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

Save this storySave this storyIf you quit checking X months ago (or left back when it was still Twitter) and have found yourself wondering how much of a right-wing echo chamber it’s become, just try making sense of the following posts.

如果你几个月前停止查看 X（或者在它还是 Twitter 时就离开了），并且想知道它已经变成了多么严重的右翼回声室，试着去理解一下接下来的这些帖子吧。

An image of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi wielding a lightsaber at the climax of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, with a caption that reads: “It’s over Anakin, some mail-in ballots came in over night while you were sleeping!”

一张伊万·麦克格雷格饰演的欧比旺·克诺比在《星球大战前传3：西斯的复仇》高潮部分挥舞光剑的图片，配文写道：“阿纳金，一切都结束了，趁你睡觉的时候，一些邮寄选票送到了！”

A montage of Anakin Skywalker throughout the Star Wars prequels that chart his transformation into Darth Vader, with this comment: “George Lucas may have made, albeit unintentionally, the most prophetic and effective far right propaganda in existence. Anakin is the millennial and zoomerwaffen. We sympathize with him, not the republic.”

一段阿纳金·天行者在《星球大战》前传中转变为达斯·维达的蒙太奇剪辑，并附有评论：“乔治·卢卡斯可能无意中制作了现存最具有预言性和最有效的极右翼宣传片。阿纳金是千禧一代和 Z 世代的武装力量。我们同情他，而不是共和国。”

A curious prediction from Guillaume Verdon, an AI startup founder and progenitor of the effective accelerationist movement who has accused Democrats of allying with “Islamo-Communists” to destroy the United States: “The Anakin edits might turn the tides of the midterms.”

人工智能初创公司创始人、有效加速主义运动的鼻祖纪尧姆·维尔登曾指责民主党与“伊斯兰共产主义者”结盟以摧毁美国，他做出了一个奇怪的预测：“阿纳金的剪辑可能会扭转中期选举的局势。”

Yes, it seems that while the fan fiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) will remain shut down for the foreseeable future, MAGA conservatives are picking up the slack, using the last hours before the 2026 midterms to imagine themselves and Trump-aligned candidates as the disciples of a genocidal archvillain from a space opera.

是的，尽管同人小说网站 Archive of Our Own (AO3) 在可预见的未来仍将保持关闭，但“让美国再次伟大”（MAGA）的保守派们正在填补这一空白，利用 2026 年中期选举前的最后几个小时，将自己和特朗普阵营的候选人想象成太空歌剧中种族灭绝大反派的门徒。

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.”

据基督教主播 Kangmin Lee 称，阿纳金·天行者代表了“典型的被剥夺权利的底层人”，当他意识到自己曾经信仰的“政治秩序”是“极其腐败、虚伪和邪恶的”时，他变得激进起来。右翼 Substack 作家马克斯·默索尔认为，阿纳金的帖子具有“文化意义”，而且你“就算在实验室里也设计不出比这更好的反进步模因病毒”。

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.”

埃隆·马斯克本人在这一选举周期向共和党候选人投入了近 5 亿美元后，分享了一张看似由人工智能生成的图片：阿纳金坐在王座上，身边是他的爱人帕德梅·阿米达拉、他们的孩子卢克·天行者和莱娅公主，以及一群帝国卫兵和冲锋队，并宣称：“这就是他们从我们手中偷走的东西。”

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.

“他们”是谁？“这”又是什么？对于那些因通货膨胀、中东毫无意义的战争以及总统历史性的不受欢迎而面临潜在“蓝色浪潮”的 MAGA 信徒来说，这些细节并不重要。阿纳金模因的核心在于宣扬你的法西斯世界观、对腐败权力的渴望，以及对移民或“多元、公平与包容”（DEI）的无尽不满。这些人也不在乎阿纳金是被一个衰老的巫师培养成邪恶走狗并奉命屠杀儿童的，因为那只是推翻民主的代价。

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.

但即使这样说，可能也太高估他们了。毕竟，在阿纳金潮流之前，他们曾热衷于与“非自愿独身者”（incel）相关的“马尔福化”（Malfoid）内容——这是一种对《哈利·波特》的同人改编，引入了一个性别转换后的女性版反派德拉科·马尔福作为主角的恋爱对象——出于某种原因，他们觉得这些垃圾内容也是很好的反动宣传。美国教育部也参与了这一模因，后来还用阿纳金的形象对其进行了更新。

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.”

同样，为了表明本届政府对奇幻知识产权令人困惑的拥抱，播客主持人、特朗普高级顾问斯蒂芬·米勒的妻子凯蒂·米勒周日在 X 上发帖称：“我在阿纳金帖子上的每一秒用户时间都让我感到后悔。”

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.”

共和党和科技右翼并不以对他们所珍视的故事进行深刻分析而闻名，他们对一个杀人暴君的认同也不足为奇。比较难解释的是，他们似乎产生了一种错觉，认为这些信息能够触及并引起他们深奥的社交媒体圈之外的正常选民的共鸣。其中一些人坚持认为，阿纳金的内容“不再只是一个模因”，而是构成了“时代精神的巨大胜利”。他们声称，连同“马尔福化”帖子一起，这在不到一周的时间内扭转了“十年的文化腐烂和破坏”。

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.”

与此同时，回到现实中，这不过是玩弄动作人偶而已。想成为达斯·维达是一个被迫打扫房间、吃蔬菜的 10 岁孩子的梦想。在《星球大战》前传中饰演阿纳金·天行者的海登·克里斯滕森在 2023 年告诉《综艺》杂志，描绘他走向黑暗面的过程“使他人性化了”，但也揭示了他是一个“可悲的人”，并且“被困在他可能并不真正想要的生活中”。

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.

你可以合理地推测，与日渐式微的特朗普捆绑在一起的保守派网红们如今是否也处于类似的境地。只是别指望他们会承认这种爆发式的媒介焦虑实际上是令人尴尬的应对机制。无论选举对决结果如何，他们很快就会有新的反英雄偶像——而这一次，你将不敢嘲笑他们那些“非常重要”的帖子。