In the waning days before the election I started seeing hilarious Anakin memes popping up on my X account. These memes have been attributed to “right-wing” angst over the blue tsunami that hit yesterday and the memes have been especially popular, apparently, among Zoomers.
Here’s how WIRED reported on this phenomenon:
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.
For some examples of the memes making the rounds, here’s a few that made me chuckle:
WIRED doesn’t think this phenomenon is significant, so they mock it, but is this the “right” thing to do?
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.
The “electoral showdown” turned out well for Democrats, but with corruption being the top issue for voters, I don’t expect Democrats (who are just as corrupt as Republicans) to do anything other than target Republicans for two years in order to keep the attention off their own party’s corrupt practices.
Democrat corruption was on FULL display with the Montana Senate race this cycle, which provided Republicans with one of the few bright spots last night when Kurt Alme won easily, thanks to the spoiler, Alani Bankhead, who failed to get top Democrat WOMEN to support her.
Isn’t that funny?
Is this list of Bodnar supporters complete? No, I had to leave one name off in order to stay compliant with the restraining order I’m appealing that bans me from writing about a public official who was VERY involved in the issue of homelessness, which Sam Forstag was ALSO very involved with.
Do voters care about the corruption within the Homeless Industrial Complex? Probably not, since critics of the HIC are either right-wing grifters pushing a political agenda, or isolated voices like mine, easily ignored by local media outlets.
But not Sam Forstag, he’s been VERY platformed as he advocates for throwing MORE money at this Democrat policy failure, like this article where he says this:
Sam Forstag, with the Montana Coalition to Solve Homelessness, summarized the status of Montana in the national report.
“We’re at the bottom of the heap for just about every category,” Forstag said.
Forstag said he sees two common drivers for spikes in homelessness.
First of all, affordable housing remains out of reach in many communities, with the median cost of a home far outpacing the ability of a person or family earning a median wage to buy or rent.
…
The second driver of the rise in homelessness is untreated behavioral health disorders, such as mental health and substance use, Forstag said. He said recent closures, such as ones that resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the beds of the Western Montana Mental Health Center due to inadequate Medicaid reimbursements, contribute to the problem.
He also said it’s an “open secret” that people discharged from Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs are sent to shelters, which mostly are not equipped to address untreated behavioral health disorders.
Will any of this improve under Democrat leadership? I highly doubt it, since our local Democrats STILL think they can subsidize housing to make it affordable, and they STILL think “housing first” is the way to “solve” homelessness. It doesn’t matter that they are WRONG because they have the power, leaving critics like me to face endless lawfare for what I’ve already exposed.
Killing homeless people while wearing badges and protecting those killers wasn’t a competitive race last night, as evidenced by this graphic showing no one opposing Sheriff/Coroner, Jeremiah Petersen, and County Attorney, Matt Jennings.
What is still competitive, as the vote count gets finalized, is a struggling school in Missoula begging voters for more money while those previously mentioned tax subsidies threaten the school’s bottomline.
Will voters choose to spend more money for kids, or will they follow the trend of voting DOWN these examples of electoral panhandling as litigation against Missoula County looms large on the horizon?
Matthew Driessen, the superintendent of DeSmet Public School, told the commissioners the expansion of the TEDD would fund new infrastructure at the expense of pulling tax revenue away from his school district.
“You are going to freeze the revenues that the school district, the fire department and transportation are going to get, based on the funding that you do with this bond, for the next 25 years,” Driessen said. “That is going to have a detrimental effect on these jurisdictions.”
He said he was giving “notice” that there would be legal action from the school district, and asked the commissioners to table the plans and have an in-depth conversation with the school and other stakeholders about TEDDs.
“The school board has approved that we will go to legal action to make sure our district is taxed the same way as other school districts within the county in reference to TIF funds,” Driessen told the county commissioners.
The final observation I’ll offer about yesterday’s election is the BIG demographic swing that tracked young white men’s evolution from MAGA to supporting the party that will NOT be supporting them, as a demographic.
Maybe these young white men are hoping they still have a chance to intercourse with those female baby killers who watch Call Her Daddy?
Enjoy your democracy, gentlmen.
And thanks for reading.