We Left Them No Choice But To Be Evil
The online right wants to rehabilitate Anakin Skywalker because he is one of them
It made no sense to me on a fundamental narrative level. Everyone is the protagonist in their own 80-year movie, everyone is the main character. Everyone, I had assumed, wants to think of themselves as good and decent.
No one, I thought, wants to perceive themselves as the bad guy. No one wants to don the black hat and antagonize the good guys, the people doing what they think is right for the right reasons. So when I heard from a friend during our freshman year in college that conservatives during the Reagan era identified with the Empire in the Star Wars universe, I (a lifelong shitlib) could hardly comprehend what it meant.
But yes, a handful of Google searches later, I confirmed what my buddy had told me over lukewarm burritos in the student union: That Republicans in a political era dominated by Republicans had looked at Darth Vader and other Star Wars characters who identified with "the dark side" and said hey, look at those folks, they did nothing wrong in their prolonged battle with scrappy insurgents doing whatever they could to poke at the underbelly of an empire bent on subjugation and domination. The people calling themselves the Dark Side were the victims, the thinking went.
Denny Carter
I found essays and newspaper columns and book excerpts from twenty years earlier that unashamedly sided with the Dark Side and said look, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to protect yourself and your people. When you really sit and think about it, they said, Vader and his minions only wanted to establish order in the universe amid the chaos sown by terror cells that wouldn't stop doing terrorist shit. The idea that the Dark Side were the real good guys in Star Wars was something of an inside joke among Reagan administration officials. Washington had been taken over my a movement that saw itself in the most prominent villain in movie history. Mommy was out, daddy was in.
That's not how any of this works, I thought. There's no honest reading of Star Wars that could lead to such an interpretation: That Luke and Leia Skywalker were actually the Big Baddies, that their father was the real protagonist in the Star Wars trilogy. That, I guess, is the thing. It was not an honest analysis of the series. It was an analysis done in bad faith.
The evolution of this bad-faith interpretation of the Star Wars universe – a world in which the real protagonists are explicitly anti-fascist – has arrived, forty years later, on the fascist propaganda social media website owned by the world's richest man. It's there, on the X platform formerly known as Twitter, that young white men are holding up Anakin Skywalker – who, in case you're unfamiliar, eventually gets fucked up by his mentor and becomes Darth Vader – as a misunderstood and mischaracterized hero. In their world, Anakin is not even an antihero.
He is blameless, pure, a man of destiny, a man of action who knew what had to be done to secure order and peace in the galaxy and wasn't afraid to take action, no matter what the space libs said, no matter how they excoriated him for his strongly-held beliefs and political leanings.
Anakin the child murderer was strong. The republic liberals in all their patience and temperance were weak. The end.
Identify with Vader, Vote Republican
This right-wing identification with the Dark Side isn't limited to the young guys living in their mothers' basements who have nine separate porn streaming service subscriptions and know way too much about skull sizes. The president just last year referred to FCC Chair Russell Vought as Darth Vader to laughs and smiles at a White House even during which Vought was cheered for weaponizing the FCC against the people who annoy the president on TV.
"I call him a fine man," the president said of Darth Vought.
The chuds on X are leaning into the Anakin-did-nothing-wrong meme as they're on the precipice of their fascistic, hyper-online edgelord political movement falling to pieces. They're posting nonstop about the Star Wars libs leaving Anakin no choice but to be evil in the days before the political party they inherited – the rotted, hollowed-out GOP – faces the (very) real prospect of electoral annihilation in the midterm elections. Their masks having been stripped away in 2024 and 2025 to reveal the festering maggots beneath, they know the American public is disgusted by their deeds and words and worldview. They never meant what they said about improving the lives of working-class families – even the white ones – just as they never meant what they said about ending Forever Wars. They were always in it for the pain: Watching it spread, enjoying the torment on their enemies.
