The 40 Most Powerful Memes of 2024

In a year of vibe shifts, these memes stand supreme

What is the New Right? It’s not a straightforward thing to explain, but the best way to understand it is through immersion in its memes. Last year we rounded up the most powerful memes of 2023, including stuff like the Longhouse, No Enemies to the Right (NETTR), natalism, hicklibs, mids, and the so-called competence crisis.

We’re back again at the end of 2024. These are the most powerful memes of the year. Some are silly, some are serious, all are interesting symbols that help us make sense of the many vibe shifts of 2024. This list is the culmination of a year of relentless poasting, our attempt to contextualize what last year meant to the New Right.

Let us know in the comments if we missed anything. Enjoy!

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40. Concubines

The guy who murked Bin Laden made us all do the whiteguyblinking.gif when he told neotenous zoomer libs that in a sane society, he'd have them as his sex slaves. The most unexpected tweet of the year.

39. Peanut the Squirrel

When the nanny state found it within their purview to take out this fuzzy lil’ guy who wudn’t hurtin’ nobody, it reminded us that they’ll sooner let you get burned alive on the subway by an illegal schizoid than let you have a no-no animal as a pet.

38. Abusive dad Tim Walz

Tim Walz gives his doofy son's arm a sharp tug and creates one of the funniest niche memes of the year, where we joked that the VP hopeful was, behind closed doors, taking his campaign frustrations out on “daddy's little ashtray.”

37. Soros revealed as Compact Mag funder

Late last year, a few poasters speculated that Sohrab Ahmari and his merry band of right-punchers at Compact Magazine were funded by none other than George Soros. A year later, this was confirmed to be true in Vanity Fair.

36. The Omnicause

Mary Harrington coined “the Omnicause” late last year to describe the underlying resentment animating progressivism that remains the same regardless of its Current Thing manifestation. Greta Thunberg donning the keffiyeh is its ideal image. Palestine? Trans Rights? Kids in Cages? It's all the Omnicause, baby.

35. “She’s a retard”

Michael Malice had Joe Rogan falling out of his chair laughing when he delivered a blink-and-miss-it joke about Kamala Harris being differently abled. He said what we were all thinking, but nobody at this level was saying it out loud. It opened the floodgates for more respectable voices to question the candidate's ability to form a coherent original thought, and helped re-normalize one of our best words.

34. Package Cuck

A journoid's paper towel deliveries kept getting stolen, and instead of confronting the Person of Theft he knew was doing it, wrote it off as the cost of doing business in the Big City. This neighborly fellow symbolizes the Good Liberal who is willing to accept personal abuse that he's rich enough to withstand, without thinking about how that abuse makes life miserable for everyone at scale.

33. Gas Station GFs

Incels of America, are you impossibly horny, but fed up with the fat hoes in your depressed rurality? Perhaps you will find a homegrown mail-order bride in… a different depressed rurality that’s 1,000 miles away? You’ll never know if you don’t try. According to some guy, you must become a jobless out-of-town drifter, and find yourself a Gas Station GF. Apparently some sensitive young man actually tried this and it worked.

32. Bitcoin Breakdancing Dad

A libertarian boomer divorces his wife, goes to jail, remarries a Filipino, gets deep into crypto and breakdancing, and his wannabe comedienne daughter posts a video about how she's totally alienated from him. Instead of taking a beat and stock of his situation, he posts a snippy reaction video where he does the crying-wojack-wearing-a-smiling-mask meme while defending himself. This insane saga inspired a conversation about divorce and the Eternal Boomer.

31. The Sundress

Evie magazine spent the year targeting newly minted tradwives, first with "the sundress," and later with rather boobalicious "raw milkmaid dress." Both releases generated a discourse cycle around the male gaze, the authenticity of trad style, and the role of conservative brands.

30. AIDS painting finished

Someone masterfully trolled the art world by mocking an early piece of sacred neoliberal kitsch by some gross pervert, completing what AIDS left unfinished, and the nihilistic art people suddenly discovered that art does convey moral values. By their standards, this troll is probably one of the finest pieces of art we’ve had in years.

29. Trump Mcdonald’s

This one really felt like the nail in the coffin for the Dems. Trump hanging out at a McDonald’s, delighting in their quotidian operations, hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, curious, natural, moisturized, in his lane. Imagine Biden or Kamabla trying this and not looking completely fake and awkward.

28. “What kind of American are you?”

The New Right is comprised of many factions, defined more by what it opposes than what it's for. As it continues to splinter, this screenshot from the Civil War movie reminds us how quickly alignments can, erm, realign. We’re closing out the year and it’s still making us laugh.

