At first, the rise of “Dark Brandon,” President Biden’s cooler, laser-eyed internet alter ego, presented us with a number of complicated questions about memes and their origins.
Who gets to decide what a meme means? Can a meme born in darkness — say, for instance, the racist corners of 4chan — ever come to have lighter meanings? Do we have a responsibility to purge our cultural vocabulary of memes with spurious origins, or does that just lead to the elimination of, well, all internet culture?
But the Dark Brandon meme’s popularity among Biden supporters was so swift and decisive that it has effectively become a positive affirmation, not only of Biden himself, but of the internet’s ability to reclaim and salvage what once was lost.
In the year or so since Democrats — including numerous politicians and White House staff members — started using it, the “Brandon” meme, which began as an ironic take on an already-ironic meme from the right, has become a triumphant anthem for the Biden campaign. Most recently, visitors to Biden’s newly unveiled 2024 campaign website discovered the site’s 404 (page not found) landing page serving a “Dark Brandon” Easter egg and pointing people towards a special “Dark” campaign tee emblazoned with the Brandon image.
Not bad work for a meme that originally started out as a right-wing slogan, “Let’s Go Brandon,” that was actually coded to stand in for “Fuck Joe Biden.” Prior attempts to reclaim “Let’s Go Brandon” for the left failed badly — until the “Dark Brandon” variant took off.
Dark Brandon typically appears as a laser-eyed Joe Biden, usually presented via ancient lolcats-style image macro, probably with a reference to defeating malarkey somewhere.
The meme first began to catch on in late summer of 2022, trending on Twitter and drawing mockery from right-wing influencers like Ben Shapiro, while other posters complained that the libs ruined their meme. But the origin and…
Read the full article here
