Garrison Davis

Very similar to Herzog's deranged penguin.

Russell left behind a wife of six years, but became a sort of nihilistic folk hero to overly online young men, especially among the online far-right on places like 4chan and Telegram, where he was dubbed Sky King.

Last August, a congressional Republican from Georgia, Mike Collins, who serves on the Republican Transportation Committee, posted a glowing multi-paragraph memorial for Richard Russell on the anniversary of his suicide, signing off the message with, Rest in peace, Sky King.

But the direct identification of the Trump administration with a suicidal penguin is a step farther.

The fascist appetite for death is well understood, but the death drive represents a usually subconscious desire to not only harm or kill others, but ultimately yourself.

an attempt to ease the tensions driving social life by returning to a prior inorganic state.

This desire can be channeled through the politics of fascism, which allow for violent, paranoid manifestations of repressed internal contradictions, which attempt to be resolved through death.

But fascism itself is a contradiction between a primitive war machine and a stable state apparatus.

And the way that tension is released is also self-destruction.

In the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, they discuss the ways in which fascism and totalitarianism differ.

They write that totalitarianism is a state affair made up of material components that overmanage society.

Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a state army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the state to the totalitarian stage.

Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative.

Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine.

When fascism builds itself a totalitarian state, it is not in the sense of a state army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the state."

This analysis from Deleuze and Guattari is building off of an essay by the French writer Paul Virilio called The Suicidal State, where Virilio argues that in fascism, the state is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal.

An evolution of the state that, quote, "...no longer pretends to be guided internally by reason and progress,"

but rather non-progress and terror, founded on the repulsion and fear of all development in this civil domain, unquote.

This repulsion and fear were manifested in the accelerated destruction of state institutions during the first few months of Trump's second term and Doge's scorched earth approach to slashing government agencies.

Virilio writes that during the disappearance of public service, quote, infrastructures of service are reduced as the wiretaps of the Wehrmacht are restored.