Wayward visitors to President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign website will encounter a unique “page not found” error if they venture off track.
Instead of a standard “404” message, the page reads “You’re lost, Jack,” along with an image of Biden with laser eyeballs and a link to buy a campaign T-shirt featuring the same illustration, for US$32.
The “deep fried” esthetic of the image, which refers to a meme that has been screenshot and refiltered so many times that the quality of the resolution craters, is intended. Dubbed “Dark Brandon,” the meme is rooted in anti-Biden rhetoric and has ties to shady corners of the internet but has since been reinterpreted and embraced by Biden supporters.
But what does it mean and why is the Biden campaign leaning into it?
Naturally, it all began with a NASCAR race.
In October 2021, NASCAR racer Brandon Brown was interviewed by NBC after winning the NASCAR Xfinity Series at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. In the background, as the crowd chanted “F— Joe Biden,” the reporter, thinking quickly during the live interview, interpreted the chants as “Let’s go Brandon.”
A clip of the moment went viral, and “Let’s go Brandon” became a not-so-secret code for “F— Joe Biden.” The phrase then began popping up everywhere, including Congress chambers and even the World Series.
“Dark Brandon” is an extension of the meme, appropriating the Dark MAGA imagery of an “edgy” and unhinged Donald Trump and other Republicans and applying it to Biden. The trend started in early 2022 and depicts Biden as a powerful and forceful figure, while also utilizing some of his folksy catchphrases, like “Malarkey.”
But the ironic meme was transformed into an unironic appreciation for the President as he picked up a series of legislative victories later in the year. Following the successful drone strike on al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri in August, Biden’s staff began to embrace the meme.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates found himself in hot water after tweeting several “Dark Brandon” memes, including one that featured a laser-eyed Biden along with the caption, “Your malarkey has been going on for long enough, kiddo,” and another that featured Biden wearing an eye-patch with the caption “The Dark Brandon Rises.”
The second tweet also contained eagle imagery that resembled the Nazi Reichsadler, an eagle that formed part of the Nazi Germany coat of arms.
“Personally, I’m not surprised that you’re tweeting out Nazi eagle imagery of your boss who reminisces about his segregationist ‘mentor,'” tweeted Abigail Marone, a spokesperson for Missouri senator Josh Hawley.
The meme’s creator later clarified in an interview with the Washington Post that the image was supposed to represent a bald eagle and not the Reichsadler.
Others noted that “Dark Brandon” memes had been the work of Yang Quan, an artist on the Chinese social app Weibo, and referred to the memes as “Chinese propaganda,” even though they were intended to be anti-Biden.
“‘Dark Brandon’ started as Chinese propaganda and then the White House co-opted it using Nazi Eagle imagery …” tweeted Alec Sears, a member of the Republican National Committee. “They’re not sending their best,” he added.
Those criticisms have done little to slow the Biden campaign, which is embracing the meme as they head into the 2024 election.
Further overlapping the two parties, however, is the fact that both “Dark MAGA” and “Dark Brandon” memes repurpose images of Biden and Trump to depict the two men as strong and competent leaders.
“MAGA supporters used their own over-the-top memes to reframe Trump’s perceived bumbling incompetence as a giant disguise, a foil for the competent strongman that lay beneath. Now Biden supporters are repeating the magic, framing Biden’s perceived bumbling incompetence as a mask for a tough, masculine warrior who gets things done,” explains Vox.
This month, Trump returned to Instagram after a two-year hiatus to sell non-fungible token (NFT) trading cards of himself. The NFTs, which Trump claims sold out within minutes and raised millions of dollars, depict the former president as a superhero in one instance and as an Elvis-like rock star in another.
“People love to collect baseball cards, but why settle for that when you can collect the greatest trading card in history,” Trump said in a video announcing the release of the NFTs.
With the 2024 U.S. election still more than a year and a half away, it seems likely that more memes and NFTs are on the way as both parties clamour to reach young voters and frame their respective candidates as the leader the U.S. needs.
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