← It Could Happen Here
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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
- [00:05]
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- [00:36]
Podcast Host
Cool Zone Media.
- [00:40]
Garrison Davis
Welcome to It Could Happen Here. 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 23, the White House shared an artificial image of Trump walking hand and 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 in 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 Mortejour, 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 20, a more explicitly political version went kinda viral with over 20,000 likes with the addition of a Frederick Nietzsche quote I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and impossible with the caption Save Europe 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, refer 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. Users, mostly male, saw the Penguin as a powerful rebuke of secular modernity. They interpreted the Penguin not as lost, but as a free thinker. To them, he was rejecting the colony. In today's terms, that means rejecting secular postmodern orthodoxy and marching toward a greater purpose. So though Herzog in this documentary refers to this penguin as deranged, as a meme. Users identified with the Penguin as a symbol of masculine rebellion against what they view as mainstream culture and the solitary trek up the mountains as a metaphor for the struggle of individual greatness. Clips of men on outdoor adventures and climbing mountains is Zarathustra style with the caption be the Penguin spread wildly online, the Most popular reaching 4.2 million likes and other penguin themed videos getting hundreds of thousands of likes. The Herzog penguin meme piggybacked and partially merged with an older right wing penguin based meme video from two years ago of a drag queen asking a kid about boys wearing makeup. The kid responds that boys can't wear makeup. So the drag queen asks the kid who told him that and this confused child looks around and sees a cartoon penguin on the wall, points to it and says, that Penguin over there, 618,000 likes. What do you think about men who wear makeup?
- [05:17]
Podcast Host
You can't put it into boys.
- [05:20]
Garrison Davis
Who said.
- [05:23]
Documentary Narrator
The penguin over there?
- [05:25]
Garrison Davis
The Penguin. This video and this figure of the Penguin has since been used as a symbol for masculine resistance to the LGBTQ agenda. And this new Penguin meme pertains to tap into a uniquely masculine urge, as explained by this tiktoker who racked up 42,000 likes.
- [05:53]
TikToker/Commentator
I hate to be the one to say it, but the Penguin didn't make it. But does that mean he died in vain? No. His life was not a tragedy. It was an inspiration. He left a legacy most of us could only hope for. It would be easy to quote Nietzsche here, but that wouldn't do it justice. The Penguin spoke to something inside all of us men, a desire for more, to push our limits and see what we're truly made of. Sometimes our purpose is the impact that we leave behind.
- [06:24]
Garrison Davis
On January 23, the Department of War rapid response account posted Be a Warrior, Embrace the Penguin with an AI generated image of five men wearing the uniform of each military branch walking towards the mountains alongside a penguin. Secretary Kennedy posted a Make America Healthy Again edit of the penguin meme with the organ music over an AI video of RFK Jr. And a penguin walking to the mountains. On screen text reads the mainstream made us sick. Choose the healthier path. The Health and Human Services government account quote tweeted this video with the caption locking in after watching that penguin edit unquote. Soy occupied government. An anti immigration advocacy account created a viral AI image of a large, evidently prosperous colony of penguins gathered under the banner of multiculturalism. It reads that as a giant banner juxtaposed to a lone penguin facing the mountains and a sign reading Re Migration Now. Across the pond, the London mayoral candidate for the far right Reform Party in the uk, Lila Cunningham, copied Trump's version of the penguin meme with an artificial image of her holding hands with a penguin walking towards some snowy mountains surrounding the Tower Bridge in London. The caption reads Choose a new path for London before it's too late. The last penguin post we'll consider is a video edit from the Department of Homeland Security. It starts like many of the viral TikTok and reels videos with footage and narration from Herzog's documentary, which I will finally play here.
- [08:14]
Documentary Narrator
But one of them caught our eye. The one in the center. He would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards we saw him heading straight towards the mountains some 70km away. Dr. Ainley explained that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains. But why?
- [08:55]
Garrison Davis
After the narration cuts out, the music continues as a fancam style montage plays Trump military helicopters, SWAT style home raids and ice and Border Patrol arresting people. The video is captioned Americans have always known why. In response to Herzog's query, this post from the DHS asserts that part of the essence of America is breaking away from the herd and forging your own path. Those who don't understand Trump's desire to control Greenland at the risk of further damaging our geopolitical standing, just suffer from herd mentality and will never be strong enough to take the kind of risks that are core to the existence of this country. On January 24th, the White House posted the Penguin does not concern himself with the opinions of those who cannot comprehend For Trump, Venezuela, Greenland Imperial expansion is an existential mission to achieve some mythic frontier greatness. And only true Americans can understand why. The Fox News penguin op ed by Christian nationalist Sean Duffy's daughter. Wow, that's a nightmare. Sentence reads quote For Trump, the penguin is an apt symbol for the President's decade long fight against the radical left. Everything Trump does is opposed by the global power brokers. Even the President's push to obtain Greenland has been fanatically opposed by hysterical European elites. America was built by penguins, and by that I mean rebels, pilgrims, frontier men and women, conquistadores and cowboys. We are a nation founded by risk takers who left the colony for the mountains. We are descended from men who suffered and died to carve civilization out of wilderness. It is our inheritance. Unquote. Now, what this DHS penguin video doesn't include, but has already been alluded to by some of the other videos I've played, is the actual context of this lone bird's journey and its sad fate. We will return to discuss penguin insanity after this ad break.
