In Massachusetts, an enterprising entrepreneur has opened a store called “Let’s Go Brandon.” The North Attleborough store “sells merchandise like hats, shirts, stickers and signs,” as WJAR reports.
The ubiquitous “Let’s Go Brandon” meme was triggered in early October, when an NBC sports reporter interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama after Brown scored his first career NASCAR Xfinity Series win stated in a video that the crowd was chanting “Let’s go, Brandon!” when in reality they were chanting “F*** Joe Biden.”
I’m pretty sure they’re not chanting “Let’s go Brandon” as the NBC reporter is telling us. What do you hear? #fjb pic.twitter.com/Ai6QU9uEZf
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 3, 2021
yeah that’s not what they’re yelling pic.twitter.com/gd5zTu1yAU
— Jessica O’Donnell (@heckyessica) October 3, 2021
NBC Sports wrote in its coverage of Brown’s win:
Brandon Brown earned his first career NASCAR Xfinity Series win when Saturday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway was called for darkness six laps from the scheduled distance.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Brown said on his team’s radio. “Wow! Just wow! Oh my God! This is a dream come true! This is a dream come true!”
Brown’s victory came in his 114th career series start.
Brown told NBCSN, “Oh my God, dad, we did it!! Everything we hoped and dreamed for. Everything I wanted to do is take the trophy home to mom and dad.”
The meme grew even more in subsequent days; in mid-October, asked by an announcer to “help kick this thing off” at the NAPA Super DIRT Week Pro Stock 50 event at Oswego Speedway on Sunday, one young boy, who was asked along with another young boy and young girl, continued after the three intoned “Drivers, start your engines” by asserting, “Let’s Go, Brandon.”
"Drivers, start your engines… LET'S GO BRANDON" pic.twitter.com/y2HUtESThe
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 12, 2021
Roughly a week and a half later, Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that his state would join Missouri to file suit against the Biden administration, telling the cheering crowd that he wanted to say to President Joe Biden, “Let’s go, Brandon! We’ll see you in court.”
Paxton started, “Well, thank you all for coming. As you can see we’re in El Paso, a great city in Texas with the border wall behind us and the attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmidt, he’s a good friend of mine, he’s come down to announce with us — and I’m going to let him say his own words — that we will be filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration as it relates to building this wall.”
“And so, we’re having to spend a lot of money on health care, on law enforcement, on other types of programs for people that coming to our state that we were not anticipating, and obviously we’re not getting help from the federal government and we’re also having to spend a lot of money on border security,” Paxton continued. “You should know the legislature appropriated, I think it was $1.8 billion, much of if for building a wall, and so we’re just here to say that we are very discouraged by the lack of care by the president, the fact that he has done almost everything he can do to make it more difficult for our border towns and for our border states and even for the entire United States as we’ve watched our immigration problem become a massive problem.”
“And I would say it’s the direct results of policies that they knew would do exactly what they’re doing,” he said, winding up. “And so, I just want to finish my comments —and then I’ll let Eric say what he’s going to say — and just say to the President of the United States, ‘Let’s go, Brandon, we’ll see you in court.’”