Following the Superbowl LVIII, US President Joe Biden posted a menacing portrait of himself with red eyes and an ominous caption “just like we drew it up.”
This post, likely from an intern with the Biden Administration, was at first believed by many to be a parody account, but upon closer inspection, people realized it came from the official POTUS account, embracing the #DarkBrandon meme.
The #DarkBrandon meme is an amalgamation of a couple of different memes coming from the Trump support base around hyper-politics in the United States.
The first meme is “Let’s Go Brandon” — from an instance at a Nascar race where Trump supporters were chanting “F**k Joe Biden!” and the reporter mistook the chants as “Let’s Go Brandon!” believing the crowd to be cheering on one of the car drivers. The phrases have sinceBiden’s been used interchangeably on MAGA signage and merchandise.
The second meme is #DarkMAGA — indicating that this time around they won’t play nice, operating under the belief the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by Biden and the Liberal Establishment. Dark red imagery is used in the memes compared to the original bright red of MAGA to indicate a vibe shift in intensity.
#DarkBrandon is the response to #DarkMAGA, however unlike the Alt-Right and MAGA memes that propelled Trump in 2016, this push comes top-down from the Liberal Establishment, as opposed to organically from the Trump support base. The Post-Superbowl tweet is the second instance of Biden embracing the meme, with the first being after the 2022 midterms where he gave a speech that condemned the MAGA voter base threatening US Democracy, all while looking like a Fascist villain from a Hollywood movie.
The above meme used the #DarkBrandon imagery, alluding to a theory posited on the Right that Football Player Travis Kelce and Pop Star Taylor Swift are an astroturfed couple put together by the Liberal Establishment and the US Intelligence Deep State. The Kansas City Chiefs team Captain is sponsored by the Big Pharma company Pfizer. Taylor Swift has publicly endorsed the LGBTQ+ amongst other causes important to the Democrat Party. The believed goal of this potential pairing is to use their compounded clout as a Liberal power couple influencing their fanbases to vote for the Democrat Party.
The latter part of this theory is actually pretty standard for US Politics. Celebrities and celebrity couples pairing up with politicians, such as Jay-Z and Beyonce endorsing Barrack Obama in the previous Democrat Administration, As well, Trump has a number of celebrities who also endorse him. Ye (formerly Kanye West) who himself has publicly endorsed Trump, spoke about this phenomenon in his 2016 song “Famous” from the Life of Pablo which depicted the visually uncomfortable imagery of an actual reality of various celebrities and politicians all being in bed together.
What is more disturbing about the Biden meme alluding to events being planned ahead of time was what was happening simultaneously on the world stage. While the viewership of US Citizens was drawn to this corporate event by the presence of two major icons of US consumer culture from the NFL and Pop music, the Zionist forces used this opportunity to commit another massacre in Palestine. The day after the Superbowl in Anti-Imperialist and Pro-Palestine spaces horrific imagery was in circulation of a young girl who was brutally lynched in Rafah, personifying the horror of what is happening to the innocent people in Palestine. These images were shared with hashtag #SuperbowlMassacre, indicating how these kinds of bread and circuses events are used, much like the Colosseum in Ancient Rome, to distract people in the Imperial Core from witnessing what the Empire is doing abroad to people in the Global South.
On the domestic front, following Superbowl LVIII there was a mass shooting at the Kansas City celebration parade for their returning football team. For years in “conspiracy theory” circles there has been speculation that many mass shootings that occur in the US may be orchestrated by the Deep State or at least with the shooters influenced by MK-Ultra-style manipulation from Federal Agents. The fact a mass shooting happened in Kansas City right after this post “just like we drew it up” alluding to the potential Deep State role in facilitating the outcome of the Superbowl around a celebrity power couple working for the Democrats is very unsettling indeed.
Is everything speculated “conspiracy theory” circles true? There is much put out there to confuse us, get us to buy into a grift, or just for people having fun on the internet, but many things are planned. We should always remain vigilant, especially when we see the Liberal Establishment is pretty much mocking us, insinuating that any of our speculation on the correlation between US entertainment and US imperialism is just a “conspiracy theory.”