Ruminations on that DHS Penguin Tweet

On January 23rd, 2026, the Twitter account DHSGV tweeted, "Americans have always known why. " The attached video is a clip from Verer Herzog's documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, a segment that features a penguin breaking from the collective and walking off towards the Distant Mountains, to which Herzog says, "But why? " At this point, the video replaces footage of penguins with footage of Trump and his Gustapo goons and Ice brutalizing the American people. The intent here is to call to American exceptionalism, the frontier spirit. Americans have always known why, they say. Because the pursuit of the majesty in the distance is supposedly quintessentially American. It cast Trump as the renegade penguin, a lone wolf hero breaking away from the herd, doing his own thing, an American thing which has presumably been lost. Trump severing America's ties with its allies, wararmongering, and his trade wars are just American individualism, baby. Don't follow that penguin herd to the ocean full of fish. It's very profound. It's a profound statement and that's why this is a king penguin. It also attempts to paint the present as merely an uncomfortable phase that must be endured before a promised reward. The long ice sheet between now and the mountains. You don't get to see the mountains if you aren't willing to walk the distance, which is a thing Americans have always known but simply forgot before Trump came to show them the way back. the murder of civilians, the brutalization of the populace, the state of fear, the concentration camps, the open admission to using ICE to punish Trump's political opponents to gain access to voter roles. This terrorism is simply the cost of getting to the mountains where implicitly America will be great again. Leila Cunningham, a UK politician running for mayor of London under the Reform Party, has also embraced this penguin as a symbol, posting an AI generated image of her walking towards the mountains handin flipper with a penguin. Right-wing politicians around the world have embraced this penguin as a symbol of their pursuit of a distant ideal. But that's not really what's happening here. The penguin isn't just like wandering off to see some sick mountains because it's never going to get there. There's no food. There's no shelter. There's no security. The penguin is going to die. Immediately before the clip in the full documentary, Herzog asks a penguin expert if penguins can go insane. So, another thing that's implicit underneath this is the recognition that Trump and his cronies are on a suicide mission. They do not believe in the future. They cannot conceptualize the world surviving the present. And so, theirs is an embrace of pure id, pillaging what future does exist to live out a revenge fantasy for no other reason than because they can. Their only policy is chaos and hatred. Because where they're going, they don't need policies. The actual mountains, America the Great and its promised flourishing, don't matter. It can remain a hazy shape on the horizon because no one headed there will live to see it. Their only goal is to take everything else with them on the way out into the ice to die. Now, maybe that's just cope on my part. I too am human and need to rationalize the world as it exists, grapple with the future. But it would go a long way to explaining why modern right-wing propaganda is so grim and nihilistic, reticent to depict any coherent ideal, even an unrealistic, unobtainable one. Herzog intended for The Penguin to reflect on humanity. Encounters at the End of the World is unabashedly an anthropomorphic film about the stories that people read into nature in order to say something about ourselves. And to that end, the United States Department of Homeland Security has looked at this penguin and said, "Yep, that's us. We're doing this for no reason. We have no hope of success. There is no meaning to this. You don't need to ask us why because you've always known