Update and correction: "Let's go, Brandon."
"Let's go, Brandon" isn't a pleasantry.
The Oregon guy who said it to Joe and Jill Biden didn't blurt it accidentally.
Now Jared Schmeck is a celebrity hero.
My error was to think "Let's go, Brandon" was so normalized within some circles that it had become a familiar and positive affirmation, said in parting. I thought it was perhaps equivalent to "Have a nice day."
My point in yesterday's blog post was that Trump-oriented people on the political and religious right, people who publicly assert their Christianity, have conflated Trump with Christ. They have replaced Christian virtues with the Trump's warrior temperament and virtues. The replacement is necessary because this is wartime. I had thought that politics has so thoroughly infused Christian nationalism that coded "Fuck Joe Biden" had lost its meaning as crude insult. Therefore, Schmeck saying "Merry Christmas and Let's go Brandon" was borne of habit, not intention.
I was wrong. Jared Schmeck meant it as an insult. He took two days to get his political feet under him and get his story buttoned down, but he has done so. He is a celebrity guest in right wing media. I was fooled by the situation and his demeanor--until the last half second, which ended abruptly with a video edit. That made me question my conclusion. Here, again from yesterday, is the three-minute video:
I had understood this call to be primarily an interaction between parents of young children and the Bidens, acting as trackers of Santa. Parents of young children are familiar with this kind of intergenerational attention from older adults. The adults understand it to be part of the social education of children. The adults ask questions about toys and Santa, and the children's responses are greeted with apparent seriousness and enthusiasm. Kids are being taught that adults other than their parents are interested in them, and kids get practice interacting politely with adults. I saw it as socialization.
Surely, I thought, a parent wouldn't screw up a future keepsake for the children with a code shift from smiley Santa talk to crude political trolling. I was wrong. Schmeck's "Let's Go, Brandon" sprung the trap. Got'cha. It was equivalent to Jill Biden responding to young Piper's desire for a Barbie doll by saying, "She's a vapid slut. What's wrong with you?"
Jared Schmeck became a folk hero within right-wing media. He was criticized. That made him a victim. The liberals are howling because I exercised my free speech, he said.
He was invited to be on Steve Bannon's show, where he wore a MAGA hat and said he was a "Christian man." Click the tweet:
Schmeck is having his moment. He feeds the appetite of a very profitable audience segment. The segment represents much of the new GOP remade by Trump. This audience feels itself under siege. The dominant culture outvotes them and its values shape the primary organs of culture: News media, Hollywood, universities--but not Evangelical churches. The segment believes that Schmeck and people like him are victims, but Schmeck is fighting back. The culture is teaching their children things they don't want them taught. The culture calls them racist, both personally and in the institutions they created. It wants to tax them to give the money to people who don't deserve it.
Abortion is the primary wedge and it gives a bright line justification for feeling their cause is just. Beyond abortion, Schmeck is part of the opposition to the general cultural movement toward acceptance of diversity. White Christians are pushed from the default center of cultural and political power. They know it and don't like it. They want to fight a guerrilla war against it. In a guerrilla war, the normal rules of religion, democracy, politics and even courtesy don't count. You do what you can.
Schmeck is a hero today. He poked the bear.