Garrison Davis

It is our inheritance."

Now, what this DHS Penguin video doesn't include, but has already been alluded to by some of the other videos I've played, is the actual context of this lone bird's journey and its sad fate.

We will return to discuss Penguin insanity after this ad break.

We're back.

Though the 2026 version of the penguin meme was dubbed the lonely penguin, earlier meme videos of this documentary footage from years past carried the titles deranged penguin or nihilist penguin.

Before the footage of this lone penguin plays in the documentary, Herzog asks a penguin expert if they can experience insanity.

The political invocations of this footage largely ignore Werner Herzog's own speculation on why the penguin is marching towards the mountains in the far-off distance and its inevitable fate.

the penguin is not the Ubermensch.

The penguin will not achieve individual greatness at the summit of the mountain because it's never going to get there.

As friend of the pod Dan Olson so eloquently put it, the penguin is going to die.

Though the penguin does not bash its head on a rock, this separation from society is still an act of suicide.

The deranged penguin has literally turned its back on food, water, shelter, and the colony to die wandering towards mountains that it will never reach.

The Trump administration's embrace of this suicidal penguin as a that's literally me figure is a shockingly open display of fascism's relation to the death drive.

It's just so naked to make your mascot a symbol of suicidal defiance against perceived cultural norms.

They're doing a first is tragedy, twice is farce for fascist death emblems.

The Nazis get the skull.

We get a fucking penguin.

But the Penguin is not the first modern American suicidal folk hero.

The killdozer rampage of public destruction, which ended in the suicide of the perpetrator, has been a mascot for the libertarian right for over two decades.

And in 2018, a 28-year-old airport ground service agent named Richard Russell hijacked an empty plane at SeaTac to fly over Mount Rainier before killing himself by purposely crashing the plane.