27. Aaron Bushnell

Remember this flame-broiled activist? No, us either. And that's good, because the only thing worth remembering about his pointless sacrifice is how quickly you forgot his name.

26. Sydney Sweeney's boobs

Do you prefer pendulous hangers that wobble to and fro, or the "aristocratic elegance of the small-breasted woman"? Sydney's set generated a lot of discussion around the Right reclaiming joyous femininity. No more sullen, sourpuss models. Bimbos are back, baby.

25. Aella gangbang

Geek whore Aealla had her "mind yeeted" by 42 men at a birthday gangbang, and left us with a number of phrases ("came in the fluffer," "he literally said “Leeroy Jenkins” as he entered") and one flowchart seared into our memories forever. A lighthearted exploration of the limits of unfettered female sexuality.

24. The JD Vance stare

When someone says something so libtarded, you just hit 'em with the JD Vance stare.

23. “You have XX days”

This ominous threat was delivered countless times to libs to remind them of the inevitability of Trump's victory, and what is going to happen to them when we win (more on this later).

22. Media literacy

Lefites continue to make the midwit claim that conservatives are too stupid to understand that their lazy, in-your-face propaganda slop is at their expense. You can’t simply enjoy entertainment at face value. The way to be a good consoomer is to be a clever enough boy to peer underneath the text to find the fake-deep subtext. You’d know that if you had any media literacy.

21. World War T

The appearance of a transwoman in the pages of Man's World Magazine ignited a flame war that forced righties to pick a side on the TQ and raised bigger questions about the role of pseudo-dissident hipsters who want to transgress against the dominant libtarded culture, but may not hold a right-wing moral vision. The TQ, say Trans Exclusionary Radical Misogynists, is a line in the sand, because what is trans identity but a revolt against God/nature that demands others' affirmation?

20. Elite Human Capital

Coined by Anatoly Karlin last year, Richard Hanania helped meme this ultimate former-gifted-kid ideology into reality in 2024. Elite Human Capital is when you want people with high-IQ and high-openness to run everything. Rule by dorks, but not a dork who joins the military, studies nuclear physics, and then has a churchgoing family in Iowa. That guy probably doesn't even have a Substack! He probably has never microdosed LSD. You want rule by a Benetton ad of pervy polyamorists who had a failed biohacking startup in San Francisco.

19. Oct. 7 counterprotesters

Progs have long villainized the crazy-ahh white boys in salmon shorts, as if they represent a serious threat. The first half of 2024 saw widespread counterprotesting from fun-loving frat guys, presenting a bright, colorful counterpoint to the wretched keffiyeh-Americans who tried to make campus life miserable.

18. The empathy heatmap

Did you know that conservatives love their families and liberals love “plants, trees, and inert entities such as rocks”? This year Rob Henderson repopularized an image from a 2019 study. Something to cite the next time someone tells you to have some heckin’ empathy.

17. Christians v. Vitalists

While the Christian-Vitalist axis has and probably always will be a point of contention among Rightists, this year saw an explosion of pontification on the subject. A thousand Substack essays bloomed around this topic, a dozen of which were featured in the NRP. The Right is a long way from total victory, so Pagan LARPers and Christcucks remain in an uneasy truce, for now.

16. Doxxed hunks

Two leading dissident lights, Raw Egg Nationalist and Lomez, were doxxed this year, revealing them to be not pale keyboard grubs with scoliosis, but genuinely hunkalicious specimens, reconfirming a long-held trope that many of our most extremely-online freaks are actually stone-cold chads IRL.

15. Jew tunnels

2024 kicked off with an impossibly bizarre event: Hasids scurrying out of underground bunkers in Brooklyn, like an antisemite's fever dream. What were they DOING down there? Just boring Jew stuff, we guess.

14. Auslander Raus

The promise of remigration feels tantalizingly close, with images of young, beautiful Euros chanting "foreigners out" to this Eurodance anthem.

Counterelite

For the first time in living memory it feels like a legitimate counterelite is forming to challenge blob consensus. While it remains to be seen how committed reformed libs like Elon and other techlords are to the cause, it's hard not to be a little whitepilled that we seem to have heavy hitters in our corner.

12. Slop

You're seeing this term everywhere to refer to everything from processed food to AI-generated content. We can't prove it, but we're pretty sure this term emerged out of "Zogslop" or "Goyslop," a jokey way to refer to consumption (not just food) under the globohomo regime.

11. Home Depot Meemaw

Home Depot Meemaw was a dumpy old lady who was spotlighted by Libs of TikTok for calling for Trump's assassination, sparking a debate among righties about the limits of social opprobrium. Should social media vigilantes try to get her fired like They do to us? Or should righties target the commissars who actually wield power and leave the sad sack proles alone?

