Vibing in the Panther Den

Panther Den (yes, that Panther Den) has a lot to tell us about the future of the right

A version of this essay appears in this month’s Spectator World, available on newstands and online.

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“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 mobilise the young even as it confounds and confuses the 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 lives on today, 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 Thankfully, all four episodes, running to about an hour, have been archived online, so you can watch them at your leisure.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 Tik Tok 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 shoulder while they swipe interminably all night, you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about.

There are recognisable human beings in the Panther Den Show—people like Beardy Beardson, Patrick Casey, Nick Fuentes, Baked Alaska and Barron Trump, almost all of some political importance—and then there are cartoon characters like Big Chungus (a fat Bugs Bunny), Spooderman (a retarded 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 right, becomes a dancing triangle and seduces NY Rep. Alexandra Occasio Cortez—who has been “Aryanified,” giving her blonde hair, A10 blue eyes and a large pair of breasts—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 could be forgiven, of course, for not taking Panther Den seriously. You might even be repelled by the show. 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. 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’s this meme is fully about, but it makes sense to know Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA have been heavily criticised 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.