Whatever happened to the Panther Den Show?

“The laughter of children is like the blossoming of a flower,” wrote French poet Charles Baudelaire. “It is the joy of receiving, the joy of breathing, the joy of opening out, the joy of contemplation, of living, of growing. It is the joy of a plant.”

Conservatives and most right-wingers have a hard time understanding laughter, I’d vouch, especially the laughter of children – by which I mean the laughter of zoomers and their even younger peers, Generation Alpha. But laughter is an increasingly powerful political tool, one that has the ability to mobilize the young even as it confounds and confuses older generations.

Today’s conservative establishment ignores laughter at its peril. Laughter is a vital force propelling the right to new success. Just look at Donald Trump. He’s pretty much the funniest guy in America right now, and that fact is not unrelated to his success.

Baudelaire continues: “Fabulous creations, beings whose reason, whose legitimacy, cannot be drawn from the code of common sense, often excite us in a mad, excessive hilarity which is translated into interminable sufferings and swoonings.” I don’t know about the sufferings and swoonings, but the rest sounds uncannily like the world of Panther Den and the Panther Den Show, a short-lived memetic phenomenon whose influence still lives on, some four years after its anonymous creator and the show itself disappeared without trace.

It’s hard to describe exactly what the Panther Den Show is. You really have to see it to believe it. Thankfully, all four episodes, running to about an hour, have been archived online, so you can watch them at your leisure. Suffice to say, the Panther Den Show is a bit like scrolling an unusually demented series of TikTok reels, one after the other. Punchline after punchline, gag after gag, rapid-fire. Loud bass-boosted music, obnoxious sound effects and AI-generated voiceovers – if you have teenage kids and you’ve looked over their shoulders while they swipe interminably, you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about.

Panther Den is a melting pot of allthe -isms, all the bad things thatwe’re not supposed to think are funny

There are recognizable human beings in the Panther Den Show and then there are cartoon characters like Big Chungus (a fat Bugs Bunny), Spooderman (a wonky-faced or “derped” Spiderman) and Pickle Blepe Chungus (don’t ask). They find themselves in outlandish, offensive situations. In one episode, Patrick Casey, a notable young leader of the online far right, turns into a dancing triangle and seduces Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a nightclub before taking her home and… you can imagine the rest.

The Panther Den Show and the memes Panther Den produced belong to a category often referred to as “schizoposting” or “esoteric edits,” and they feature prominently in certain corners of the online right, where new and particularly dazzling examples are greeted with awe and applause. They break out of those corners too, and even established politicians, including sitting US senators, interact with esoteric content from time to time. Esoteric edits require tremendous skill with video-editing software to produce, not to mention time and a pretty sick imagination. Being autistic, as one imagines many of the producers are, probably helps.

These memes are hyperreal, to borrow (reluctantly) a term from arch French pseud Jean Baudrillard: they exist where the lines between reality and fiction blur and the horizon seems to melt away and everything is just… weird. But the meaning is there, if you have the eyes to see it.

You might be repelled by Panther Den. Incel memes rub shoulders with blatant racism and thinly veiled references to “globalists.” It’s a melting pot of all the -isms, all the bad things we’re not supposed to say and think are funny but actually, perhaps because we’re forbidden, we do say and think are funny. Or some of us, anyway.

Here’s another meme. A young man in a MAGA hat is running away from something. There’s loud music playing. The caption reads: “Me running away from the TPUSA mossad agents after asking Charlie Kirk what the greatest story he’s ever been told is.” As with so much of meme culture, there are layers to be peeled away. You could probably laugh without knowing what this meme is fully about, but it helps to know that Kirk and Turning Point USA have been heavily criticized by some segments of the right for being too pro-Israel – hence the Mossad reference – and that The Greatest Story Never Told is a nearly seven-hour pro-Hitler documentary released in 2013. It’s very popular with white supremacists and radical Islamists alike, including a Minnesota imam Tim Walz was good friends with. So now you know.

