'Suicide rightism' and the penguin
Is it based or soy to kill yourself?
Greetings from Read Max HQ. This week, a column about the Trump administration’s obsession with suicidal heroes. But some housekeeping items first!
If you live in New York or nearby, I’ll be doing a book talk with Leif Weatherby about his great book Language Machines at 4 p.m. this coming Thursday Feb. 5. Leif’s book (Henry Farrell has a good précis and review here; here’s another from Derek Neal) has been very influential in how I think about L.L.M.s as cultural technologies, and I’m excited to talk to him about language, meaning, slop, and other Read Max obsessions. You can register here.
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Way back in September 2016, the blogger and speechwriter Michael Anton wrote a now-famous essay for The Claremont Review called “The Flight 93 Election,” in which he argued that voting for Donald Trump was akin to “charg[ing] the cockpit” of a hijacked plane in the same manner as the heroic passengers of Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania instead of hitting its intended target in D.C. on September 11. The risks are high--you might die; the plane might crash--but if you remain in your seat, an even worse fate is guaranteed.
2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
I wouldn’t personally endorse it, but “The Flight 93 Election” has been useful over the years for understanding a rational core of MAGA. For people like Anton, voting for Trump is a logical, justifiable, even sane choice: the high-risk unknown outcome over the guaranteed bad one. I’ll admit, as an argument, it’s overwrought and hysterical, and in real life Flight 93 did crash and kill everyone on board. But it’s a metaphor, right? The point is that Trump offers a high-risk alternative to a deadly flight path, not that it would be cool and heroic to crash a plane in the middle of a field and die…
… Right?
The odd afterlife of “Sky King”
“Planes,” for whatever reason, loom large in the American political imaginary. In addition to “The Flight 93 Election” and its inescapable liberal mirror--the Will McPhail cartoon of a passenger on a commercial flight standing up and saying “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”--we have Richard Russell, the 28-year-old ground crew worker who stole a DeHavilland turbo-prop plane from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in 2018. After flying for an hour with an escort of two F-15s scrambled from Portland Air National Guard Base and chatting amiably with air traffic control, he crashed it into Puget Sound, killing himself.
Russell’s plane heist was not an explicitly political act. The closest thing to a motivation for the baffling sequence of events provided by Russell or those who knew him was bad working conditions and low pay at Sea-Tac--but neither Russell nor his co-workers seemed to find such an explanation particularly satisfying. Russell himself told A.T.C. “I’m just a broken guy, got a few screws loose I guess, never really knew it until now.”
And yet Russell, re-anointed “Sky King,” has become an odd, semi-ironic folk hero in the years since his suicide to the disaffected, highly online young right-wing men who make up among Trump’s most vocal and dependable demographics. To these guys--Channers, groypers, aging Gamergaters, anime avatars, X.com blue checks, etc.--Russell’s stunt resonates as an act of courage and agency undertaken by a man otherwise overlooked, thwarted, and frustrated by life. Images from his final flight, edited into motivational posters, are prevalent online:
The cult of Sky King is subscribed to widely enough that last year Georgia Republican congressman Mike Collins--or, presumably, one of his weird little staffers--tweeted a tribute to Russell from his X account:
Between Flight 93 and Sky King, the Republican Party now enjoys in circulation two prominent and horrible plane-crash tragedies as allegories for its politics, which seems like too many deaths by plane crash for a political party? And where “The Flight 93 Election” is legibly rational and defensibly logical, offering up “likely suicide” only as an alternative to “certain death,” the Sky King mythos reduces to no such rationality: It takes spectacular suicide as a heroic act in and of itself.
The “Nietzschean penguin” wants 🫵 you to kill yourself
Online, among the tech right and groyper true believers, Trumpism in its late stages has devolved into what X.com user @VivianKesandre calls “suicide rightism”: An ideology whose cultural touchstones and heroic myths reflect values not of calculated risk or noble self-sacrifice but of literal suicide--pointless, sensational acts of total self-destruction.
Most recently prominent of these is a penguin. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted an edited clip from the Werner Herzog documentary Encounters at the End of the World that had recently found sudden viral success on TikTok: A lone, broken penguin, breaking away from its pack and waddling purposefully toward certain death, the Transantarctic Mountains looming in the distance. “But why?” Herzog asks.
On TikTok, the penguin was imbued with the same quasi-ironic inspirational qualities as Sky King. (A number of videos of mountain hikes ending in great views were posted with the caption: “Be that penguin.”) And one can imagine a relatively innocuous U.S. government adaptation: Americans love the idea of crazy dreamers, hardy individualists, and maverick visionaries, waddling towards the horizon against the advice of busybodies.
