{"id":673246,"date":"2026-11-03T02:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T02:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/673246\/"},"modified":"2026-11-03T02:02:10","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T02:02:10","slug":"the-online-rights-closing-campaign-argument-fascist-anakin-skywalker-memes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/673246\/","title":{"rendered":"The Online Right\u2019s Closing Campaign Argument: Fascist Anakin Skywalker Memes"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Christian streamer Kangmin Lee, Anakin Skywalker represents<\/a> the \u201carchetypal disenfranchised chud,\u201d radicalized when he realizes the \u201cpolitical order\u201d he once believed in is \u201cdeeply corrupt, hypocritical, and wicked.\u201d Right-wing Substack writer Max Mersault believes<\/a> that the Anakin posts are \u201cculturally significant\u201d and that you couldn\u2019t \u201cengineer a better anti-progressive memetic virus in [a] lab if you tried.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elon Musk himself, after funneling nearly half a billion dollars<\/a> to Republican candidates this cycle, shared<\/a> a seemingly AI-generated image of Anakin on a throne, accompanied by his love interest Padm\u00e9 Amidala, their children Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and a bevy of imperial guards and stormtroopers, declaring: \u201cThis is what they stole from us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who is \u201cthey\u201d? What is \u201cthis\u201d? To the MAGA faithful staring down a potential blue wave thanks to inflation, a pointless war in the Middle East, and the president\u2019s historic unpopularity, such details hardly matter. The Anakin memes are all about advertising your fascist worldview<\/a>, lust for corruptive power<\/a>, and endless grievances about immigrants<\/a> or \u201cDEI<\/a>.\u201d These guys also don\u2019t care that Anakin was groomed to be an evil lackey by a decrepit old wizard and slaughtered children on his orders, since that\u2019s just the price of overthrowing democracy.<\/p>\n

But even this may be giving them too much credit. After all, their Anakin trend was preceded by a craze for incel-adjacent \u201cMalfoid<\/a>\u201d content\u2014a fanfic twist on Harry Potter that introduces a gender-flipped, female version of antagonist Draco Malfoy as a romantic prospect for our main character\u2014and for some reason felt that this slop<\/a>, too, made good reactionary propaganda. The US Department of Education got in on the meme<\/a>, later updating it with Anakin imagery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Likewise signaling the administration\u2019s confusing embrace of fantasy IP, Katie Miller, podcaster and wife of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, on Sunday posted<\/a> to X: \u201cI have zero unregretted user seconds spent on Anakin postings.\u201d<\/p>\n

The GOP and the tech right aren\u2019t exactly known for their cogent analysis of the stories they hold near and dear<\/a>, and their identification with a murderous tyrant is no great surprise. What\u2019s somewhat harder to explain is their apparent delusion about this message reaching and resonating with well-adjusted voters outside their esoteric social media feeds. The Anakin stuff, some of them insist<\/a>, \u201cis not a meme anymore,\u201d constituting a \u201cmonumental zeitgeist victory.\u201d Along with the Malfoid posts, they claim<\/a>, it has reversed \u201ca decade of cultural rot and damage in less than a week.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, back in reality, this amounts to nothing more consequential than playing with action figures. Wanting to be Darth Vader is the dream of a 10-year-old forced to clean his room and eat his vegetables. Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in the prequels, told Variety<\/a> in 2023 that depicting his journey to the dark side \u201chumanized him\u201d yet revealed that he was a \u201cpathetic person\u201d and \u201ctrapped in this life that perhaps he didn\u2019t really want.\u201d<\/p>\n

You might reasonably speculate whether conservative influencers tied to a weakened Trump are in a similar position these days. Just don\u2019t expect them to ever acknowledge this burst of mediated angst as the cringeworthy coping it actually is. However the electoral showdown plays out, they\u2019ll have a new aspirational antihero soon enough\u2014and this time, you won\u2019t dare laugh at their very important posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"According to Christian streamer Kangmin Lee, Anakin Skywalker represents the \u201carchetypal disenfranchised chud,\u201d radicalized when he realizes the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,21749,270,1650,58,2140,606],"class_list":["post-673246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-memes","tag-movies","tag-politics","tag-social-media","tag-star-wars","tag-x"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}