Let’s start with the image. It shows Emmanuel Macron embracing what looks like a waxy, AI-generated Neanderthal woman in a courtroom, under the stiff gaze of a judge. It doesn’t look like Brigitte Macron. Not even vaguely. But that’s not the point.
Dugin knows it doesn’t look like her. So does Candace Owens, who picked it up and ran with it. The point was never resemblance. The point was to throw something ugly and let the crowd fill in the blanks. The aim isn’t satire, it’s insult. Then someone objects. Legal action follows. And without fail, they all fall back on the same line: it’s just a joke. Except it never was.
This is the simplistic right-wing dialectic in miniature: launch an attack, wrap it in irony, then scream censorship when there’s blowback. They want the offence. They need the reaction. The meme itself is meaningless. Just another piece of AI detritus pumped into the bloodstream of the culture war. What matters is that it lands. That it provokes. That it sets the scene for a bigger story: the West can’t take a joke, liberalism is collapsing, the traditional world is rising.
Let’s pause on Brigitte Macron. Because this isn’t the first time the far right has decided she must be something else. There’s been a persistent thread across reactionary channels (Telegram, YouTube, even bits of the US culture war fringe) that Brigitte Macron is a man. That her marriage is a cover-up. That her femininity is fraudulent.
So we should ask: why is the far right so obsessed with that idea?
At root, it’s not about Brigitte Macron. It’s about the panic that sets in when gender, authority, and visibility stop obeying the old rules. An older woman, publicly visible, married to a younger man—already, that breaks the script. But if she’s also composed, intelligent, politically present? Unforgivable. The far right needs gender to be rigid. Needs women to look a certain way. Needs relationships to follow the order of command. If they don’t, the whole thing must be fake. It must be a lie.
Calling Brigitte Macron a man isn’t just a schoolyard jibe. It’s a cultural counterattack. It turns the ambiguity and complexity of modern life into something to be feared and laughed at. It’s the same logic that drives transphobia, misogyny, and the obsession with “traditional values.” It says: if I don’t recognise it, it shouldn’t exist.
And that makes her the perfect canvas for their story of Western decline. In Dugin’s hands, she becomes symbolic of everything they claim is wrong with liberal civilisation: confusion, inversion, weakness. The image doesn’t look like her because it doesn’t need to. It only needs to conjure the reaction. To push the buttons. And when those buttons get pushed (when people get angry) they declare victory. It’s juvenile. Which is exactly the point.
This is what Dugin does best: turn farce into metaphysics. The meme isn’t just a jab—it’s a parable. A low-resolution AI smear becomes symbolic proof of civilisational decline. In his schema, liberalism produces confusion, inversion, and gender chaos. Memes like this don’t need to be accurate because truth, in Dugin’s worldview, is not empirical, it’s mythic, symbolic, orthodoxy-bound. That’s what makes the Neanderthal such a potent device. As Stefanos Geroulanos shows in The Invention of Prehistory, the prehistoric is never neutral: it’s a projection site, a blank canvas for ideological fantasy. The Neanderthal becomes shorthand for disorder, degeneracy, and regression, a figure onto which civilisational decline can be mapped. It isn’t supposed to look like Brigitte Macron. It’s meant to feel like everything the West has lost: clarity, order, tradition. That’s why it works on his audience. Not as argument, but as incantation.
The closing note, as ever with Dugin, is civilisational. It always is. The West is finished. Russia is beyond it. The joke becomes prophecy. The meme becomes evidence. The courtroom becomes a stage for multipolar triumphalism. If it all seems grotesque, performative, and ridiculous. Well that’s the plan.
This isn’t about free speech. It’s about using cruelty as a political tool, then pretending to be shocked when someone takes it seriously. It’s about making the world unliveable for anyone who doesn’t fit the reactionary mould. The AI does the image generation. Dugin just supplies the ideology.
The joke was never funny. It was never meant to be.