But in general they like those stories to end with success and accomplishment, not death by exposure. “Americans have always known ‘why,’” D.H.S. tweeted, as though presenting a patriotic version of Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign. But its version of the clip ended not with a spectacular vista validating the penguin’s dreams, but with a fancam of Donald Trump and the militarized federal law enforcement he has unleashed as a murderous masked militia on ordinary people around the country.
As with Russell, and again unlike “Flight 93,” the choice here is not between high risk heroism and passive decline, but between certain life and certain death. You can dress up Sky King and the penguin in whatever Nietzschean self-help dross you want, but the Trump administration is, as always, happy to make the subtext text: The penguin rocks because it’s killing itself in beautiful full-color video. Just like us.
Killdozer destroyed a town but he inspired a lot of people so, it;s impossible to say if hes bad or not
I am not so far removed from being 17 that I can’t recognize, dimly, the romantic appeal of stealing a plane just to do a barrel roll, or the rousing pull of a visionary penguin heading into the unknown. But the vaguely apolitical, ironically motivational “heroism” of Sky King and the Nietzschean penguin are only the most palatable fables of Suicide Rightism.
Much less defensible are “heroes” like, say, Yukio Mishima, the Japanese writer and ultranationalist who committed ritual suicide after a failed military coup, or Marvin Heemeyer, also known as “Killdozer,” the muffler repairman who drove an armored tank through Granby, Colo., destroying 13 buildings before shooting himself in the head.
Mishima, at least, wrote great novels. The best thing you can say about Heemeyer, a small-town paranoid crank who attributed property disputes and bureaucratic red tape to a grand conspiracy aimed directly at him, is that he was lucky enough not to kill anyone during his daylong tantrum. And yet Killdozer has developed a sizable army of sensitive apologists who see him as an icon of petulant, self-destructive libertarianism.
Killdozer has a more explicitly political valence than Sky King,1 and Heemeyer was a much more clearly aggressive and dangerous figure than Russell, even if their respective joyrides resulted in the same body counts. But to the commandos of the Suicide Right their stories are effectively the same: These were intelligent, reasonable men pushed to their limits. What else were they supposed to do besides take their own lives in eye-popping fashion?
Soyicide Rightism
One of the striking things about Suicide Rightism is how soy it is, how mewling, wounded, and self-pitying. For all that Russell and Heemeyer are celebrated by their apologists for their (warped expressions of) agency, they are ultimately regarded as victims, men thwarted by an uncaring and corrupt society.
The idea of many tweets about the heroic suicides is that you should be able to identify with them, and not as crazy dreamers but as depressed and resentful losers. The aspirational figures of Suicide Rightism are a guy so anhedonic that he felt compelled to leave behind his family for the sake of an hourlong plane ride and a guy so antisocial he built a tank to visit ruin on the local General Store.
Fascism is a literally suicidal ideology, one obsessed with purging the body politic to the point of total self-negation. What’s funny about Suicide Rightism is how direct it is about all this. You don’t need some big theoretical analysis; there’s no level of abstraction to move through. It’s just pretty straightforwardly pro-suicide. I don’t think you have to be a professional psychologist to understand why dramatic, attention-grabbing suicide might be appealing to semi-employed guys who spend 14 hours a day watching Asmongold or whatever. Its promise is that all the pain and frustration you feel can be visited on the people you believe authored it--and then ended. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is school-shooter ideology.
And the Suicide Right case for Trump is that he gets this. The D.H.S. tweet of the penguin meme belies any positive vision of MAGA. The reward for supporting him isn’t an American renaissance, it’s universal oblivion. He and I.C.E. and the C.B.P. are the armored bulldozer giving you the chance to kill immigrants and liberal white women and male nurses before you put a gun in your mouth. His administration is the plane, just waiting for you to get inside. I guess 2024 was a Flight 93 election, after all. Turns out we got the certain death.
Though I’d note that when A.T.C. told Russell he could probably get a job at Alaska Air if he landed the plane, Russell responded “Yeah right! Nah, I’m a white guy.” It’s not evidence of anything but a mordant sense of humor, but it’s also a response that wouldn’t harm Russell’s reputation among the groyper bloc.
if i was on that plane it woulnd't have gone down like it did
One thing that shouldn't be understated in histories of digital media is how much the concept of "Grand Theft Auto stars" has shaped our auto-elimination fantasies.