WASHINGTON – What happened on that Monday night in Phillips Hall was this: Justin Diamond decided to run for president.

Justin is a freshman who rose to dramatic popularity when he decided to park himself next to the George Washington statue in Kogan and play the accordion for 6 hours, announcing his plan to a) abolish the student government and, b) ask students to write him in for student body president.

I met him in Gelman Starbucks for coffee. I messaged him on Facebook beforehand. “I’m always down to talk,” he said.

It’s a balmy day in March. It’s late on Day Three of Justin’s campaign. Today is judgment day. Polls close at 9 pm and soon after that, we’ll find out who our next president is, along with the rest of the other student government positions, who nobody (honestly) cares about. The point of an election is to choose a leader. Everything else is just a game.

Today Justin comes out of the Starbucks to meet us. He’s got square-framed eyeglasses and grid-patterned cargo shorts and socks to his ankles. He sits with my friend Pat and I. Justin offers us a cup of coffee from inside.

“The Student Association is a cesspool of political violence,” he says.

It’s shaping up to be another bizarre GW election. My sophomore year, in the spring of 2016, the student body election was a catastrophe. One candidate accused the other of stalking and threatening him to get him to drop out of the race. The other candidate sued the first one, and the school-wide embarrassment concluded when both candidates became disqualified and a guy who never even ran for president, became president.

Then seven months later in November of 2016, elections were confirmed, on a global scale, to be fucking stupid.

And so some months later, we had another student association election where somebody was actually elected, and that was great, but nobody voted, and then stuff just generally went on and got worse. This year looked like it was shaping up to be that way too. I like SJ Matthews, and I know she’s running. A couple of other people are running, I would guess, but the only recognition they usually get is if and when you identify them from their poster, taped to the walls in front of the Panera. Or yeah, if there’s a stalking controversy. But this year, it all looked normal.

And then came the memes.

Spongebob memes, Star Wars memes, Wolf Blitzer memes, Wallace and Gromit memes. All over the place. Relentless memes.

The memes made him famous. But Justin Diamond is a Serious Man. He speaks with conviction and purpose. He is honest and true. He has strong opinions about the worthlessness of bureaucracy and the futility of our process. He took no money because he doesn’t believe in it (and also he can’t get it, as a write-in). He says he’s going to donate the $15,000 stipend you get if you win to charity. But he is entirely apolitical. He wouldn’t tell me what he thought of the colonial vs. hippo controversy (just google it), because wait a second, who cares? Isn’t the sole tenant of his platform the deletion of student government? If he’s elected, there’s not going to be an SA, right?

There seems to be some appeal for that. It seems to be a winning issue. People here encounter far too many politicians in their daily lives. They don’t want to see any more.

“People can tell when you’re being disingenuous. People are kind of waking up to the fact that they’ve become so desensitized to that sort of politician at GW. And somebody asked me, what makes you not a politician? My answer is, well, a politician wouldn’t abolish the position they were running for.”

“Very Cincinnatus of you,” Pat said.

“Very George Washington,” Justin said.

“Is that why you came here?” I said.

“Not really. Everything just came into place.”

…

On that night in Phillips, Justin heard his friend say, “I hate the SA.” And Justin agreed. And Justin ran on that idea.

It seems like, maybe he’s winning?

Now it could be possible, I suppose, that my interpretation is confirmation bias. I am a senior and I mainly talk to seniors, around 65% of the time. And as I said earlier, less than a third of the school votes (and a lot of those folks are probably not seniors).

And Justin is barely a candidate at all. He has sincere and weighty opinions about the SA, and he knows exactly how to abolish it, but he’s an anti-candidate. Voting for him is kind of like a person who hates porcelain voting for a bull in a china shop.

This is the thing, though: that’s why Justin is poised to win. Now, I’m not going to pretend to be an authority on the politics of this specific election(or any of them). I have absolutely no idea who is going to win, and there’s a 50% chance that I won’t even recognize the winner when they’re announced.

But I do know that his appeal is directed towards the very sorts of people who wouldn’t even consider voting in the first place. People that just like memes. His appeal is to freshman and seniors: that’s how you win a student election at this school, in this city, at this time.

He’s a symbol, the sort of figure we’re ready to unleash on a school, and a country, which has done such a shitty job at making life easier for students, or if you want to go a step farther, has destroyed student life altogether. Justin’s campaign isn’t just a joke. Abolishing the SA isn’t just a bit. Its a message, sent from freshmen disillusioned with the promise of GW, and what it ended up delivering. And sent from nihilistic seniors, who hate the school, the last class who went to GW for Barack Obama, who realized over the last four years that maybe none of the things we thought mattered, actually matter?

So even if he doesn’t win, Justin has succeeded in one thing. GW students are mostly liberal and pretty actively political, but Justin managed to convince everyone to view the SA election for what it is: a big meme. People don’t want a good president here. They don’t want a Kennedy or a Roosevelt or a Clinton, they just want a meme.

And so, abolish the SA. The revolution will not be televised. Apparently, it’ll be on a memes page.