The GOP adopts a new slogan
Last month, Brandon Brown, a 28-year-old NASCAR driver, won his first Xfinity series. A sportscaster was interviewing him afterward, when the crowd began chanting obscenities against our current president. The sportscaster misheard the chant as “Let’s go, Brandon.” Since then, the phrase has grown to become one of the most popular right-wing insults to the democratic president. The G-rated version of the original spew is “acceptable” enough that it has become part of the dominant language.
A song featuring the phrase went viral on TikTok, which is not at all surprising. I was curious about the song, so I went searching for it. To avoid getting political videos on my feed, I created a new account and searched for the phrase. I found the video easily enough, among hundreds of other videos projecting hate onto the president. Most of these videos had gone viral with thousands of views, which means that there are people right now whose feeds are full of this song. This trend has reached more audiences than our past president’s tweets.
We are seeing this phrase now in places where any polarized political statement would have been considered extremely inappropriate. A Republican congressman used it as the finale to his floor speech. “[The people], you know what they want? They want you to help put America back where you found it and leave it the h*** alone,” said Bill Posey, one of Florida’s representatives. “Let’s go, Brandon.”
Even more shockingly, a Southwest Airlines pilot used the phrase when greeting a flight full of passengers. The anonymous pilot was unlucky enough to have an Associated Press reporter onboard that flight. She was nearly removed from the flight after attempting to get a comment from the pilot. The AP reported that there were audible gasps from the passengers on that flight from Houston, Texas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Only after the AP report was published did Southwest give a statement promising to address the situation: “Southwest does not condone employees sharing their personal political opinions while on the job serving our customers, and one employee’s individual perspective should not be interpreted as the viewpoint of Southwest and its collective 54,000 Employees."
Southwest recently had to cancel thousands of flights due to pilots refusing to comply with the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. While the airline used the excuse of bad weather, the airline’s CEO Gary Kelly respectfully puts the blame on President Joe Biden for mandating vaccines for federal employees and federal contractors, which includes Southwest among other large airlines. General reasoning makes me think that this pilot may be one of the group that caused Southwest’s cancellation crisis.
Stay safe and stay informed.
By Annelise Jacobs