Biden White House Goes All in on ‘Dark Brandon’ Meme Mocking Pro-Trump ‘Dark MAGA’ Movement

Alex GriffingAug 8th, 2022, 3:00 pm
 

Dark Brandon Meme

In an age of political trolling, the Biden White House is trying to get in on the action and reclaim one of the right’s favorite taunts: “Let’s Go Brandon.”

“Let’s Go Brandon” became code for “Fuck Joe Biden” after a NASCAR race in Alabama on Oct. 2, 2021, in which an NBC reporter mistook the crowd’s cheer of “fuck Joe Biden” as “let’s go Brandon” – referring to the winner of the race that day, Brandon Brown. The rest is history, as they say, as GOP activists and even politicians adopted the phrase in yet another sign of how seriously Americans take their politics.

Now, coming off the heels of multiple legislative victories, the Biden White House is adopting their own meme aimed at “owning” their critics.

“Dark Brandon is crushing it,” wrote Andrew Bates on Saturday night in a tweet. The White House deputy press secretary included an image of Biden with red-laser eyes, fashioned after the so-called “Dark MAGA” movement which uses the same graphic language.

Newsweek’s Giulia Carbonaro took a deep dive into the term “Dark MAGA” back in April, sourcing its origins.

Carbonaro wrote that the term first appeared as a hashtag “on Twitter on January 21, and it had become increasingly popular by March. It can now be found in thousands of memes on Telegram and TikTok as well.”

“More of a meme than a political slogan, Dark MAGA is a post-alt-right aesthetic that promotes an authoritarian version of Trump in dystopian, Terminator-like images,” she explained, adding, “In some, the Trump Tower is painted entirely in black and the former president is seen piercing through the screen with blue laser eyes.”

The new “Dark Brandon” meme is an effort on the left to try and co-opt both “Dark MAGA” and “Let’s Go Brandon.”

Rob Flaherty, Director of Digital Strategy at the White House, got in on the action by posting an image of Biden with laser eyes.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) also posted a “Dark Brandon” meme on Sunday.

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski tracked the rise of the “Dark Brandon” meme and used a tweet from right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro to illustrate its origins:

The “Dark Brandon” meme was started as an ironic joke by Twitter leftists mocking conservatives who share memes of Trump dressed as rambo non-ironically. The second tweet is the basis for the joke.

“That said, the imagery of a dotard who can barely form words from his face-hole actually being a laser-eyed deathlord is pretty hilarious,” tweeted Shapiro.

NBC’s Ben Collins warned journalists back in May of the risks involved in covering the “Dark MAGA” movement without a critical lens.

“Reporters shouldn’t accept the branding on Dark MAGA. There are plenty of words for revanchist politics based on grievance and lies. It’s accelerationist violence, fascism, authoritarianism,” Collins wrote on Twitter. Revanchism is a term in political science derived from the French word for “revenge” and it refers to the recapturing of territory or influence after war or social change.

“Don’t sanitize it with cute Batman movie words—even if they self-identify as bad guys,” he added.

Bates decided to go even further in one of his “Dark Brandon” tweets and fully co-opted the “Dark MAGA” branding with an image of Biden superimposed on a movie poster from The Dark Knight Rises – a Batman film.

Bates’s image includes the text “The Malarky Will End” and the “The Dark Brandon Rises.”

Insider notes that Bates “drew criticism from Republicans for posting an image that — while reminiscent of the movie poster for The Dark Knight Rises — included an image of an eagle that they say is reminiscent of Nazi imagery.”

While far-right figures and conspiracy theorists, like Jack Posobiec, claimed the eagle is associated with the Nazis, the meme’s creator quickly shot down that notion. “The eagle is not, and was never intended to be the reichsadler—it was just intended to be a representation of America’s national bird, the bald eagle, and any reasonable person would interpret it as such,” Tobin Stone, who first posted the meme, told the Daily Dot.

The meme wars between the left and right have taken on new levels of bombast and vitriol in recent months and possibly hit a new low over the weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, which featured a banner that read “We Are All Domestic Terrorists” – an apparent nod to solidarity with the Jan. 6 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol.

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Alex Griffing - Senior Editor

Alex Griffing is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Send tips via email: alexanderg@mediaite.com. Follow him on Twitter: @alexgriffing