Tobin Stone didn’t come up with “Dark Brandon,” the popular meme depicting Joe Biden as an aggressive, no-nonsense president, often with laser beams shooting from his eyes, but the 22-year-old Democrat who grew up in Eagle County played a key role in popularizing the image.

Last summer, Stone turned his proclivity for creating online graphics – his first foray drew criticism from then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy – to a satirical take on the iconic “The Dark Knight Rises” movie poster, only instead of featuring Batman in front of an edgy Bat-Signal, the image featured a stern, eyepatch-wearing Biden in front of a fiery eagle and the headline “The Dark Brandon Rises.” The poster read “The Malarky Will End,” referencing a trademark Biden phrase for nonsense, with the date of last year’s midterm election, Nov. 8, displayed below.

The concept is a play on “Let’s Go, Brandon,” a stand-in for a vulgar phrase Biden’s Republican opponents tried to use to their advantage last year, crossed with “Dark MAGA” imagery, which depicts former President Donald Trump and his followers as hard-edged avengers, usually with scary, glowing eyes.

For Stone, who had just graduated from Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, it was just one of a steady stream of graphics he’d been producing and posting online for a couple of years, typically advocating for denser housing construction and land-use policies.

That was, until Andrew Bates, a deputy White House press secretary, tweeted the image and drew a ferocious backlash from Republicans – and propelled Dark Brandon into the mainstream.

“I managed to make a meme that caught the attention of a bunch of Republicans and pissed them off,” Tobin told Colorado Politics with a chuckle.

He added that he initially realized he could “do cool things” with graphic design a year earlier in 2021, when a poster he’d posted online to promote the expanded Child Tax Credit drew attention from McCarthy, who complained – falsely – that the federal government was “literally spending taxpayer money to advertise a government handout.”

McCarthy’s misguided harangue landed Stone and his poster a handful of mentions in national news outlets, giving him a taste of the deluge of coverage he would receive after his “Dark Brandon” poster took off.

“Nobody realizes it but @tobinjstone is the most important political figure of our time,” author and Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias tweeted last month, linking to another tweet that reported someone in the Biden administration had said, “We all love Dark Brandon.”

After graduating in 2022 from Albright with degrees in political science and public policy and administration, Stone interned with the St. Vrain Valley School District, compiling research to support legislation to improve the state’s Safe2Tell program. He also interned as a researcher with Mathematica. Last fall, Stone worked as a press assistant on U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s successful reelection campaign.

Stone moved to Washington, D.C., this year to work as a community and communications manager at the Center for New Liberalism, a self-described “pragmatically liberal” organization with 55 chapters around the country – including a couple in Colorado – that aims to bring the same kind of energy to the center-left as more progressive Democrats enjoy.

Colorado Politics caught up recently with Stone to ask about turning political concepts into posters and working to make moderate policies exciting. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Colorado Politics: You didn’t invent Dark Brandon, but you helped make the concept part of the national conversation. How did that come about?

Tobin Stone: A year ago toward the end of July, the Biden administration had a ton of huge wins for his legislative agenda, which ultimately culminated with the Inflation Reduction Act. The idea of Dark Brandon as a concept had started to take off on small parts of Twitter. In a Twitter group chat with some Colorado politicos and another group chat with some friends from across the country, I began to discuss the idea of what kind of meme I could make for the Dark Brandon phenomenon, and after much discussion, I started working on a recreation of the “Dark Knight Rises” movie poster, with an eagle instead of a bat in the background, and “Dark Brandon” front and center.

When I eventually posted the meme on Twitter, it took off, and it went well beyond the usual orbit my memes would reach. Somehow, Andrew Bates, the White House deputy press secretary, found the Dark Brandon meme, and he ended up tweeting it out himself, which of course, Republicans immediately noticed. Conservative commentators, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jack Posobiec, took notice and started claiming that the Eagle in the background was Nazi imagery, rather than the iconic American symbol that normal people think of when they see an eagle. Journalists started taking notice, and after a very hectic 48 hours for me, stories about Dark Brandon and my meme were in the Washington Post, Vox, Rolling Stone and more.

Since then, I’ve made more Dark Brandon memes, some “Dark Colorado Democrats” memes, and more.

CP: When your Dark Brandon post took off, that wasn’t the first time something you’d created made national news. Didn’t Kevin McCarthy draw attention a couple years ago to a graphic you posted online?

Stone: In 2021, I was reading “Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means,” by Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan, and came across an old poster promoting the Social Security Administration that they included in their book. Sen. (Michael) Bennet’s expanded Child Tax Credit was about to go into effect, so despite never having really done graphic design before, I was inspired to try to recreate the Social Security poster as a poster promoting the expanded Child Tax Credit.

