Like many public-facing organisations trying to have their zeitgeist and eat it, the Australia Institute is getting down with ‘youff’. They’ve hired the entertaining ex-Guardian journalist Amy Remeikis and created a TikTok account where she regularly posts her quirky takes on Institute research.

She analyses the Coalition’s nuclear policy by putting on a pair of garish Dame Edna-style sunglasses to make the point that the policies are a ‘distraction’ from a serious energy policy debate even though, ironically, the sunglasses themselves are a distraction from the serious point she presumably wants to make. And she attempts to channel old Clarke and Dawe interviews by repeatedly and mockingly interjecting that the ‘science is clear’ (in case we didn’t hear her the first time) during an ‘interview’ about banning salmon farming in Tasmania.

You can’t blame Remeikis for doing what she was hired to do. It’s the Australia Institute that seems to have forgotten the old notion of letting your research speak for itself. Given that it is mainly like-minded subscribers who watch the videos, it all seems slightly redundant, like preaching to the converted.

To ask that most billable of post-millennium questions: is turning your serious research into vaudeville ‘on brand’? The corporate metaphysics must be dizzying for any think tank needing to reconcile the rhetorical posturing required to get social ‘likes’ while seeing itself as a ‘highly influential public thinktank’.

I haven’t been this brand-confused since  self-declared ‘news leader’ 7 News did its own brand contortions and hired self-identifying funny man Mark Humphries from the ABC so he could do satire in between the sport, weather, and the promotion for the up-next Home and Away episode. Or when Clementine Ford recently dropped the feminist scold persona for Zen TikTok poet chanting an oddly narcoleptic non-rhyming aphorism about buying an espresso in Brunswick and freeing Palestine. If we want humour in our public debate, let’s get someone who actually is funny. Maybe Rodney Rude could explain the Andrews/Allen Victorian government fiscal conservatism in a post-Covid railway to nowhere dystopia? Or Hannah Gadsby could tell that old one about the three misogynists walking into a bar and asking for the television set to be changed to the football.

The TikToking of research institutes and news programs hoping to be noticed aren’t lone examples of intellectual ‘Dad dancing’ trying to make a political point. Just look at how some leftist commentators and social media posters got brand excited back in December when the man accused of shooting a healthcare insurance CEO on the streets of New York turned out to be a young, handsome Ivy League graduate called Luigi Mangione protesting the quality of America’s dilapidated health system. Rather than being repulsed by the killing, many progressives seemed strangely turned on. Some did that progressive metaphorical ‘Gotta break eggs to make an omelette’ shrug of the shoulders to argue that given the state of the American health system, a Mangione and his bulging abs might just have a point. Unsurprisingly, in this Golden Age of Brand, his most applauded quality was his talent for marketing: using bullets with anti-health industry slogans written on them and carrying a backpack full of monopoly money for socio-economic laughs.

Never mind the morality, feel the marketing campaign. As that 1980s dating show with the amorous robot Dexter would put it, ‘He’s murderous, psychotic, and yes ladies, he’s single.’ There hasn’t been this much overt political sex appeal from an alleged psychotic murderer since Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s strike-a-pose moment on the cover of Rolling Stone, or when Che Guevara first blow-waved his hair and marched through the streets of Havana looking for revolution, a t-shirt deal, and blow jobs from useful idiots.

Of course, for all the unusual yet strangely pleasant bodily responses hot branding can induce in career leftists, it cannot hide the moral duplicity. It’s like finding out your dream date is actually married with three kids and doesn’t recycle. For all the topless images, no one seems to have noticed that the cowardly Mangione is accused of shooting the executive from behind or that Mangione covered up his own face so no one would know who he was. How brave is that? Most importantly, he was captured at the Cathedral of Big Junk, eating McDonald’s, the antithesis of a gym-junkie-led revolution.

This simplification of serious issues to marketability goes from the sublime to the ridiculous. At the dumbest end of the scale are protesters trying to demolish the Coalition case for using nuclear power in Australia by protesting outside a Dutton event beside a large inflatable three-eyed fish borrowed from an old episode of The Simpsons. Well, at least it got on TV. More serious are the consequences seen in the revisiting of the UK child-rape scandal where police and public figures were reluctant to act for fear of being accused of that kryptonite to brand – racism.

Speaking of brand and its infinite senselessness, I recently wrote in the Herald Sun about American celebrities trying to be on brand by saying they’re going to leave America following Donald Trump’s election win but like the old Eagles hit Hotel California, they don’t ever leave. This analysis blew the gasket of an old Greens-voting friend, who posted on my Facebook page that I had been duped by Trump’s salesman charm and marketing genius.

This is quite the brand turnaround and, if nothing else, shows how malleable and laughable is the whole branding caper. Whatever happened to the left’s brand narrative of a gormless, idiot Orange Man whose Art of the Deal was ghostwritten and who, rather than a self-proclaimed self-made billionaire, makes a habit of driving investments into bankruptcy? Now, he’s a branding Svengali? Then again, having appropriated the camp classic ‘YMCA’ for his hyper-macho campaign and inauguration and then posing like a glowering criminal for his official inauguration photo, Trump is quite capable of re-branding his persona without any help from the left.