10. Will Stancil

Nobody invited more abuse from dissidents this year than preeminent center-left lolcow Will Stancil. The extremely-online policy dork fashioned himself as a sort of coal-mine canary, tweeting hysterically every day about disinformation and how Trump would win because Elon let literal nazis be mean to him on Twitter. His trivial disagreements with the prog hivemind have made him a pariah in those circles, so you almost have to admire him: The Will Stancils alone.

9. “Christ is King”

This year Candace Owens continued flirting with the JQ and popularized the “Christ is King” litmust test. Some call it an antisemetic dogwhistle, others a casual affirmation of a core religious belief. Enh, probably a little of both.

8. The Woke Right

James Lindsay, whose last name is a girl's name, spent the year trying to make "Woke Right" happen, with surprising success. Lindsay’s project is to slow the expansion of a “New” Right (maybe you’ve heard of it) which is currently ripping out the libertarian substrate that has defined the wing since WWII. This New Right has identarian grievances and seeks to obtain and wield political power in order to actually win for once. Lindsay finds this to be Marxist somehow, a mirror image of the woke left. It's incoherent, it's pernicious, but it's found a foothold among centrist IDW types who wish to signal to the mainstream that although they're anti-woke, they remain good little girls and boys.

7. “They're eating the cats”

In the most visible dissident cultural victory of the year, Captive Dreamer aka Martin single-handedly thrust Haitian migrants in Springfield, OH onto the national stage, culminating in Trump calling attention to their alleged culinary proclivities.

6. “This was rejected at the ballot box”

After Trump's victory, when someone posted something libtarded or insufficiently adversarial to the Left, you could simply hit them with this reply. We don't have to be afraid anymore. Trump won.

5. “Your body, my choice”

When you saw Nick Fuentes reciting these words with that lovable Cheshire cat grin, you knew this one was going to escape the e-right containment zone. It was simply a provocative gloat, "We won, you lost, go cry about it," but of course they all put on their handmaid bonnets and pretended like they were in danger of having their you-know-whats grabbed.

4. “We're going to do things to you that have never been done before”

This five-year-old throwaway quote from Trump during a Rush Limbaugh call-in segment took on a mythic quality this year. He was originally referring to Iran but it now applies to anyone who steps over the line, like people who say "Happy holidays."

3. The Crystal

A comic book fantasy trope where villains are imprisoned within crystals for 10,000 years is repurposed to punish the libs, and even more importantly, the center-rightists who are abetting them. We are using ancient Agarthan magic now, and you better get with the program or you're going into the crystal, too.

***Special last-minute addition***: 2b: H1Bs

We can all agree that we don’t want mass immigration, but what about “skilled” immigrants? Our tech overlords still want those guys. H1B discourse exploded onto the timeline on Christmas Day, and it’s the most fascinating Twitter phenomenon you’ve ever experienced. The world's most powerful people bickering with filthy anons, literal nobodies — a monster they created — revealing divergences and motivations that would be otherwise concealed, exposing dark machinations they don't even recognize as supervillainous, opening up deeper questions about what America is, what nations are for. It's unprecedented, that they are even bothering to respond to criticism instead of just doing what they want with a backroom handshake. That may still happen, but for now it's exhilarating to see it play out in the open like this, and over Christmas break, a weird liminal zone where we've got bellies full of pie and nothing to do but ive into the discourse, the only game in town, the one conversation that's happening. Beats watching TBS.

2a. Wifejak

Wifejak riffs on the idea that “My wife doesn’t think like me but instead of being annoyed, I love her ‘cause she’s my cute lil’ somebody.” A charitable explanation is that this is a way to express that every man just wants a nice mid gal to live a boring, stable life with. We love our wifejaks not despite their predictable nature and simple if inscrutable desires, but because of them. Haters object to men expressing satisfaction with their “mediocre” wives and “domesticated," even “feminized” lives, but they just don’t get it because they’ve never experienced the pleasure of a woman warming their cold feet in between their thighs.

1. Fight. Fight. Fight.

The image of a bloodied Trump rising with his fist in the air is the most iconic image of a U.S. president ever, maybe the hardest photo ever taken. It arguably was the tipping point for Trump's eventual victory. This moment didn't originate with the New Right and obviously resounded far more widely, but it reflected a new fighting spirit. We're not here to get a pat on the head from liberal consensus -- we're here to fight, and more importantly, to win.

Honorable mentions: Plapjack, Kamabla, JD Vance edits, Catfish girl, Eternal Trump protector Shinzo Abe.

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That’s it for the year’s biggest, basedest memes. Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments, and stay tuned for a roundup of 2024’s best longreads. Happy New Year!