NEW ORLEANS (Audacy) — Dateline: Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, October 2.
NASCAR driver Brandon Brown has just won the checkered flag and is waiting to be interviewed by NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast. A chant erupts from the racing enthusiasts in attendance.
“F--- Joe Biden.”
However, as Stavast goes live for her post-race interview, she mishears the reason for the din and takes the air saying, “You can hear the chants from the crowd. ‘Let’s go, Brandon!’”
As the viewers at home could more clearly make out the gist of the actual chant, the moment quickly became a viral video and then a meme that grew in popularity among conservatives.
Now ‘Let’s go, Brandon’ is the chant du jour at GOP rallies and a popular response from the Republican rank-and-file online, adorning bumper stickers, campaign merchandise, and even a face-mask worn by South Carolina Representative Jeff Duncan.
In fact, the phrase was tweeted almost 1,800 times in one hour Tuesday afternoon, according to Twitter.
So what has caused the phrase’s popularity to grow so exponentially in just a few weeks?
Robin Lakoff, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, told NBC News that those three simple words are “a way of saying this ought to be perfectly all right to say, but 'they' won't let us.
Whoever ‘they’ are.”
Lakoff said, for the right-wing, it works as both a rebuke of a President they didn’t vote for and a rebellion against what they view as cancel culture.
“It’s a sort of group-identification thing,” Lakoff said. “Usually, when people choose a euphemism, it becomes universalized," she said.
"This is kind of 'we conservatives, we who hate Joe Biden, we got this.' And it's a sort of poke of the thumb in the eye of people who don't wear my hat.”
Plus, it’s a more family-friendly way of expressing displeasure than what the alternative would be, says Justin Gross, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts.
“It's a way to say the thing that people want to say and that people will actually say, but we can get grandma and the 11-year-old involved, because they're not saying a naughty word,” Gross told NBC News.
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