According to Christian streamer Kangmin Lee, Anakin Skywalker represents “the archetypal disenfranchised guy,” radicalized when he realizes that the “political order” he once believed in is “deeply corrupt, hypocritical, and evil.” Right-wing Substack writer Max Mersault believes that Anakin’s messages are “culturally significant” and that you couldn’t “design a better anti-progressive memetic virus in (a) lab if you tried.”
Elon Musk himself, after donating nearly half a billion dollars to Republican candidates this cycle, shared an apparently AI-generated image of Anakin on a throne, accompanied by his love Padmé Amidala, their children Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and a band of Imperial guards and stormtroopers, declaring: “This is what they stole from us.” »
Who are “they”? What is that? For MAGA faithful facing a potential blue wave from inflation, an unnecessary war in the Middle East, and the president’s historic unpopularity, such details hardly matter. Anakin memes are intended to promote your fascist worldview, your corrupting lust for power, and your endless grievances against immigrants or “DEI.” These guys don’t care either about Anakin being trained to be an evil lackey by a decrepit old wizard and slaughtering children on his orders, since that’s just the price of overthrowing democracy.
But even that may be giving them too much credit. After all, their Anakin trend was preceded by a craze for Incel-adjacent “Malfoid” content – Harry Potter fanfiction that introduces a female, inverted version of the antagonist Draco Malfoy as a romantic prospect for our main character – and for some reason they felt that this slop, too, made for good reactionary propaganda. The U.S. Department of Education took interest in the meme, then updated it with images of Anakin.
Also signaling the administration’s confusing embrace of fantasy intellectual property, Katie Miller, a podcaster and wife of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, posted on »
The Republican Party and the tech right aren’t exactly known for their compelling analysis of the stories they hold dear, and their identification with a murderous tyrant is no big surprise. What’s a little harder to explain is their apparent delusion that this message is reaching and resonating with well-adjusted voters outside of their esoteric social media feeds. The Anakin thing, some of them insist, “is no longer a meme”, constituting a “monumental victory in the spirit of the times”. Together with the Malfoid publications, they claim, it reversed “a decade of cultural rot and damage in less than a week.”
Meanwhile, in reality, there is nothing more substantial than playing with figurines. Wanting to be Darth Vader is the dream of a 10-year-old child forced to clean his room and eat his vegetables. Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in the prequels, said Variety in 2023, which depicted his journey to the dark side “humanized him” while revealing that he was a “pathetic person” and “trapped in this life that perhaps he didn’t really want.”
It’s reasonable to wonder whether conservative influencers linked to a weakened Trump find themselves in a similar position these days. Don’t expect them to ever recognize this publicized outburst of anxiety as a meaningful way to cope. Regardless of how the election showdown plays out, they’ll soon have an ambitious new anti-hero – and this time, you won’t dare laugh at their very important positions.
Gn entert
