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Rap and EDM. Clips from action movies. Heads-up displays from video games.<\/p>\n
As the war with Iran approaches its second week, the White House has leaned into an online propaganda campaign that seems less about intimidating Iran or projecting US strength abroad than it is about reaching a rather niche domestic audience: young rightwing American men who spend a lot of time online.<\/p>\n
Over the past couple of days, the White House and officials affiliated with the\u00a0Trump administration<\/a>\u00a0have shared on X a series of hype videos that aggressively, and tastelessly, show off deadly combat footage from the strikes on Iran, sometimes in combination with footage from fictional movies and video games.<\/p>\n The videos are short, rapidly edited, and seem designed to appeal to the attention spans and tastes of Gen Z males fond of video-game trash-talk \u2013 though it is unclear whether those Gen Z males universally appreciate the Trump administration\u2019s narrowly tailored jingoism.<\/p>\n One video,\u00a0released<\/a>\u00a0on Thursday and captioned \u201cJUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY\u201d, is less than a minute long but manically mixes footage from iconic action movies such as Braveheart, Gladiator, and Iron Man with apparently real footage of American ordnance striking Iranian military targets. Pulsing, fast-paced electronic dance music plays in the background as Russell Crowe, in Gladiator, says, \u201cStrength and honor,\u201d and a face-painted Mel Gibson, in Braveheart, demands: \u201cWhat will you do without freedom?\u201d<\/p>\n (It is unclear if the White House obtained permissions for the film and music in these clips, though\u00a0it seems<\/a>\u00a0not.)<\/p>\n Another video, captioned \u201cCourtesy of the Red, White & Blue\u201d,\u00a0opens<\/a>\u00a0with someone calling in an air-strike in the style of Call of Duty, the first-person-shooter video game. Thumping music starts and the video segues into a series of clips of US bombs destroying Iranian vehicles and facilities. As each target is destroyed, a video-game heads-up display announces that the viewer has scored another 100 points.<\/p>\n A third video also melds real combat footage with video-game clips,\u00a0this time<\/a>\u00a0from Grand Theft Auto. A character from the game strolls down the street as the video jump-cuts to periscope footage of a US torpedo\u00a0destroying<\/a>\u00a0an Iranian warship. \u201cWASTED,\u201d the screen announces.<\/p>\n The White House seems aware that fast-paced, low-budget or self-produced hype videos have been popular in recent years among the online right and far right. The videos tend to embrace an adrenaline-boosting retro-futurist aesthetic that\u00a0appeals<\/a>\u00a0to nostalgia \u2013 especially to the music and movies of the 1980s and 1990s \u2013 while also predicting a boisterously optimistic near-future America with a renewed industrial heartland, fewer immigrants, roaring prosperity and defiant national self-confidence.<\/p>\n The videos sometimes also use memes or animation. In 2023, a staffer was\u00a0fired<\/a>\u00a0from the Ron DeSantis campaign after\u00a0producing<\/a>\u00a0an unauthorized pro-DeSantis campaign video, set to the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill, that included animated soldiers marching under a Sonnenrad, a symbol associated with neo-Nazis.<\/p>\n The White House\u2019s aggressively macho propaganda is also of a piece with the rhetorical style of Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense, who has frequently railed against political correctness, boasted of US military prowess, and promised unapologetic death and destruction on Iran.<\/p>\n Before joining the administration, Hegseth, a conservative media personality and a veteran of the national guard,\u00a0lobbied<\/a>\u00a0for pardons for US soldiers who had been accused or convicted of war crimes. He is also known for sporting Christian nationalist\u00a0tattoos<\/a>\u00a0of a Jerusalem cross, the Crusades-era slogan Deus Vult (\u201cGod wills it,\u201d in Latin), and the word \u201ckafir,\u201d Arabic for unbeliever.<\/p>\n The strategy behind the propaganda campaign \u2013 to the extent that there is a coherent strategy \u2013 is revealing in what it seems to say about the Trump administration\u2019s priorities.<\/p>\n Americans are overwhelmingly skeptical of the strikes on Iran,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to a recent NPR\/PBS\/Marist survey, with just 36% of the public saying that they approve of Trump\u2019s handling of the war. The White House\u2019s own messaging has been\u00a0confusing<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0tautological<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rather than try to persuade the American people as a whole of the necessity and efficacy of the war, however, the administration seems more worried about pacifying a small sliver of its base \u2013 a very online, very male, and often younger segment of the\u00a0Maga \u201cnew right\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that is skeptical about foreign interventionism and especially cynical about anything redolent of the Middle East misadventures of the George W Bush years.<\/p>\n So far that audience seems less than impressed. On X, commenters have responded to the White House war propaganda videos by mocking the videos\u2019 ham-fisted and bloodthirsty aesthetics, describing the US as a cat\u2019s-paw of Israel, or disparaging the Trump administration for betraying the MAGA movement\u2019s promise to put \u201cAmerica first\u201d.<\/p>\n Comments referred to Hegseth as \u201cGI Joke\u201d or suggested that the war with Iran be known as \u201cOperation Epstein Distraction\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n