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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.
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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.
It’s easy to think life is meaningless, civilization is collapsing and there’s nothing left to save. But that’s the lie of our age — the lie that nothing matters and the good cannot win.
TikTokers paired the penguin footage with an organ remix of the right-wing anthem “L’Amour Toujours (I’ll Fly With You)” and overlaid images of Western heroes: Joan of Arc, Alexander the Great, Aragorn, Jesus Christ, King Baldwin IV and Luke Skywalker. Countless similar penguin edits have garnered millions of views online.
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Although this is all long after his time, celebrated fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien understood the power behind the penguin. In Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” Frodo Baggins leaves the comforts of the Shire on a grueling, back-breaking quest. He faces hunger, fear, harsh weather, betrayal, and danger. Tolkien shows us, through storytelling, that all ordinary people are called to extraordinary courage by leaving comfort behind and facing suffering and sacrifice.
As Christians, we are beckoned to the hobbits’ adventure — to fight evil all our lives. The modern world suppresses that calling, teaching people that thinking with this type of purpose is somehow wrong. The modern world smears Christians, particularly 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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That’s why it’s no mystery that young men on social media are resonating 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’re truly made of.”
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The penguin lore actually predates the memes that sprang up last week. The penguin first became an emblem of masculinity thanks to a previous viral video featuring a drag queen interrogating an elementary-school-age boy about men wearing makeup. The child asserted that boys cannot wear makeup. When the drag queen asked the boy, “Who said?” the boy pointed at a paper penguin on the wall and exclaimed, “The penguin over there!”
His answer was improvised, but the symbolism stuck. “The penguin over there” became a tongue-in-cheek internet defense of manhood and sex differences against the LGBT cult.
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This brings us back to the administration. For Trump, the penguin is an apt symbol for the president’s decade-long fight against the radical left. His road to political power has been one marred by literal persecution — including an FBI raid on his home, impeachment witch hunts, and lawfare against him and all his supporters. It is therefore befitting that he would embrace the penguin on his journey against the regime, or “colony.”
Everything Trump does is opposed by the global power brokers. Even the president’s push to obtain Greenland has been fanatically opposed by hysterical European elites (who couldn’t care less about the invasion of the Third World into their own countries).
Other Trump administration leaders and their departments joined in on the penguin meme. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a “MAHA” video of himself walking with the penguin alongside the caption, “The mainstream made us sick. Choose the healthier path.”
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For RFK Jr., the penguin captures his rebellion against Big Pharma and Big Food — the revolt against the upside-down food pyramid and the corporate gospel of seed oils and processed sludge.
Then the Department of Homeland Security added its own compelling take. In response to the question of why the penguin is walking toward the mountains, 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 out of wilderness. It’s our inheritance.
But beneath the idea of rugged individualism lies a deeper religious current. Some users have interpreted the mountains to symbolize Jesus Christ Himself.
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To be a Christian is to follow Jesus, “the way and the truth and the life,” which usually means taking a path opposite of the world. In other words, to be Christian is to leave the penguin colony. It means to walk into suffering. It means to climb Mount Doom. It means to reject modernity’s cheap dopamine for the deeper contentment of a redeemed soul.
One leftist on X sneered that Trump’s penguin post “has all the maturity of the brain rot Reels my kids watch.” 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 life is meaningless, civilization is collapsing and there’s nothing left to save. But that’s the lie of our age — the lie that nothing matters and the good cannot win.
This is why the penguin hits a nerve. He refuses to give up, stay in the colony, or let despair consume him.
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If you “get” the penguin, you’re already ahead. You know life isn’t supposed to be comfortable — but it’s also not supposed to be miserable.
Take comfort in that.
If 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 just in knowing that Christ is always working in beautiful, mysterious ways — including through a penguin meme.
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