Why Gen Z Conservatives Are Turning Anakin Skywalker Into A Political Icon

The Anakin Skywalker right-wing zoomer meme is the kind of subject cultural anthropologists will be studying a century from now to understand politics in the last gasp of the Trump era.

For weeks now, images of Anakin Skywalker, the fallen hero of the “Star Wars” prequels who becomes Darth Vader, have dominated conservative spaces online. The trend is the product of meme layered upon meme. It mixes “based” Gen Z trad-Catholic memes, pro-Crusades content, Russ Greene’s timely analysis of “Total Boomer Luxury Communism,” fatigue with fourth-wave feminism, and pro-family imagery aimed at young men who want to marry and raise children. Throw in a few casual antisemitic winks, and you have a fair picture of the insanity of Gen Z politics.

Tucker Carlson was quick to sense this energy after leaving Fox, and he started using his own platform to rip into boomers as “disgusting” wealth hoarders who are content to own two or three homes while their kids and grandkids languish in apartments. This is, of course, his former audience on cable news. 

But if I had to sum up what Anakin-maxxing is about, it would be this: generational anxiety, and an exhaustion with waiting in line for a handoff of wealth and power that never seems to come. American democracy now runs on an economic order built to serve the affluent elderly, and that class has every incentive to keep it that way. They hold on to their offices long past retirement age, vote more reliably, and keep voting themselves a larger share of the pie. Gen Z sees this on the Left and the Right alike. They just use different words for their anger. 

Anakin Skywalker embodies a certain revolutionary spirit: in his Luciferian rejection of hierarchy, as popularized by Milton’s “Paradise Lost”; in his military service and an angst that smacks of Napoleon Bonaparte; and in his Caesar-like willingness to cross the figurative Rubicon and go all in on Palpatine’s coup. He is a man of action, uninterested in process, legalism, checks and balances, and the archaic reasons the galaxy must endure a broken Republic. Milton’s Satan decided it was “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” Anakin doesn’t go quite that far. He simply tells Padmé the Senate should be made to agree on what’s best for the people, and when she replies that this sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship, he shrugs: “Well, if it works.”

That shrug is half the meme. And judging by the data, it’s not a joke to more than a few young people. When Harvard’s Institute of Politics surveyed young Americans in the fall of 2025, just 13% said the country was headed in the right direction. And 39% said political violence could be justified in at least one circumstance. The most popular justification, chosen by 28%, was a government that violates individual rights.

Before the 2024 election, only about a quarter of Gen Z strongly agreed that democracy is the best form of government, compared with more than two-thirds of Americans over 58. The pollsters called it a “five-alarm fire.” A young Jedi like Anakin, watching as nothing gets done in the capital and the galaxy sleepwalks into civil war, understands the impulse. Every American is born into democracy, and society tells us it is sacrosanct, it also doesn’t work very well, and we’re very bad and evil if we fancy alternatives.

It was George Lucas, the Silent Generation anti-Nixon liberal Democrat, not right-wing Gen Z memelords, who said, “There’s no respect for the office of the Presidency. Not that we need a king, but there’s a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There’s a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled … That’s sort of why I say a benevolent despot is the ideal ruler. He can actually get things done.”

None of this means Gen Z is ready to march on the Jedi Temple. Youth politics is always more radical and impatient, but it is especially rare in American politics to have so many right-wingers signaling they’d at least stand down and not defend the system. Conservatives by nature are institutionalists, and we’re at a time where liberals and conservatives alike increasingly see conservatism as a failed project. This cohort of disaffected zoomers, angered by leftist postmodernism and managed decline, is hungry to build things and lead more visionary lives. That’s what Anakin is doing in these pro-Empire AI slop videos where he heads an elegant dark side family enmeshed in Hitlerian scenery.

Anakin is the symbol of no longer being content to wait one’s turn or conserve a political system that isn’t ordered toward the always elusive “common good.” 

From the moment we meet Anakin Skywalker, he is a boy being told to wait. In “The Phantom Menace,” Qui-Gon orders him to stay in the cockpit during the Battle of Naboo; he ends up blowing up the droid control ship. In “Attack of the Clones,” the search party sent to find his kidnapped mother has given up and tells him to let it go. Anakin takes off and finds her dying in a Tusken camp and, rather than wait for anything resembling justice, slaughters the village: men, women, and children. 

By “Revenge of the Sith,” the waiting continues. He’s given a symbolic Council seat but denied the rank of Master, and told to sit in the chamber while Mace Windu arrests his friend, Chancellor Palpatine. All the while, he’s haunted by visions of his wife dying in childbirth and struggles immensely to sit stoically while history unfolds without him. So he walks in, disarms Mace Windu, and takes a step from which there is no return.

Anakin’s son later faces the same temptation. Training with Yoda, Luke Skywalker envisions his friends suffering in a city in the clouds and feels he must rush to save them. Yoda warns him that the future is always in motion, and that his fears may be nothing more than anxiety. “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,” once wrote the philosopher and Roman statesman Seneca. Such was the case for Luke, and for Anakin Skywalker.

To hyperanalyze the state of galactic politics or upward mobility on the Jedi Council is to miss entirely the point of the Skywalker story, which is that everything could have been different for Anakin if he’d learned to distinguish that which was in his control from that which was not.

His mother was abducted and murdered. It was tragic, and also not the result of a public policy decision like that of America’s once-open border.

Anakin grew up in slavery, so control and agency are what he craved above all else. When faced with dreams of Padmé’s death in childbirth, he had options, including to resign the Jedi Order or seek help, which would involve coming clean about his breaking of oaths to the Jedi way of life. He chose not to do that and to seek power to intervene against death — and brought about Padmé’s death himself. 

Anakin made one poor decision after another. He could have had the wife, the twins, the lakeside retreat on Naboo — all of it — but he didn’t want to give up his Jedi status.

The whole Anakin-maxxing meme is a relitigation of the Great $20 Burrito War, which was itself a rehash of the ire over Ben Shapiro’s insistence that New York’s high cost of living didn’t rob young people of the agency to move somewhere more affordable. It’s one battle after another over whether Gen Z has any agency at all, or whether it has all been taken from them, by a “big-nosed” slave owner on Tatooine or by the pampered elites of the Jedi Council.

You can see how this all graphs perfectly onto this ugly moment of Jacobin-loving, Jew-skeptical politics that is infecting both the Republican and Democratic parties. According to this angry insurgency, the life they deserve was stolen from them — thus the Elon Musk post on Anakin netting 11 million views. 

No one in politics appears willing to take the Anakin-pilled zoomers to the side, and, in the gentle but serious words of Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, tell them: Always remember, your focus determines your reality.

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Stephen Kent is the founder of Geeky Stoics and co-author of the upcoming book “Great Escape: 30 Reflections on Stoicism, Faith and the Wisdom of Great Stories.” Available for pre-order now.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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