My first foray into graphic design was successful, and I ended up posting it on Twitter in April of 2021. It got about a hundred likes, and I didn’t think much else of it. Fast forward to June 2021, when the Biden administration was promoting their Child Tax Credit Awareness Day, I shared the poster again on Twitter. A few days later, I got a big surprise when a Twitter mutual (who is now my boss, funnily enough) sent me a message letting me know that then-Minority Leader McCarthy had shared my poster on Facebook, with the caption, “Infuriating. The IRS is literally spending taxpayer money to advertise a government handout. This is welfare without work requirements.” Hilarity ensued, and Forbes and Business Insider ended up reporting on the incident, and I got to say that my graphic design skills were so good that they fooled Kevin McCarthy.

CP: After that, you became known for a series of posters you released – many of them involving the YIMBY – “Yes In My Backyard” – approach to housing and development. What inspired you to make those?

Stone: I grew up in Eagle County as the son of a teacher, and needless to say, it was incredibly difficult for my family to afford to live there. We moved around from place to place my entire life, living in whatever we could afford to live in. I got really interested in housing policy as a result, and I came to realize just how much the “Not In My Backyard” mentality was hurting communities like the one I grew up in.

As I researched the other issues I cared a lot about while in college, including education policy and workforce development, I started to realize just how much our housing market – which has been broken by decades of bad policy – was impacting our ability to make meaningful change on those issues. I ended up getting involved in the YIMBY movement as a result, and that started with me using my newfound passion for graphic design to make a variety of posters promoting YIMBYism. Eventually, I started doing more for the YIMBY movement by writing op-eds about the housing crisis in Colorado’s ski towns and becoming an organizing lead for YIMBY Denver, where I helped support their efforts in the recent Denver municipal elections, and to support Gov. Jared Polis’ land use bill.

CP: In the last couple years, you’ve broadened your focus from policy to politics, including working last year on Sen. Michael Bennet’s reelection campaign?

Stone: While I was in college, I was really focused on education policy issues, and workforce issues to a lesser extent. I did an internship with Brandon Shaffer, where I got to help him with some really cool legislation that Saint Vrain Valley School District was supporting. After that, I interned with Mathematica, where I worked on a number of projects looking at education issues, and one really cool project that explored employment support programs and services for young adults with autism.

After college, I had initially been looking for a job in policy where I could continue some of the education and workforce policy work that I had been doing, but after a few months of searching with no luck, someone from Sen. Bennet’s campaign reached out to me about an opportunity to be a press assistant on his campaign. I had already been introduced to the world of politics through my shenanigans on Twitter, but getting to work on the senator’s campaign gave me a lot more experience, and I realized that I was really good at political communications, and I had a lot of fun doing it too.

CP: This year, you’ve been working at the Center for New Liberalism, an organization that’s trying to bring the same kind of energy to more center-left and moderate Democrats as there is further left on the political spectrum. What does that entail?

Stone: It’s true that there seems to be more energy on the far left than there is left of center. But we believe that’s not because center-left folks enthusiastic about pragmatic, liberal policy aren’t out there – there just hasn’t been a real grassroots community for these young activists to call home.

The Center for New Liberalism is an organization that was founded in 2017 in response to the rise of populist politics within the Democratic Party. It started out as a group of people online who believed in basic liberal principles but also were huge nerds about specific policy issues like housing, free trade, energy policy and more. I first got involved with them in late 2019 because of my interest in the Child Tax Credit, which CNL and its members support. After starting a chapter at my college and doing a lot of work to help grow CNL’s Denver chapter, the Denver New Liberals, I ended up joining the team in March as their new community and communications manager.

Since I joined the staff, I’ve been helping to advance some of our primary organizing objectives, which include growing and strengthening our membership base, helping to build support for policies that will advance economic opportunity and connecting with policymakers across the country to make the case for pragmatic solutions.

We joined forces with New Democracy this June, an organization that is a “home base” for pragmatic Democrats in all levels of government – including at home in Colorado, where they supported Mike Johnston’s run for mayor through Advancing Denver.

CP: The Biden campaign appears to have fully embraced Dark Brandon, even featuring the meme on billboards in Milwaukee and in a takeover of the Fox News site on the day of the first Republican presidential debate. What does that feel like when you see something you helped popularize getting that kind of attention?

Stone: Well, it certainly does a lot to boost my ego – especially when people like Matt Yglesias are saying that I’m “the most important political figure of our time” – but beyond that, it’s honestly just been super fun to watch the Biden campaign embrace something that I helped create. It’s crazy to think that just four years ago, I was fresh out of high school, with zero political connections or even any kind of volunteer experience, and somehow I’ve ended up where I am now by posting memes on Twitter.

CP: What do you do when you aren’t making posters or working on political communications?

Stone: When I’m not focused on raising the two adorable yet chaotic kittens that I adopted at the end of June, I usually spend my time exploring DC and hanging out with the new friends I’ve made out here. I also spend a lot of time complaining about the awful heat and humidity here in DC, and I’ve been jumping at every opportunity I get to come back to Colorado’s beautiful (and cool and dry) mountains.