Today they understand in their marrow that it's over. They had their fun with neo-nazi propaganda spread on official U.S. government websites and social media accounts. They had their fun imbibing in the pain and terror of immigrants and migrants and others who had poisoned the blood of the nation, a European fascist concept that they have adopted because it's considered cool in their circles to say Hitler and other European fascists – like Anakin Skywalker – did nothing wrong. It was all so much fun. They could do full-chested nazi salutes in front of the cameras and gaslight the public into believing they had lost their minds – that there was no salute – because they knew the national media either would not or could not strip them of the presumption of good faith. They could openly engage in the kind of gutter racism and loose genocidal chatter that would have ended political careers even ten years ago.
The terminally-online fascist chuds know the reaping will be less fun than the sowing, and so they look to Anakin Skywalker as a corollary, as a sympathetic figure who reminds them of themselves. And they think the memeification of Anakin as the protagonist in Star Wars is going to swing the midterms in their favor. This is their closing message for the 2026 midterms: Darth Vader is good, actually. There is an immeasurable gulf between these guys' political world and the political world of the American normie.
Imagine for a moment how fucking crazy you would sound if you tried to explain this to your parents or your grandparents or someone at work. "You see, the chuds believe weaponizing memes of Anakin Skywalker as a good guy will motivate young men to vote Republican and stop Democrats from taking congressional majorities in the midterms." If the person to whom you're speaking doesn't immediately spray you with bear mace, they might have a follow-up question, something like, "Who the fuck is Anakin Skywalker?"
Anakin opposed the republic and all its empathy and multiculturalism and desire for a real peace, not the violent peace that Civil Rights leaders and activists warned white folks against as right wingers pointed to outwardly stable American cities as examples of what the country could have if it did the right thing and enforced Jim Crow laws against Black and brown Americans.
Millennial men, watching the prequels in 2002: man this sucks, Darth Vader is literally a whiny teenage boy Gen Z men, watching the prequels in 2026: he’s just like me fr
— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) October 31, 2026 at 10:17 PM
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It makes terrible sense that young men in the 2020s would identify so strongly with Anakin Skywalker. He is, like them, a victim of culturally liberal forces. The women who want to be treated as fully human and the folks of color who want to be treated as fully human and maybe mom and dad – those pitiful libs – told them to be good boys and treat others with respect and dignity. These outside forces brainwashed these young guys into believing all people were created equal and no one should be treated differently based on the color of their skin or their creed or ethnicity or religious background.
Look what you took from me, the Gen Z bros whine as one: A world in which I sit at the tippy top of the hierarchy or oppression, for this is my birthright. You're telling me I'm equal to the Black man? To the Latino woman? To the LGBTQ person? To the migrant who arrives on our shores with nothing? No, they say, this will not do. My great grandfather was not equal to those people and neither am I. You have given me no choice but to become a fascist. This, as Anakin implied in the days and hours before his transformation into Darth Vader, is your fault. I have no agency in this matter.
I'm old enough to have seen the early-2000s Star Wars trilogy in theaters. I had never been a Star Wars Guy, but enjoyed the movies enough to see the new ones, usually on opening weekend (I fell asleep during the first one). I recall feeling nothing but contempt for adolesenct and young adult Anakin. What a sniveling, pathetic piece of shit, I thought. I could hardly wait until he got his ass kicked and had to have whatever remained of him stuffed into a big robot suit. Today, 20-some years later, he is a role model for the sniveling, pathetic online fascist. Everything I hated about Anakin, they love today.
When Musk, a 55-year-old man, posts an AI slop picture of Anakin in an alternate timeline with Padme and his children by his side and says, "This is what they stole from us," he is ignoring that Anakin had every opportunity to have a family and live happily as an influential leader of the republic. It was his ego, his rage, his total lack of self control and his abuse of his own powers that ended any chance of him living a happy life with a wife and children, with people who loved him and would give his existence meaning beyond using his cool powers to fuck people up.
No one took anything from Anakin Skywalker; he took it from himself. Just as the American fascist movement's downfall will be its own fault – brought on by arrogance and hatred and a refusal to engage with reality while trying to craft unreality – Anakin's downfall was his own doing. Like all fascists, he is not a misunderstood antihero, but a tragic figure who created the conditions for his own demise.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
