According to Christian streamer Kangmin Lee, Anakin Skywalker represents the “archetypal disenfranchised chud,” radicalized when he realizes the “political order” he once believed in is “deeply corrupt, hypocritical, and wicked.” Right-wing Substack writer Max Mersault believes that the Anakin posts are “culturally significant” and that you couldn’t “engineer a better anti-progressive memetic virus in [a] lab if you tried.”
Elon Musk himself, after funneling nearly half a billion dollars to Republican candidates this cycle, shared a seemingly AI-generated image of Anakin on a throne, accompanied by his love interest Padmé Amidala, their children Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and a bevy of imperial guards and stormtroopers, declaring: “This is what they stole from us.”
Who is “they”? What is “this”? To the MAGA faithful staring down a potential blue wave thanks to inflation, a pointless war in the Middle East, and the president’s historic unpopularity, such details hardly matter. The Anakin memes are all about advertising your fascist worldview, lust for corruptive power, and endless grievances about immigrants or “DEI.” These guys also don’t care that Anakin was groomed to be an evil lackey by a decrepit old wizard and slaughtered children on his orders, since that’s just the price of overthrowing democracy.
But even this may be giving them too much credit. After all, their Anakin trend was preceded by a craze for incel-adjacent “Malfoid” content—a fanfic twist on Harry Potter that introduces a gender-flipped, female version of antagonist Draco Malfoy as a romantic prospect for our main character—and for some reason felt that this slop, too, made good reactionary propaganda. The US Department of Education got in on the meme, later updating it with Anakin imagery.
Likewise signaling the administration’s confusing embrace of fantasy IP, Katie Miller, podcaster and wife of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, on Sunday posted to X: “I have zero unregretted user seconds spent on Anakin postings.”
The GOP and the tech right aren’t exactly known for their cogent analysis of the stories they hold near and dear, and their identification with a murderous tyrant is no great surprise. What’s 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, “is not a meme anymore,” constituting a “monumental zeitgeist victory.” Along with the Malfoid posts, they claim, it has reversed “a decade of cultural rot and damage in less than a week.”
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 in 2023 that depicting his journey to the dark side “humanized him” yet revealed that he was a “pathetic person” and “trapped in this life that perhaps he didn’t really want.”
You might reasonably speculate whether conservative influencers tied to a weakened Trump are in a similar position these days. Just don’t expect them to ever acknowledge this burst of mediated angst as the cringeworthy coping it actually is. However the electoral showdown plays out, they’ll have a new aspirational antihero soon enough—and this time, you won’t dare laugh at their very important posts.