What does a penguin have to do with the Crusades, Joan of Arc, President Donald Trump, Alexander the Great, masculinity, Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, and the fight for Western Civilization itself? As of this week — quite a lot.
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.
EVILS OF COLLECTIVISM ARE JUST WARMING UP. ‘RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM’ BETTER BE READY
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.
Source:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trumps-penguin-breaks-internet-sends-left-frenzy