I do, too.
By the fall of 2021, Joe Biden's regency had already failed catastrophically in its withdrawal from Afghanistan, killing 13 Americans and countless Afghans in the process. Inflation had already begun to take off, and COVID restrictions kept getting extended to such a degree that even college-aged Americans, typically a Democratic demographic stronghold, had seen enough. At college football venues all over the country, "F...Joe Biden" chants became a viral thing very quickly.
The profane chant did not stay contained to football. It crossed over into other sports and even at rock concerts. You heard it at the Ryder Cup in golf. And then on October 2nd, 2021, thanks to NBC's NASCAR field reporter Kelli Stavast, the chant mutated spectacularly into "Let's Go Brandon" for the rest of Biden's term in office.
Brandon Brown had just won the Sparks 300 race at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, and after racing three-plus hours at almost 200 mph with no windows amidst a very loud field of 42 other cars not exactly muffled to be considered street legal, he couldn't hear what the crowd was chanting behind him in the post-race interview. Stavast, knowing full well what profanity was being repeated, tried to cover it up by saying, "They're saying 'Let's go, Brandon.'" And thus, a meme was born.
It was crude, it was vulgar, it was juvenile, but it was a way of blowing off steam at an administration that was already widely-regarded as a disaster, and it wasn't even a year old, yet. There remained plenty of people who fiercely opposed everything Joe Biden's team said and did in office, but still wished the national rhetoric didn't continue to coarsen the way it was heading. And then, there were the opportunists in leftist media who tried to see the darker, hidden meaning behind the LGB meme.
Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC (now M-SNOW), was the chief offender at reading way too much into the expressive chant, calling it a slow-motion insurrection. Here's our good friend, Ben Domenech, filling in for Sean Hannity on Fox back in the day, framing the issue.
While Wallace may have overreacted the most, she certainly was not alone. Former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart, then a contributor for CNN, offered up a column and series of tweets back in November, 2021.
Liberal CNN political analyst Joe Lockhart managed to compare the anti-Biden rallying cry "Let’s Go Brandon" to coded rhetoric from Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and ISIS in one tweet as corporate media continued its meltdown over the chant.
Lockhart, a former Clinton press secretary, tweeted Monday, "You know who also had coded statements like Brandon? ISIS, the Klan, Nazi's...beginning to get the point?"
The Washington Post did a piece on the 'veiled insult', and how LGB represented so much more, featuring an assistant professor of rhetorical communication at State University of New York, Geneseo, Lee Pierce.
On the right, the meme became a cottage industry - shirts, bumper stickers, anything you could imagine. If you knew, you knew. In Andover, Kansas, where my father retired, I visited him the first week of July in 2024. It was the first time I had been in a state other than California for Independence Day, and I was shocked and awed by the variety and explosive arsenal of fireworks that were apparently legal in the Sunflower State. What did I settle on? This little beauty.
Just toured a warehouse of fireworks in Andover, KS. Asked an employee if they had the ‘Let’s go Brandon’ special.
— Duane Patterson (@Radioblogger) July 4, 2024
“Right this way,” he said with a grin on his face. God bless America.
In the way to the checkout line, Pops says, “We should get two, just because.”
In line,… pic.twitter.com/76VLHQ6REX
I must admit, Let's Go Brandon, the firework, packed a lot more punch than anyone in the administration it mocked in glorious pyrotechnic splendor, Biden included.
But as to the LGB chant itself, was it coarse? Yes. We all know for what it stood. Vulgar? Sure. Comical? Absolutely.
Yesterday, the first campaign ad for Juliana Stratton dropped. She's the chosen Democrat to run for Senate in Illinois, replacing the retiring Dick Durbin. I say chosen, because appearing in her introductory ad are Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth.
They said it. We’re all thinking it. pic.twitter.com/AOARPLHGCB
— Juliana Stratton (@JulianaStratton) February 19, 2026
Again, this is her first ad paid for by her campaign. What do we get? Not an ad about who she is, who her family is, what motivates her political activism, or what she plans to do FOR the people of Illinois. Her opening campaign message? F...Trump.
Gavin Newsom in California has used the same vulgarity in interviews and video clips, flirting right up alongside but not using it directly at the President. Instead, he's indicated a preference to have coital relations with Trump's policies or agenda items. In other cases, the expletive has been a bit of a slip of the tongue, like when then-freshman Congresswoman Maxine Dexter of Oregon, at a rally.
"We have to f*ck Trump" - Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-OR)pic.twitter.com/YDSEUrnJ00
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 11, 2025
She almost blushed at the thought when she said it, but said it anyway and giggled.
Would I personally like a return to civility in our national public political discourse? Of course. Am I naive enough to believe it's going to happen in my lifetime? No. We have crossed the potty mouth Rubicon, and the descent in our rhetoric goes back quite a bit, actually. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney was colorful in describing a New York Times reporter over an open microphone. Joe Biden, when he was Barack Obama's veep, commented on the passage of Obamacare as a 'big f'ing deal.' And don't get me started on Kamala Harris. She's used the F word publicly more times than she's used a straw in a box of Sauv Blanc.
And yes, President Donald J. Trump has been known to be a little salty with his language, both in rallies and in speaking engagements as president. Just last month, at a speech in Michigan at a Ford F-150 truck plant, a heckler hassled Trump on his way out and in return got a more provocative finger from the President than the Canadian curling stone got last week by Marc Kennedy, the double-touching cheater to our north. I fully recognize that this expletive genie is not going back in the bottle.
But where is the same outrage in Resistance Media that they showed regarding the LGB euphemism? How come this isn't a slow-motion insurrection? Why isn't anyone on the left comparing this rhetoric to the Brown Shirts in Berlin in the 30's?
Stratton is attempting to be cute by being the only one in the spot not to use the profane phrase, but setting up her entire campaign as a promise to do just that. And remember that Duckworth, a sitting United States Senator, willingly chimes in with the epithet.
When the FJB/LGB meme was born, it arrived during a time when virtually everyone in the country understood that Biden-Harris et al. were disasters leading the country. Life was getting harder, times were getting tougher, and the country felt like it was going in the wrong direction.
Today, it's only the fever swamp on the left that is locked into the 'Trump is a failure' meme a year in. To the rest of the country, the jury is still out. Energy prices have come down. Wages are outpacing inflation again. ICE arrests got ugly for a while in Minnesota, but for the most part, have plateaued, and the administration is once again deporting violent criminals here illegally. Crime is down, and outside of blue state enclaves, people are better off than they were a year ago, almost without exception. Moderates may not like how Trump comports himself, but a lot of them like what they're seeing thus far in results.
FJB/LGB worked because Biden wasn't working. F-Trump won't make it as a meme long-term, because the country is healing. Manufacturing is coming back. Housing/rental prices are coming down. Babies born during this administration are getting a savings account headstart for the first time in this country's history. The meme Stratton is deploying won't work nationally for Democrats because hating Trump is not enough if things are steadily improving.
Stratton is a lock in Illinois because she's a Democrat. She will win in spite of the ad, not because of it. But the virtue signaling strategy of hating Trump above all else in the most coarse way possible is just not a winning message for the midterms nationally.
Faced with a historical precedent of electoral advantage going into a midterm as the party out of power, Democrats are doing everything they can to give the country a reason not to continue that historical trend. But they're so blinded by hatred of Donald Trump that they may not realize they're fumbling away a chance to be competitive. A very dear friend of mine reminds me often that in politics, you can't beat something with nothing. And if that something is getting better by the day and you still have nothing to run against it, you're in real trouble the next time you face the voters.
Let's hope the blinders stay on.
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