Fury over the Oregon father who concluded his family’s call with President Biden by saying “Let’s go, Brandon” is being mocked online, with critics pointing out there was little outrage when profane insults were aimed at former President Trump.
“OMG a guy was disrespectful to the president of the United States in one of the most euphemistic ways possible after four years of the entire legacy media celebrating crazy lady hats, obscene gestures, and verbal disgusting words directed at the president of the United States, everybody freak out,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said on Twitter Monday.
Shapiro was referring to a viral Christmas Eve moment that saw Jared Schmeck, a 35-year-old father of four from Oregon, conclude his call with Biden by saying “Let’s go, Brandon,” a phrase that has become a stand-in for the more vulgar “F Joe Biden” chants that at one point were spreading across the country.
The moment caused immediate backlash for Schmeck, who said he has received threats since video of his conversation went viral. The incident was also not well-received by much of the media, with NBC News referring to the exchange as a “right-wing slur” while ABC News called it a “vulgar insult.”
The Atlantic senior editor Ron Brownstein took things a step further during a Friday appearance on CNN, saying that the exchange was “about insurrection.”
“Look, it’s ungracious. It’s juvenile. It’s reprehensible by the father, but I don’t think it’s fundamentally about incivility. It’s about insurrection,” Brownstein said. “I don’t know the individual, but the whole Let’s Go Brandon kind of motif is a reflection of the view of two-thirds of the Republican base, driven by Trump’s claims, false claims, and the Big Lie, that Biden is an illegitimate president.”
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But critics such as Shapiro pointed out there was much less outrage in cases where vulgar insults were directed at Trump, including when Virginia woman Juli Briskman was photographed flipping the then-president a middle finger as his motorcade passed her riding a bicycle in 2017.
Briskman was soon fired from her job with a government contractor after the photo went viral, prompting many to come to her defense.
“It should be illegal to fire the cyclist who gave Trump the finger,” declared a headline in the Washington Post shortly after Briskman’s firing.