The media is insufferable

There was an article today — yes, another one — about what the media likes to call the ‘Dark Brandon effect’, which is essentially the media’s attempt to co-opt the name Brandon. Every once in awhile, they try this tactic, similar to how Trump loves to throw out pet names during debates. Fortunately, the media is absolutely putrid when it comes to the meme wars and they usually give up quickly.

The problem is there is nothing organic about their memes. No one would have cared about ‘Dark Brandon’ if dozens of stories were not run over the course of a few days last month, and when they stop running stories, the memes stop circulating.

Exhibit A: Even sustained media attention is a blip compared to internet trolls

They regularly fail to capitalize when someone on the “right” says something ridiculous because they are generally too full of fire and brimstone to find humor in anything. Instead, they take anything that’s meme-worthy, blow it out of proportion, before lying about the actual details for weeks on end, then lying about their lies for weeks after that. Ergo, they are unable to make anything clever go viral despite billions of dollars behind them.

I suppose with Dark Brandon, in a sense, it could be an attempt to do damage control by making the “Let’s go Brandon” meme so uncool that no one wants to use it, kind of like your parents signing up for Facebook. Except it’s months too late and most people rarely even reference that meme anymore.

Then there’s also the fact that the best part of that meme was not that it was a substitute for FJB. It was funny because the media is so completely out of touch that when they hear Fuck Joe Biden, their brain translates the sounds into Let’s Go Brandon. The media was the butt of the joke more than Joe Biden. And they still don’t understand that almost a year later.

One is also left wondering whether Biden’s handlers actually bought into the media’s attempt to make a meme. Did they think it was going viral? Is that why they had him make a ‘Dark Brandon’ speech that, instead, made him look like Hitler with late-stage dementia? It’s not only possible, it’s likely.

These people are that out of touch.

To make matters worse, the “original” Dark Brandon images were Chinese propaganda. Contrary to flipping the script on the MAGA folks, the media literally just recirculated bad propaganda and tried to make it their own, which is about as clever as the Chinese version of Top Gun (don’t watch it, not worth it).

Seriously, these people are that out of touch.

But all of that is moot compared to the fact that a White House staffer decided that the inorganic, media sponsored meme — that was not even funny or clever to begin with — was worth sharing on Twitter. That would have been a failure in and of itself, but the image he happened to share had the Reichsadler in the background, which was the coat of arms used by Nazi Germany.

They are that out of touch!

Yet the puff pieces continue, and the media pretends to act like Biden is doing well.

The narrative makes no sense, though. He’s as incoherent as ever and his party increasingly sounds like they’re getting their talking points from an insane asylum. His so-called wins like the “Inflation Reduction Act” consists of bad ideas. Not to mention that it uses the old American-political trope of being named for the exact opposite effect it will have. Despite trying to frame himself as a war time president by continually saying America is in a (undeclared) war against Russia, he is recklessly emptying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the hopes that it will lower inflation before the mid-terms, rather than keeping a stockpile before — you know — winter when it might actually be needed.

The failures of this administration are transparent, and even with a sympathetic media, his polling numbers are terrible. That might not matter for a mid-term election, but he seems to be dragging down everyone around him. Despite that, the Republican party is doing its best to throw the election in typical fashion. Still, polling makes it look like they will have solid victories in both the Senate and the House. That’s without even controlling for the fact that most (non-internal) polling is meant to change public opinion, rather than convey public opinion. And we all know which party these polls are trying to change public opinion in favor of.

Part of the problem for the media is that they seem to be using this Dark Brandon failure in the same way that White House staffer did. It looks like they are baiting themselves into thinking that, somehow, there has been a turning point in Biden’s presidency. The only remaining question is: are they lying to protect their preferred candidate or could they possibly be that out of touch?