No, No. He's Got A Point

Origin

The line is from The Emperor’s New Groove, the Disney animated comedy released in 2000. In the scene, Kronk — the amiable, dim henchman — is deciding whether to dispose of the emperor, and the film visualises his conscience literally: a shoulder angel and a shoulder devil appear and argue the case.

The devil makes his pitch. The angel starts to object, then stops, reconsiders, and concedes:

“No, no. He’s got a point.”

The joke is that the moral authority in the scene simply gives up and agrees with the villain, and Kronk is left with no guidance at all.

What it means / how it’s used

The meme is used to concede that an opposing or absurd argument is actually correct. The setup presents a position the poster would be expected to reject; the punchline is the reluctant admission that it holds up.

Its main modes:

• Agreeing with a point made by someone you were arguing against.
• Conceding that a ridiculous idea is technically sound.
• Fandom versions where a villain’s reasoning is uncomfortably defensible.
• Self-directed versions admitting the poster’s own counter-argument fails.

It sits in the same family as He’s Out of Line but He’s Right, but the emphasis differs: that format concedes a point despite bad delivery, while this one concedes a point despite being on the wrong side of it.

How it spread

The film had been quotable for two decades before the scene became a format. The first documented meme use was a text post on Reddit on August 9, 2019, and the established image-and-text format appeared on November 9, 2019.

It exploded through late November 2019. A tweet on November 11, 2019 carried it to a much larger audience, and on November 28, 2019 alone three separate Reddit posts took roughly 30,000, 25,000+, and 1,000+ upvotes across different subreddits. By early 2020 it was a standard reaction format.

The Emperor’s New Groove has had an unusually strong internet afterlife. It underperformed on release, following a famously troubled production, and has since been adopted as a cult favourite — with Kronk in particular generating several separate meme formats.

Notable examples & variations

• Two-panel setups pairing an argument with the concession.
• Versions where the angel and devil are labelled as competing positions.
• Fandom uses conceding an antagonist’s logic.
• Text-only quotation, which is extremely common.
• Crops of the shoulder angel alone as a “fair enough” reaction.

Legacy / cultural impact

The phrase has become general internet vocabulary for a reluctant concession, used far beyond any reference to the film.

Its usefulness is structural. Online argument rarely has a good way to signal partial agreement — positions tend to be treated as all-or-nothing — and this format gives people a light, self-deprecating way to admit the other side landed one without abandoning their own position entirely.