- [11:20]
Hans Charles
Welcome to the A Building. I'm Hans Charles.
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Armenalek Lumumba
I'm inalec Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr have both been assassinated and black America was at a breaking point. Rioting and protest broke out on an.
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Hans Charles
Unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia. At Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. And a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
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Armenalek Lumumba
To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying.
- [11:54]
Hans Charles
1960, 1968. The murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
- [11:59]
Documentary Narrator
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
- [12:05]
Armenalek Lumumba
This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
- [12:13]
Hans Charles
Listen to the A building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [12:21]
Armenalek Lumumba
Foreign.
- [12:24]
Garrison Davis
We'Re back though. The 2026 version of the penguin meme was dubbed the Lonely Penguin. Earlier meme videos of this documentary footage from years past carried the titles Deranged Penguin or Nihilist Penguin. Before the footage of this lone penguin plays in the documentary, Herzog asks a penguin expert if they can experience insanity.
- [12:51]
Documentary Narrator
Is there such thing as insanity among penguins? I try to avoid a definition of insanity or derangement. I don't mean that a penguin might believe he he or she is lending Napoleon Bonaparte. But could they just go crazy because they've had enough of their colony? Well, I've Never seen a penguin bashing its head against a rock. They do get disoriented. They end up in places they shouldn't be, long way from the ocean.
- [13:32]
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.
- [13:45]
Documentary Narrator
One of these disoriented or deranged penguins showed up at the New harbor diving camp, already some 80km away from where it should be. And here he's heading off into the interior of the vast continent. With 5,000km ahead of him, he's heading towards certain death.
- [14:13]
Garrison Davis
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 as 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 Sea Tac to fly over Mount Rainier before killing himself by purposefully 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. 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 over manage 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 but of a war machine taking over the state, unquote. 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 the civil domain. 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. Colonial geometry of decolonialization, unquote. So as the federal government rescinds public services, the everyday presence of the federal government is reduced to masked armed agents in the streets disappearing our neighbors and shooting civilians, while the president fights in court for the ability to deploy the military against American citizens within our own territory. During the tension of total war or total peace, Ferrilio says the system expands and reproduces itself. A material process without an end, but no longer without limits. To quote the Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Svatli, the suicide state quote is not just a manager of death. It is rather the ongoing agent of its own catastrophe, the maker of its own Explosion, to be more precise. This new state mixes the death management of entire sectors of its own population with an ongoing and risky flirtation with its own self destruction. Unquote.
- [20:22]
Hans Charles
Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles Armenalek Lumumba.
- [20:26]
Armenalek Lumumba
It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr have both been assassinated and black America was at a breaking point. Rioting and protest broke out on an.
- [20:35]
Hans Charles
Unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia. At Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. And a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
- [20:52]
Armenalek Lumumba
To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying.
- [20:57]
Hans Charles
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
- [21:01]
Documentary Narrator
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
- [21:08]
Armenalek Lumumba
This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should and it will blow your mind.
