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But thats none of my business memes12/8/2023 ![]() Enter: popular memes that turn him into his own polar opposite, e.g., an aggressive, red-eyed, one-man army/supergenius. Biden has committed to staying out of the limelight and getting work done mostly behind the scenes, allowing for the rejuvenation of his public image. Still, during the Biden administration, the relatively innocuous public image that boosted his relatability with voters seems to have worked in his favor. Like Biden himself, it’s everything Trump and his memes are not. Biden’s longest-running pop culture image, that of an older gent enjoying a vanilla cone, barely offers a counter to the hyper-aggressive “America, fuck yeah!” vibes of, for example, the average Trump meme, or Trump’s own digital trading cards. The folksy, homespun Biden who calls out “malarkey” and claims to have told Vladimir Putin he has no soul isn’t a persona that easily lends itself to a political meme culture that now, more than ever, relies on layers of irony. ![]() Not even Saturday Night Live could create a parody of Biden that didn’t sink under the weight of Biden’s own perceived blandness. His detractors, on the other hand, easily beat them to it by depicting him as “ Creepy Uncle Joe.” Although “ Sexy Joe Biden” is a whole thing, it never truly reemerged as a meme in the post-Obama era. If Obama-era Biden resided somewhere between a neighborly Dad and a dril tweet, during his election campaign, Biden’s public persona was so staid and buttoned-up it seemed to do nothing to inspire his supporters to memeify him. The Onion famously popularized a parodied, souped-up version of Biden colloquially known as “Diamond Joe” - an everyman in a ponytail who liked Dude Things like motorcycles, tinkering with his Trans Am, and cooling his heels in Mexico for a while. While serving as vice president during the Obama administration, the internet embraced him as a fun-loving, relatable sidekick. It works whether you read it ironically or not.īy contrast, Joe Biden’s image in internet culture has long been malleable. That’s because so much of their ideology and methodology involves coded language, dog whistles, and a grandiose aesthetic that melds easily with the kind of humor you can never be sure is real. This kind of imagery has always served far-right agitators well, across levels of online fluency. Since the 2015–16 “Deplorables” era of Trump memeing, images produced by his supporters have evoked the former president as a testosterone-fueled Rambo-style warrior, boldly riding tanks or giant bald eagles toward a hyperbolic victory over the libs, flags waving. Joe Biden is a famously innocuous public figure. There’s a lot to unpack in a meme about an old dude with Godzilla eyes, so let’s sally forth. Is there anything we can do about that? Should we even try? ![]() The irony that attaches to memes of this nature is often used, especially by the far right, to obscure and distort their underlying point - and can raise confusion about whose aims the memes are ultimately serving. But like so much of the internet these days, the wholesome appeal masks a much more shadowy history. On the surface, this may all just look like good, clean superhero fun. #DarkBrandon /uEmBuxGCVR- _ August 8, 2022 ![]() The Deep State told Biden he could not withstand The Storm.īiden replied, I am the Storm. And at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 29, Biden briefly donned sunglasses and referenced the persona, to cheers from the audience. 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. 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. 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?īut 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. 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.
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