RIP Dark Brandon, 2022-2022

The White House puts the final nail in the coffin of another left joke.

There’s a predictable lifecycle for a certain kind of joke on the left:

1. It begins in extreme obscurity, coming from some weirdo who you’ll never even know exists unless you spend 25 hours a day for months on end chatting with vaguely left-oriented Twitter weirdos with 100 followers. These guys are almost always the unsung heroes and victims of the story.

2. The joke catches on and everyone starts doing it, half the time because it was popularized by Chapo Trap House. The only variation on this pattern so far is that sometimes it was actually the Chapo guys who came up with it in the first place.

3. Liberal Twitter accounts see what’s going on and decide that they want in on it too. But crucially, since they’re often the punchline of the joke, liberals spare themselves from ridicule by removing precisely the thing that made it funny.

4. Finally, some major political or media figure does the joke because a soulless marketing or PR guy who gets paid $300k a year to monitor internet trends tells him to. And this becomes proof that the thing everyone was saying because it was funny is now “funny” because everyone’s saying it…