- [21:15]
Hans Charles
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:27]
Garrison Davis
For. His idea of the suicidal state emerges as this new mode of governing to solve the crisis of post war liberalism in Germany after World War I, as well as risked by the United States after each of our many wars. Quote One of the keys to the present situation is on one side, the overly informed status of experts of the system, and on the other, the under informed status of all those who are supposedly thinking outside of it. Verlio says that the experts no longer know how to use their hoards of information except to gain money and status by continually adding to their body of work. Meanwhile, the outsiders produce the political and cultural undercurrent of modern folklore and ordinary life. But this limp dichotomy cannot last for very long on its own. So Verrilio proposes the new emergence of a third category of people who make use of information for an end, the ultimate end. The directors of the suicidal state, while the outsiders, ideologues and artists simply try to simulate catharsis. By contrast, the third category, the suicidal state, it self produces a feeling for the real better. It aims to retain the exclusivity of its production. This feeling is a contempt for and a hatred of the everyday. To paraphrase Virilio, the fascist project exploits man's alienation from his environment through pollution, economic insecurity, emotional insecurity, desocialization, and seeks to replace any legitimate grievance he has with society with a more repulsive and expressive force, the fear of society, which is superimposed on a New military schema of total war and internal invasion, all towards a nihilistic end of dropping the bomb on ourselves. The oscillation of external and internal destruction epitomized by the death drive is mirrored by the imperial boomerang, where the violence of colonial expansion is forced to return to its homeland. Once home, the drive remains, resulting in a war on society directly or through other means. But this is a war on its own people, or as Trump would say, the enemy within. To quote a paragraph from A Thousand Plateaus, so called total war seems less a state undertaking than an undertaking of a war machine that appropriates the state and channels it into a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the state itself. There is in fascism a realized nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian state, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of escape, fascism is constructed on an intense line of escape, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were bringing at once. Wedding bells and death, including their own death and the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish, but that their undertaking would be resumed all across Europe, all over the world, throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager everything, you have every hand to stake your own death against the death of others. Unquote. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari quote an excerpt from Klaus Mann's 1936 novel Mephisto, which contains fascist speeches and ordinary conversations from Nazi Germany. The quote they include is eerily similar to the visuals of Trump as the suicidal Penguin quote. Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives. In reality, we are not marching forward, we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fuhrer is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets who have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him, unquote. Deleuze and Guattari then write, suicide is presented not as a punishment, but as the crowning glory of the death of others. The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on vague so called ideological determinations. We prefer to inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as. As in the most absurd of conversations. They always contained the stupid and repugnant cry, long live death. Even at the economic level, where the Arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction. Virilio calls this a psychosis which governs its entire politics of production. And he writes that the replacement of the American industries of the automobile and the cinema with the military industrial complex does not involve a rational, functional or useful choice, but rather entirely psychological or rather psychopathological. It stems from contempt for and abandonment of productive rapport with the milieu. Every investment is made to escape from it. For contemporary reference, go check out the stock price of Palantir. And on the larger economic and international level, Trump's tariffs, his trade wars and the self destruction of the United States geopolitical standing are all expressions of this suicidal state in action. Forillio claims the state of total war, where the economy of war has become the economy of peace, is facilitated by a transformation in the American sense of freedom, where quote, unquote, the free as a subject, as in the land of the free, quote is no longer properly spoken of. As a citizen, he is an anonymous organism without culture, without society and without memory. This figure has no historical precedent. Assistance has become survival, non assistance a condemnation to death. All liberation henceforth has for him invariably the appearance of death, of the end, suicide or murder, unquote. This sort of freedom from social services, freedom from the state, freedom from assistance as a movement of the death drive also provides insight into people's willingness to and even desire to vote against their own material interests, especially when their political struggle has turned against society itself. Only in transformation of ordinary social life into the horrific in the minds of the populace can the fascist quote find their surest means of governing the legitimization of his politics and military strategies, and right up to the end, far from weakening the repulsive nature of his powers, the ruins, the horrors, the crimes, the chaos of total war will generally only increase in scope. In Hitler's 1945 telegram 71 he writes, if the war is lost, may the nation perish. Here Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order to complete the destruction of his own people by obliterating the last remaining sources of its life support system, civil reserves of every kind, potable water, fuel, provisions. This is the normal outcome of the politics of dialectical retreat. From the man who had written, the idea of protection haunts and fulfills life, unquote. Fascism hijacks the mechanism of evolutionary and revolutionary escape and reverts it into a mechanism of destruction. Instead of resolving crises, it produces constant crisis for it to feed off of, forming as deleuze and Guattari say a war machine instead of resonating in a state apparatus, a war machine that no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction. To quote a thousand plateaus. This is war not for conquest or revolution, but war as its own end. The hollowing out of public institutions and social services, the divestment from the milieu of life leads people to turn towards the suicidal state as the only force of movement resting on, as Forilio says, quote, the advanced exploitation of our instincts for death. A new totalitarian state defined by the constant ascent of statistics toward planetary death. Crime and madness will no longer be the defects the madman and the assassin are, are the legitimate children engendered and recognized by the suicidal state. And what phenomenon has risen in the United States the past few years? The conspiracy theorist and the assassin? The embrace of total war and the campaign of civil fear necessitates a break from sanity and the bizarre strangeness of means that inevitably result in in a self destructive end. Virilio claims there is an insanity at the heart of the fascist project. The imaginary potential of the fascist state arises. Quote from a finished world where insanity has become the goal of order, the very product of organization. There's a quote from Goebbels to one of his aides, Prince Frederick Christian the world in which Hitler moves is a world of absolute fate. A world in which even success makes no sense. It's not a mistake that the White House has cast itself as a lost penguin marching to its own death. They know the absurdity of their replies. They know the world looks upon them as insane. They know that they'll never reach the Make America Great Again mountain. The self destruction ice, the tariffs, the broken treaties are not for any greater purpose. The means are the end. This is total war, the psychological purpose of which is terror, which for the fascist is synonymous with peace. But let's not forget how Hitler and Goebbels finally resolved their contradictions.
- [33:24]
Podcast Host
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.
- [33:43]
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- [34:12]
Podcast Host
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.