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 struggle for Western Civilization itself? Since this week: quite a lot.
On Friday, the White House posted an AI-generated photo of President Trump walking next to a penguin holding an American flag as the pair march toward mountains decorated with the Greenland flag. The caption read: “Hug the penguin.”
Predictably, internet-illiterate leftists jumped to the conclusion that Trump thinks penguins live in Greenland (the only penguins found in the Northern Hemisphere live in the Galápagos Islands). But Trump’s penguin post wasn’t ignorant; it was an intentional nod to a viral right-wing meme. And since the left can’t meme, they completely missed the reference.
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For days, TikTok and Instagram have been flooded with a clip of a lone penguin trudging towards distant mountains. The images come from Werner Herzog’s 2007 Antarctic documentary ‘Encounters at the End of the World’. In the film, Herzog shows a lonely penguin who breaks away from the safety of his colony and moves inland – towards certain death, according to Herzog.
But the online right saw something different. Users (mostly men) saw the penguin as a powerful rebuke to secular modernity. They interpreted the penguin not as lost, but as a free thinker. He rejected the colony for them. In contemporary terms, this means rejecting secular postmodern orthodoxy and marching toward a greater purpose.
It’s easy to think that life is meaningless, that civilization is collapsing and that there is nothing left to save. But that is the lie of our time – the lie that nothing matters and that good cannot win.
TikTokers combined the penguin imagery with an organ remix of the right-wing anthem “L’Amour Toujours (I’ll Fly With You)” and overlapping images of Western heroes: Joan of Arc, Alexander the Great, Aragorn, Jesus Christ, King Baldwin IV and Luke Skywalker. Countless similar penguin edits have been viewed millions of times online.
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Although this is all long after its time, celebrated fantasy author JRR Tolkien understood the power behind the penguin. In Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’, Frodo Baggins leaves the comfort of the Shire for a grueling, grueling quest. He faces hunger, fear, harsh weather, betrayal and danger. Through his storytelling, Tolkien shows us that all ordinary people are called to extraordinary courage by leaving comfort behind and facing suffering and sacrifice.
As Christians, we are invited to the adventure of the hobbits: to fight evil throughout our lives. The modern world suppresses that calling and teaches people that thinking for these kinds of purposes is somehow wrong. The modern world labels Christians, and especially white Christian men, as racist, misogynistic, oppressive, and regressive. But the innate human desire to leave the Shire or the colony and seek a higher calling can never be killed.
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Therefore, it is no mystery that young men on social media resonate 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 are really made of.”
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Penguin lore actually predates the memes that emerged last week. The penguin first became an emblem of masculinity thanks to an earlier viral video in which a drag queen questions an elementary school boy about men who wear makeup. The child claimed that boys cannot wear makeup. When the drag queen asked the boy, “Who said that?” The boy pointed to a paper penguin on the wall and exclaimed, “The penguin over there!”
His answer was improvised, but the symbolism stuck. “The Penguin There” became a tongue-in-cheek internet defense of masculinity and gender difference against the LGBT cult.
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This brings us back to administration. For Trump, the penguin is a striking symbol of the president’s decade-long struggle against the radical left. His path to political power was marred by literal persecution – including an FBI raid on his home, witch hunts and lawsuits against him and all his supporters. It is therefore fitting that he would embrace the penguin on his journey against the regime, the ‘colony’.
Everything Trump does is opposed by global power brokers. Even the president’s attempt to acquire Greenland was fanatically opposed by hysterical European elites (who care nothing about the Third World invasion of their own country).
Other Trump administration leaders and their departments joined in on the penguin meme. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a “MAHA” video of himself walking the penguin, alongside the caption: “The mainstream has made us sick. Choose the healthier path.”
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For RFK Jr. the penguin records his rebellion against Big Pharma and Big Food – the rebellion against the inverted food pyramid and the corporate gospel of seed oils and processed sludge.
Then the Department of Homeland Security added its own compelling view. In response to the question of why the penguin walks to the mountains, the DHS wrote: “Americans have always known why.”
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DHS is right. America was built by penguins – and by that I mean rebels, pilgrims, frontier men and women, conquistadors and cowboys. We are a nation founded by risk takers who left the colony for the mountains. We are descended from men who suffered and died to carve civilization from the wilderness. It is our legacy.
But beneath the idea of rugged individualism lies a deeper religious current. Some users have interpreted the mountains as a symbol for Jesus Christ Himself.
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To be a Christian means to follow Jesus, “the way and the truth and the life,” which usually means following a path opposite to that of the world. In other words, being a Christian means leaving the penguin colony. It means stepping into suffering. It means climbing Mount Doom. It means rejecting the cheap dopamine of modernity for the deeper satisfaction of a redeemed soul.
A lefty on Sure, there’s plenty of brain rot online, but the penguin is an exception.
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It’s easy to get ‘blackpilled’ these days. It’s easy to spend our days doom-scrolling and believing the fight is pointless. It’s easy to think that life is meaningless, that civilization is collapsing and that there is nothing left to save. But that is the lie of our time – the lie that nothing matters and that good cannot win.
This is why the penguin hits a nerve. He refuses to give up, to stay in the colony or to let despair consume him.
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If you ‘catch’ the penguin, you are already ahead. You know life shouldn’t be comfortable, but it shouldn’t be miserable either.
Find comfort in that.
When you understand the penguin, you understand the truth: we are meant to fight on this earth – with hope, not bitterness. You can even find hope in knowing that Christ is always at work in beautiful, mysterious ways—including through a penguin meme.
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