tinkzorg | In recent days, the phrase ”Let’s go Brandon!” has taken on a life of its own. At one point, four out of ten songs on the Spotify top 10 list were called ”Let’s go Brandon”. People are saying it as a form of greeting, or wearing it on t-shirts. For some, this is just a funny gag. For others, it is a source of significant and growing dread; dread about what is happening politically in the United States, and what the future now looks to have in store for them.
For those of you who don’t know the context: at a recent NASCAR event in New Jersey, the crowd could be heard chanting ”Fuck Joe Biden!” after the race. During an interview with the winner of the race – a man named Brandon Brown – the flustered reporter, hearing the chant, then says on camera that the crowd must be very enthused for Brandon, as they’re all chanting ”Let’s go Brandon!” in his honor. Of course, they crowd is doing no such thing, and she and everyone else knows it. This little episode, on its own, is hardly very remarkable or significant. Others slowly pick up on the story and mock the journalist involved. But at this point, it is merely just another day of ”fake news”, another day of the liberal media being the liberal media.
However, like a dangerous respiratory virus, this little ”Brandon incident” then incubates for a week or two, before blossoming out into something far more serious, into a true social event. People start saying ”Let’s go Brandon!” at random, both as a mockery of the sitting president, but also as a way to mock the now increasingly toothless media apparatus, who fewer and fewer seem to take seriously at all. And this is where things become truly interesting: as at least one pilot then tells his passengers ”Let’s go Brandon!” before takeoff, liberal America starts to actually freak out. At this point, think pieces are produced by NPR and others claiming that there’s a new form of conspiratorial ”code speak” that ”racists” are now using to note their displeasure with the sitting president. Others demand the offending pilot be fired, as it is obvious that he isn’t really saying ”Let’s go Brandon!”, he’s actually saying ”Fuck Joe Biden!”. The irony here should be quite obvious, as liberals are now decrying people for playing along with the very same cover story they invented out of thin air to cover up what is clearly growing dissatisfaction with president Biden.
Some have taken this to be just another funny episode of ”internet humor” leaking into the real world. But this is, to put it frankly, the delusions of an intellectual class who themselves enjoy being ironic on the internet, and who then quite myopically assume that everyone else must think and act the way they do. Middle aged female nurses, as a rule, do not use 4chan, nor are they versed in, or at all interested in, the finer points of ironic ”internet humor”. Political humor, coming from normal, working class people, might superficially resemble that of irony-poisoned college graduates. But in reality, they have very little in common.
Moreover, there’s a very large, very obvious flaw in this explanation of events. Again, the crowds at that NASCAR race weren’t chanting ”Let’s go Brandon!” they were chanting ”Fuck Joe Biden!”, and by all accounts, they certainly weren’t being ironic about that. No coded language was intented, no mental jiu-jitsu performed. Only when the media tried to use its incredibly hollow and thoroughly unimpressive powers of ”mind control” did people start with ironic mockery, and that mockery was aimed both at the president as well as the clear powerlessness of the chattering classes to control the narrative or get people to believe them. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, when airplane passenger hear the phrase ”Let’s go Brandon!” spoken over the intercom, they don’t necessarily hear just a joke, but also a reminder that a political conflict they had tried to suppress is very much still real.
But even with all this said, many a reader will probably want to ask a simple question: why does any of this matter? Though I would argue that the sudden explosion of ”Let’s go Brandon!” in American culture actually means a very great deal, to truly explain why this joke is so funny to some, and so unnerving to others, we have to do so by way of a metaphor. To truly understand why many liberals are so scared of what others consider to still be merely a harmless joke, we have to talk a bit about a concept known as Kantai Kessen, the Japanese naval war doctrine during World War II. Do not worry, the relevance of this concept to today’s America will hopefully become clear as we go along.
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