Ruminations on that DHS Penguin Tweet

0:00 On January 23rd, 2026, the Twitter account DHS Gov tweeted,

0:05 "Americans have always known why." The attached

0:08 video was a clip from Werner Herzog's documentary,

0:11 Encounters at the End of the World, a segment that features a penguin breaking

0:14 from the collective and walking off towards the distant mountains,

0:18 to which Herzog says, But [music] why?

0:21 At this point, the video replaces footage of penguins with footage

0:25 of Trump and his Gestapo goons in ICE brutalizing the American people.

0:29 The intent here is to call to American exceptionalism, the frontier spirit.

0:33 Americans have always known why, they say, because the pursuit of the majesty

0:37 in the distance is supposedly quintessentially American.

0:40 It casts Trump as the renegade penguin,

0:42 a lone wolf hero breaking away from the herd,

0:44 doing his own thing, an American thing, which has presumably been lost.

0:49 Trump severing America's ties with its allies, warmongering,

0:52 and his trade wars are just American individualism, baby.

0:56 Don't Don't follow that penguin herd to the ocean full of fish.

1:00 It's very profound.

1:01 It's a profound statement, and that's why this is a king penguin.

1:05 It also attempts to paint the present as merely

1:07 an uncomfortable phase that must be endured before a promised reward,

1:11 the long ice sheet between now and the mountains.

1:14 You don't get to see the mountains if you aren't willing to walk the distance,

1:18 which is a thing Americans have always known,

1:20 but simply forgot before Trump came to show them the way back.

1:24 The murder of civilians, the brutalization of the populace,

1:27 the state of fear, the concentration camps,

1:30 the open admission to using ICE to punish

1:32 Trump's political opponents to gain access to voter rolls,

1:35 this terrorism is simply the cost of getting to the mountains where,

1:39 implicitly, America will be great again.

1:41 Leila Cunningham, a UK politician running

1:44 for mayor of London under the Reform Party,

1:46 has also embraced this penguin as a symbol,

1:48 posting an AI-generated image of her walking towards

1:51 the mountains hand in flipper with a penguin.

1:53 Right-wing politicians around the world have embraced this penguin

1:57 as a symbol of their pursuit of a distant ideal.

2:00 But that's not really what's happening here.

2:03 The penguin isn't just like wandering off to see

2:06 some sick mountains because it's never going to get there.

2:09 There's no food, there's no shelter, there's no security.

2:13 The penguin is going to die.

2:15 Immediately before the clip in the full documentary,

2:18 Herzog asks a penguin expert if penguins can go insane.

2:22 So, another thing that's implicit underneath this is the recognition

2:25 that Trump and his cronies are on a suicide mission.

2:28 They do not believe in the future,

2:29 they cannot conceptualize the world surviving the present,

2:32 and so theirs is an embrace of pure id,

2:35 pillaging what future does exist to live out a revenge

2:38 fantasy for no other reason than because they can.

2:41 Their only policy is chaos and hatred because where they're going,

2:45 they don't need policies.

2:47 The actual mountains,

2:48 America the Great and its promised flourishing, don't matter.

2:51 It can remain a hazy shape on the horizon because

2:54 no one had it there will live to see it.

2:56 Their only goal is to take everything else with them

2:59 on the way out into the ice to die.

3:01 Now, maybe that's just cope on my part.

3:03 I, too, am human and need to rationalize the world as it exists,

3:07 grapple with the future, but it would go a long way to explaining

3:11 why modern right-wing propaganda is so grim and nihilistic,

3:15 reticent to depict any coherent ideal, even an unrealistic, unobtainable one.

3:20 Herzog intended for the penguin to reflect on humanity.

3:24 Encounters at the end of the world is unabashedly an anthropomorphic film about

3:28 the stories that people read into nature

3:30 in order to say something about ourselves,

3:33 and to that end, the United States Department of Homeland

3:35 Security has looked at this penguin and said, "Yep, that's us.

3:39 We're doing this for no reason.

3:41 We have no hope of success.

3:43 There is no meaning to this.

3:44 You don't need to ask us why because you've always known why."