embrace the penguin!Choose the right path and great purpose Rather than breathing in a crowd where you don’t belong, I chose to lose myself in my own solitude. Even if no one understands, this is my path. Be a warrior, embrace the penguin. Mr Viper On Friday, the White House posted an AI-generated photo of President Trump walking alongside a penguin holding an American flag, the pair marching toward mountains adorned with the Greenlandic flag. The caption read: "Embrace the penguin." Predictably, internet-illiterate leftists leapt to the conclusion that Trump thinks penguins live in Greenland (the only penguins native to the Northern Hemisphere live on the Galápagos Islands). But Trump’s penguin post wasn’t ignorant; it was a deliberate nod to a viral right-wing meme. And because the left can’t meme, they missed the reference entirely. For days, TikTok and Instagram have been flooded with a clip of a solitary penguin trudging toward distant mountains. The footage comes from Werner Herzog’s 2007 Antarctic documentary "Encounters at the End of the World." In the film, Herzog shows a lone penguin peeling away from the safety of its colony and heading inland — toward 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. That’s why it’s no mystery that young men on social media are resonating with the penguin. As one user put it: "The penguin spoke to something in all of us men. A desire for more. To push our limits. To see what we’re truly made of." The penguin lore actually predates the memes that sprang up last week. The penguin first became an emblem of masculinity thanks to a previous viral video featuring a drag queen interrogating an elementary-school-age boy about men wearing makeup. The child asserted that boys cannot wear makeup. When the drag queen asked the boy, "Who said?" the boy pointed at a paper penguin on the wall and exclaimed, "The penguin over there! " dura pat uz mīmiem savu purnu apdauzīs... |
