The same week the White House was notified that six Americans were coming home in flag-draped transfer cases, someone on the federal payroll opened up a video editing suite and got to work.
The product: a montage. Real footage of missile strikes on Iran, cut with Grand Theft Auto gameplay, the word “WASTED” flashing on screen every time something exploded. Hip hop from the game’s soundtrack underneath. Another video mixed Call of Duty kill-streak animations with actual combat footage and captioned it “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue.” There was a Wii Sports mashup — bright, cheerful, Nintendo’s famous bouncy music playing over footage of things being destroyed. “UNDEFEATED,” it said. Baseball home runs cut with explosions. Football tackles cut with strikes. SpongeBob SquarePants. Braveheart. Top Gun. Mortal Kombat’s “Flawless Victory” audio drop over real-world fire.
The official White House account posted all of it. Dozens of videos. A genre.
Less than a week after an airstrike killed dozens of children at an Iranian elementary school, and one day after the Pentagon named two of the six Americans killed by a drone, the White House posted a video blending real-world bombing footage with clips from action movies and video games. Ben Stiller personally asked them to remove his film from the propaganda reel. Pokémon Company International condemned the use of its imagery. The response from the White House was silence, which is the only honest thing they’ve produced since this war started.
Here is what we know: at least 1,168 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 194 children. A U.S. Tomahawk missile hit a girls’ elementary school - twice - in Minab. 175 people died there, mostly children, and the administration continues to dismiss any suggestion of American responsibility. Seventeen Americans are dead. Six of them were the entire crew of a KC-135 refueling tanker that went down in Iraq. Their families were notified. Their names were added to the list.
And the White House communications director posted a Grand Theft Auto cheat code for unlimited ammunition.
Let’s be very clear about what this is. This is not clumsy social media management. This is not a junior staffer going rogue. This is a deliberate strategy — roughly a dozen videos, produced and published by the official White House account, designed to sell an unpopular war to an audience the administration has correctly identified will respond to the language of games and movies and sports. They are not accidentally treating this war like entertainment. They are treating it like a product. They are selling it the same way you sell a new Call of Duty title — with a hype reel, a drop date, and a killstreak animation.
There is another word for what this is, and it is recruitment. The United States military has been hemorrhaging enlistments for years — missing recruitment targets by thousands, throwing money and incentives at a generation that looked at the forever wars and said no thank you. So now they are trying something else. They are going to where the young people are, speaking the language young people speak, and telling them — with every Mortal Kombat audio drop and every Grand Theft Auto cheat code — that this is the game and you could be playing it. That the uniform is the controller. That war is something you win, something you’re good at, something that ends with “Flawless Victory” on the screen and your friends watching the killcam.
Girls play video games. Women serve. The military has been actively recruiting young women for years, and the conversations about Selective Service registration for women have been happening long enough that “safe from the draft” is not the comfort it once was. This content is not aimed at boys in their bedrooms. It is aimed at an entire generation — anyone with a controller, a screen, and enough hours logged to feel the dopamine hit when the explosion lines up just right.
It is a lie so profound and so deliberate that it takes your breath away. Because the young people they are recruiting with these videos will not respawn. There is no extra life. There is a dignified transfer and a folded flag and a family that will spend the rest of their lives watching other people post hype reels about the week their kid died.
The people they are selling it to are real. The people being killed in the content they are repurposing are real. The children who died in that school in Minab were real. They had names. They had backpacks. And the United States government responded to their deaths by posting Wii Sports.
There is a word for what happens when a government trains its population to experience killing as entertainment. It is not a complicated word. It is not a new concept. What is new — what is staggering in its brazenness — is that they are doing it from the official White House account, in broad daylight, with a caption and a fire emoji, while the dignified transfer is still being scheduled.
A former senior military official called it fucking bullshit and said flatly that nobody with any sense thinks this is a good idea. Active duty service members are watching their chain of command turn their colleagues’ deaths into content. The families of the dead are watching the government that sent their people into this war post SpongeBob memes about the explosions.
This is what a government looks like when it has stopped fearing accountability. When it knows its base will cheer the hype reel and dismiss the body count. When it has correctly calculated that the people who might object are already the designated enemy — the press, the critics, anyone with the audacity to ask a follow-up question.
They made a cartoon out of a war. They made a sports highlight out of a missile strike. They posted a video game death screen over footage of a ship being torpedoed and called it justice.
Somewhere, a family is folding a flag.
The White House account is already working on the next drop.
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