The Entirely Needless Meltdown over ‘Let’s Go Brandon’

F earless and vital as ever, our steadfast friends over in the mainstream press corps are working themselves into a veritable lather over the nonchalant, tongue-in-cheek “Let’s Go Brandon” meme that has been deployed of late against the president. “No one is really cheering on a guy named Brandon,” NPR helpfully informed its readers yesterday. “Instead, the phrase is being used in conservative circles in place of a more vulgar message directed at President Biden.”

Heaven forfend!

Now, as ever, there is nothing in the world I care less about than people being rude to the president. The lines I worry about are physical, not rhetorical. There is no room in American politics for violence, stalking, or harassment. But profanity? Hyperbole? Reproval? Hanging in effigy? Fill your boots. An American called George W. Bush a monkey? Don’t care. An American portrayed Barack Obama as a zombie in an outhouse? Don’t care. An American pretended to cut off Donald Trump’s head, before holding it up to the camera with pride? Don’t care. This is a big, free, rambunctious country, and our president is a public employee, not a king. At present, millions of Americans are repeating the in-joke “Brandon” chant, which serves as a euphemism for something more profane: “F*** Joe Biden.” And, surprise! I don’t care about that, either.

Until quite recently, the press seemed to agree with me, which is why stories noting that Robert DeNiro had shouted “F*** Trump!” at the Tony awards carried an invariably matter-of-fact tone; why the New York Times felt comfortable publishing a fantasy about Trump being executed by the Secret Service; why Vox and others defended Shakespeare in the Park when it ran a production of Julius Caesar in which Trump was stabbed to death; and why the woman who flipped off the presidential motorcade in Virginia was able to run for office as a Democrat, and win, without being hounded by journalists at every step.

Now? Well, now any criticism that wouldn’t be appropriate to air at a Mormon book club is deemed both unacceptable and indicative of the entire conservative platform. In the Washington Post on Saturday, Dana Milbank explained that “‘Let’s go Brandon’ is Republicans’ vulgar governing agenda.” Unlike the genteel Democrats, who are simply “trying to govern,” Milbank proposed, the GOP and their voters are “hurling vulgarities” in the hope that, by doing so, they will create an “unstable America of ill-mannered insults.” I would respectfully propose that Milbank lighten up — not only because he will enjoy life more if he does, but because, by reaching for the smelling salts, he is indulging and prolonging the joke.

Besides, he doesn’t want to end up like Colleen Long, an AP reporter who, having (allegedly) heard the pilot on her flight say the words “Let’s Go Brandon” at the end of one of his announcements, tried to storm the cockpit. Long, who, amazingly enough, happened to be working on a piece about the “Let’s Go Brandon” chant when she heard it over the PA system, tweeted out later “in defense of” Southwest Airlines that she may have been looked at askew by staff because, “I was asking them to open [the] locked cock pit [sic] and probably sounded insane!”

“Probably”?

As it happens, I would rather that our airlines did not become politicized in this manner, but suffice it to say that if your first reaction upon hearing an airline pilot repeat a partisan meme is to rush up to the front of the plane and break down the door, then you’re the one escalating our national divide. Reflecting on the incident later, Long made it sound as if anyone would have done what she did: “You’re trying to go on vacation,” she wrote, “and then the pilot says the very thing you’re working on over the loud speaker and you have to try to get him [to] comment but then almost get removed from [the] plane.” But of course, nobody has to do anything of the sort. To most people, indeed, the idea would never have occurred.

Oddly enough, it has been the pilot, rather than Long, who has been accused of being drunk, high, or terminally politicized, and likened to someone waging Islamic jihad. Over the weekend, CNN’s Asha Rangappa wondered why the pilot hadn’t been treated in the same manner as he would have been had he said, “Long live ISIS,” while her colleague at the network, Harvard’s Juliette Kayyem, diagnosed him as either “drunk” or as having “anger management problems.” What a long way we have come from dissent being patriotic.