"Dark Brandon"

In Which My Point Is Further Proven

This is a brief one. I just got back from a retreat to Big Bear to escape the microwave that the San Fernando Valley has become. I’m hard at work on the next episode of History Impossible; it’s gonna be a big one (what else is new) but I’m already really happy with it so I hope you all will be too. Anyway. Things happened while I was gone. And as always I have thoughts that no one asked for.

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Biden gave a speech on Thursday. I won’t dwell on it. Enough digital ink has been spilled. Yes, the overall context of the picture has been robbed. And yet still it does look, as Dave Portnoy put it, “like the Soviet Union and Hitler had a baby”. You cannot spin away these optics. And I do believe that’s the point; I don’t think the context showing that there was also blue lighting in the background (how cute, it represents America!) was ever meant to remain in place. As many outlets reported earlier this summer, the White House is leaning into the (cringe, like everything else political) “Dark Brandon” meme as a way to “celebrate legislative victories” or something. That’s not what that, and this, is: this is, without any question, a patently obvious attempt to act like Trump. It’s an attempt to lean into the criticism as a way of saying “You don’t like what I’m doing? Fuck you, cry about it some more.” The thing that Democrats don’t understand—and I really think that this is a chronic, systemic aspect to their very being—is that they can’t get away with this the same way Trump did.

Unlike most people, I don’t think Trump changed much. His policies were boilerplate GOP lowering of taxes on the wealthy, flexing overseas, boring old BS. It was done in a bellicose and crude and ultimately diplomatically dangerous way—and again, that’s why people still love him, it doesn’t take a degree in rocket surgery to understand—but in the end, it was his personality people couldn’t stand. His fanboys love to crow about how much they loved his policies and how little they care about the man himself—that pesky “people talk”—but that’s performative autism at best. To pretend the man doesn’t matter is naive at best and dishonest at worst; the man was the president. And more important still, the man is what caused people’s brains to melt in real time for about six years. And most important of all, the man understood that all that mattered to his success was him being the man that he was. It had nothing to do with policy; his followers don’t love him because of policy. They love him for what he—the man—represents: a repudiation of the very kind of person who sits in the Oval Office right now (and the woman who might have sat in that office if not for those meddlesome emails and systemic sexism or whatever). So for that very kind of person to try and flip-and-reverse the Trump formula—i.e., lean into the worst possible assumptions and interpretations of one’s own actions as a badge of pride—is only bound to backfire and backfire immensely. Could be short term, more likely to be long term.

And that was my point all along.

I’m stealing this point from Kmele Foster of Fifth Column fame (seriously go listen to the most recent episode, “Triumph of the Shrill”), but it needs to be said about Uncle Joe’s fearmongering speech that for all the talk of political violence coming from the MAGA crowd—and yeah yeah don’t jump down my throat the risk for that violence is real—there was nary a peep about the political violence that came in the form of the Republican baseball field being shot up. Nary a peep about the abortive assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh earlier this year. Nary a peep about the “fiery but mostly peaceful” summer of 2020. Not in specifics in the same way as he rightly condemned things like Charlottesville and January 6th, at least. Need I go on?

The point is that whatever truth you find in the president’s speech, you don’t look like a serious person if you don’t see this for what it is: dangerous electioneering and exactly what I was talking about in that recent Substack post. And now it’s not just Biden’s crappy talentless mouthpiece talking about “fascists”, it’s the man himself. And it’s only there to make a blue backlash against the supposed red wave coming this year (which it looks like isn’t happening; for chrissakes Sarah Palin—remember that moron and a half?—lost in Alaska, bringing an end to over half a century of Republican domination). In the end, there is nothing sincere about this speech.

This isn’t good, guys. The already-fizzling red wave is evidence enough that most Americans don’t want radicalism from the right. But Biden and his progressive brain trust are trying to sell us on there being MAGA violence just around the corner. And yeah guess what geniuses: you’re creating more incentive for that happen with your hypocritical “semi-fascist” hysteria! His detractors are already doing the thing they hate him for doing by comparing him to Hitler. Don’t you see how this dynamic that I’ve been hammering on about works?

To steal another bit from that episode of the Fifth Column, it’s telling that Biden invokes Charlottesville—a five year old event—to make his point. In the past, as Michael Moynihan points out in the podcast, there weren’t singular events like Charlottesville evidencing the rise of fascist thuggery. There were literally hundreds. There was literal open warfare in the streets for years before Hitler got anywhere close to power; it began as soon as the First World War ended and the Spanish flu was on the wane, as I’ve covered. And hundreds of people died. Not one poor girl murdered by some neo-Nazi loser sperg.

What we’ve seen and what we continue to see is the beginning of political violence with these singular events—including the ones our commander in chief in his infinite wisdom deigned not to mention in his hysterical speech. That speech will only loosen the valve. It’s not closing it, especially when you frame yourself as the only “side” that can. And hey, maybe nothing else will happen. But things like this speech—namely its optics and its attempts to create an IRL version of “Dark Brandon” simply to trigger the opposition (to what end, I will let you all speculate) and to spread fear of conservatives that maybe once wore a dorky red hat into the easily-triggered blue state base—don’t do anything to ease the temperature in the room, to use another strained metaphor. You may see any political gains you make as evidence of this methodology—that of demagoguery, but as a vaunted member of the Establishment, rather than a poser-renegade acting against it—having benefits, but what you—and I’m speaking to the man pushing 80 now who will likely not live or remain mentally cogent enough to see the downstream effects of this—do not understand is that you are doing nothing but intensifying the already-in-motion feedback loop that is consuming our sociopolitical culture.

I know it’s so cringe but all there is left to say regarding this speech and what it represents is this: “let’s go Brandon.”

Now I’m going to go wash out my mouth with soap.