation of his public image. Still, during the Biden administration, the relatively innocuous public image that boosted his relatability with voters seems to have worked in his favor. Like Biden himself, it’s everything Trump and his memes are not. Biden’s longest-running pop culture image, that of an older gent enjoying a vanilla cone, barely offers a counter to the hyper-aggressive “America, fuck yeah!” vibes of the average Trump meme. The folksy, homespun Biden who calls out “malarkey” and claims to have told Vladimir Putin he has no soul isn’t a persona that easily lends itself to a political meme culture that now, more than ever, relies on layers of irony. Not even Saturday Night Live could create a parody of Biden that didn’t sink under the weight of Biden’s own perceived blandness. His detractors, on the other hand, easily beat them to it by depicting him as “ Creepy Uncle Joe.” Although “ Sexy Joe Biden” is a whole thing, it never truly reemerged as a meme in the post-Obama era. If Obama-era Biden resided somewhere between a neighborly Dad and a dril tweet, during his election campaign, Biden’s public persona was so staid and buttoned-up it seemed to do nothing to inspire his supporters to memeify him. The Onion famously popularized a parodied, souped-up version of Biden colloquially known as “Diamond Joe” - an everyman in a ponytail who liked Dude Things like motorcycles, tinkering with his Trans Am, and cooling his heels in Mexico for a while. While serving as vice president during the Obama administration, the internet embraced him as a fun-loving, relatable sidekick. It works whether you read it ironically or not.īy contrast, Joe Biden’s image in internet culture has long been malleable. That’s because so much of their ideology and methodology involves coded language, dog whistles, and a grandiose aesthetic that melds easily with the kind of humor you can never be sure is real. This kind of imagery has always served Trump and his supporters well, across levels of online fluency. ![]() Since the 2015–16 “Deplorables” era of Trump memeing, images produced by his supporters have evoked the former president as a testosterone-fueled Rambo-style warrior, boldly riding tanks or giant bald eagles toward a hyperbolic victory over the libs, flags waving. Joe Biden is a famously innocuous public figure. There’s a lot to unpack in a meme about an old dude with Godzilla eyes, so let’s sally forth. Is there anything we can do about that? Should we even try? The irony that attaches to memes of this nature is often used, especially by the far right, to obscure and distort their underlying point - and can raise confusion about whose aims the memes are ultimately serving. But like so much of the internet these days, the wholesome appeal masks a much more shadowy history. On the surface this may all just look like good, clean superhero fun. #DarkBrandon /uEmBuxGCVR- _ August 8, 2022 The Deep State told Biden he could not withstand The Storm.īiden replied, I am the Storm. ![]()
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