‘Thank You, Brandon’ Is Just Embarrassing
An underrated joy of modern life is that you don’t have to watch live TV to see all of the uncomfortable situations people find themselves in on live TV. I don’t even own a television, nor would I ever watch NBC Sports coverage of a NASCAR race, yet I still got the chance to see the October 2 clip of the reporter Kelli Stavast attempting to interview the race-car driver Brandon Brown after an unexpected victory while the crowd behind them chanted “Fuck Joe Biden.” “And you can hear the chants from the crowd,” Stavast narrated for the camera, before repeating what she seemed to think she was hearing: “Let’s go, Brandon.” As I would say after texting this link to someone in the middle of the workday: “LOL!”
Then it became a hashtag, which you may have heard about. People who don’t like Joe Biden picked up “Let’s go, Brandon” and immediately ran the joke into the ground. People who like Joe Biden started fighting it on social media, as if the phrase were the latest and greatest threat to democracy, and social media were the place where great threats to democracy should be fought. This is political discourse in the Twitter era: A hashtag becomes annoying to a group of people, so they try to repurpose it, or replace it with an artificially juiced hashtag of their own. If you happen to have seen a liberal on your timeline in the past few weeks tweeting #ThankYouBrandon to a president they are purporting to like and support, this is why. But as for all of it together, the bigger question is still unanswered:
