Garrison Davis

The political invocations of this footage largely ignore Werner Herzog's own speculation on why the penguin is marching towards the mountains in the far-off distance and its inevitable fate.

the penguin is not the Ubermensch.

The penguin will not achieve individual greatness at the summit of the mountain because it's never going to get there.

As friend of the pod Dan Olson so eloquently put it, the penguin is going to die.

Though the penguin does not bash its head on a rock, this separation from society is still an act of suicide.

The deranged penguin has literally turned its back on food, water, shelter, and the colony to die wandering towards mountains that it will never reach.

The Trump administration's embrace of this suicidal penguin as a that's literally me figure is a shockingly open display of fascism's relation to the death drive.

It's just so naked to make your mascot a symbol of suicidal defiance against perceived cultural norms.

They're doing a first is tragedy, twice is farce for fascist death emblems.

The Nazis get the skull.

We get a fucking penguin.

But the Penguin is not the first modern American suicidal folk hero.

The killdozer rampage of public destruction, which ended in the suicide of the perpetrator, has been a mascot for the libertarian right for over two decades.

And in 2018, a 28-year-old airport ground service agent named Richard Russell hijacked an empty plane at SeaTac to fly over Mount Rainier before killing himself by purposely crashing the plane.

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.