Garrison Davis

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I'm Garrison Davis.

Amidst attempts by President Trump to seize control of Greenland last month during the World Economic Forum, administration officials started posting images of a penguin.

On January 23rd, the White House shared an artificial image of Trump walking hand in flipper alongside a penguin holding an American flag across a snowy tundra towards mountains bearing the flag of Greenland.

The caption read, embrace the penguin.

The flags look like poorly photoshopped stock images while the rest of the image appears to be generated by AI.

Immediately, this post sparked ridicule across various online platforms based on the fact that there aren't any penguins in Greenland.

Erm, penguins don't live in the Northern Hemisphere, save for zoos and the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador.

So, haha, the foolish Trump has been bested once again in the arena of facts and logic.

Except this White House penguin post was actually in reference to a TikTok meme that was currently going super viral.

In mid-January, remixed footage from Werner Herzog's Arctic documentary, Encounters at the End of the World,

Featuring a lone penguin breaking off from the flock and marching towards some icy mountains, started spreading around TikTok, synced to an organ cover of Le Morte Jour, a song which has been adopted by far-right anti-immigration groups in Europe the past few years.

This combination of music and footage soon spread to other short-form video platforms, like Instagram Reels, with the featherless subject being dubbed the Lonely Penguin.

On January 20th, a more explicitly political version went kind of viral, with over 20,000 likes, with the addition of a Friedrich Nietzsche quote, "'I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and impossible,' unquote."

with the caption, save Europe, hashtag remigration.

That same day, an edit with 36,000 likes by the TikTok account, EpicHistory32, captioned, do the hard thing,

played the documentary footage with Herzog's narration, overlaid with images of historical figures and pop culture characters like Alexander the Great, Caesar, Joan of Arc, King Richard I, King Baldwin IV, Genghis Khan, Aragorn, Jon Snow, Luke Skywalker, and Spider-Man?

An op-ed in Fox News by the daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy referred to these as quote-unquote Western heroes.

To quote this op-ed, in the film, Herzog shows a lone penguin peeling away from the safety of its colony and heading inland towards certain death, according to Herzog.

But the online right saw something else.