A straightforward identification of the Panther Den Show as “white supremacist” collapses on closer examination, however. Yes, there’s racism and plenty is said about immigrants and America First, but for all the references to the Austrian Painter, Agartha and Indo-European mythology, the Panther Den Show is heavily black-coded, for want of a better phrase.

The soundtrack consists almost entirely of hip-hop, including relatively unknown Soundcloud rappers; the aesthetic, down to the face tattoos and baggy clothing, is straight out of a hip-hop video; the language, that strange patois zoomers and Gen Alpha kids speak, is drawn straight from hip-hop, memes and computer games. Panther Den merchandise even included a branded “lean” cup, from which to sip the rapper’s favorite concoction of codeine cough syrup, soda, hard candy and alcohol. If this is white supremacy in the 2020s, we’re a long way from the Ku Klux Klan and its violent aversion to Little Richard.

Rewatching all four episodes, I can’t help but feel nostalgic. It was only four years ago, and yet the show, of course, bears all the hallmarks of its time. Trump 2020 was still in full swing, the baleful events of January 6 had yet to occur. Many of the up-and-coming personalities showcased by Panther Den were still friends and still free men. I remember watching the show at the time, as it came out. Panther Den followed me on Twitter and even started posting about “slonking” raw eggs – my specialty in my guise as the Raw Egg Nationalist – before he was banned from Twitter some time in early 2021. He never came back.

If anything, though, Panther Den is more relevant than ever, as the 2024 election showed and as the fortunes of insurgent right-wing movements around the world show, too. The future of MAGA and America First, when Trump bows out, is yet to be decided, and it’s inevitable that a younger leader – probably J.D. Vance – and a younger demographic will be key to its success.

Trump had the backing of Twitterposters and meme-makers like myself; we went to work in our special way

During the 2024 campaign, Barron Trump helped ensure his father went on the hippest, most popular podcasts, including appearances with Adin Ross, Theo Von and the Nelk Boys, as well as Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman. Trump still campaigned in the normal way, with his rallies and social-media posts, but his focus on podcasts was a new thing. It worked. “Biden won big with young voters. This year they swung toward Trump in a big way,” read a typical headline, from National Public Radio.

The Harris campaign, by contrast, engaged with the most social-media and internet-savvy generations ever in a half-hearted way, posting a series of embarrassing “brat” memes on TikTok and scheduling appearances on a few podcasts such as Call Her Daddy.

Trump also had the backing of Twitter posters and meme-makers like myself, and we went to work in our special way. An article in London’s Daily Telegraph post-election noted how my fellow poster Bronze Age Pervert and I had helped rally an army of “right-wing bodybuilders,” wrestlers, combat-sports enthusiasts and gym-bros to the Trump cause. To what effect, it’s impossible to say – but a British national newspaper thought it noteworthy enough to dedicate a full two-page feature to the subject.

It’s easy to condemn provocative right-wing memes as dangerous or unpleasant. It seems to be harder to acknowledge this youthful turn is happening across the western world. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party campaigns on a platform of “remigration” – basically a euphemism for mass deportation – and attractive, middle-class German kids sing “foreigners out” on TikTok to the tune of classic club song “L’Amour Toujours.” The AfD is now the most popular party with 18- to 30-year-olds in Germany. We were told this was simply impossible.

It marks a new sensibility. It isn’t about economic arguments for free markets or running down, for the 10,000th time, the dreadful, blood-spattered record of socialism. This is about, well, vibes as much as anything else.

The left is sclerotic, ugly, unfunny and unsexy. It always was these things, but now instead of offering battles in the streets, leftists play language police and squash young men – young white men in particular – with their absurd henpecking. The spirit of Panther Den runs directly against that censorious spirit. It puts a subversive middle finger up to anybody who says “you can’t say that.”

No doubt if he were alive today, Bill Buckley would be desperately standing athwart this new generation of right-wingers yelling “stop” – and no doubt he would fail, just as he and his dull, prissy acolytes have failed in their every endeavor, not least of all conserving anything, for the past 70 years.