The Online Right’s Closing Campaign Argument: Fascist Anakin Skywalker Memes
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...
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