Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!
The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.
This week, we’re looking at Anakin memes, the downfall of MAGA’s cultural influence, and why the vibes are so bad at Netflix.
Anakin Skywalker and the end of MAGA
The biggest news story this week has obviously been the midterm elections and the enormous blue wave that saw Democrats retake control of both the House and the Senate. Most polls and forecasts predicted a bad night for Republicans, but almost none predicted a wipeout on this level (although polling by The Argument and modeling we built with Split Ticket came about as close as anyone).
So how did the online right spend their last few days before they were wiped out? Posting memes about Anakin Skywalker, obviously.
Why Anakin? Many young conservatives identify with the wayward teen who would later become Darth Vader — he’s a lonely, misunderstood, angry young man. He feels betrayed by a Jedi bureaucracy that’s unfairly keeping him from his rightful place in society. He’s convinced that a corrupt system has denied him opportunities that he deserves, and he turns to a dark alternative to get what he wants.
If you don’t swim in the murky waters of the online right, you might not believe how seriously this simple meme was taken. This was not just a joke: MAGA influencer Kangmin Lee called Anakin the “archetypal disenfranchised chud” and “perhaps the most profound piece of right-wing media in sci-fi form.” Another MAGA influencer claimed, “It cannot be overstated how culturally significant Anakin poasting is. I dont think you could engineer a better anti-progressive memetic virus in lab if you tried. [sic]”
This bled directly into politics and into the midterms. Right-wing shitposting account “Beff Jezos” suggested that the Anakin edits might turn the tides of the midterms. Katie Miller (the former spokesperson for DOGE and current wife of newly appointed White House chief of staff and aspiring Nosferatu cosplayer Stephen Miller) dressed up as Padme for Halloween and posted “Find the Anakin in your life.” The Department of Education started Anakin-posting. Elon Musk posted an AI-generated image of Anakin-as-imperial-patriarch with the caption, “This is what they stole from us.”
It’s obviously absurd that this was the right’s online obsession in the days leading up to a crucial election. But, hey, the Anakin story does actually illustrate modern right-wing politics pretty well.
In the Star Wars prequel films, Anakin is an impressionable young man who is tricked by a cackling, elderly tyrant into undermining democracy, after which he has children who hate him. Then, in the original trilogy, he loses and dies.
So, you know, not the worst analogy.