I know how I am supposed to feel about “Let’s go, Brandon”: Mocking the president this way is uncivil, a sign of the collapse of once-routine public courtesy, etc., etc. How I really feel about it, though, is that it’s fascinatingly serendipitous, seriously funny, and intriguingly fecund. From that one meme, others are being born.
Last month, an NBC reporter interviewing the victorious NASCAR driver Brandon Brown heard fans in the stands chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” in lustily contemptuous unison. The reporter insisted to viewers that the fans were in fact chanting “Let’s go, Brandon.” This improvisation made no sense. Brown had won, so why would anyone cheer him on by saying “Let’s go!” after he’d just accomplished quite a bit of going? Since then, Biden’s detractors have adopted “Let’s go, Brandon” as a kind of in-group salute—a coded way of saying, well, the other thing. The meme has found its way onto T-shirts, masks, signs at other sporting events, the House floor, and (reportedly) airplane intercoms, and was parodied this weekend in an online video from Saturday Night Live.
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