White House wages online propaganda campaign with aggressive and tasteless videos seemingly designed for young rightwing American men
Rap and EDM. Clips from action movies. Heads-up displays from video games.
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.
Over the past couple of days, the White House and officials affiliated with theTrump administrationhave 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.
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 – though it is unclear whether those Gen Z males universally appreciate the Trump administration’s narrowly tailored jingoism.
One video,releasedon Thursday and captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, 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, “Strength and honor,” and a face-painted Mel Gibson, in Braveheart, demands: “What will you do without freedom?”
(It is unclear if the White House obtained permissions for the film and music in these clips, thoughit seemsnot.)
Another video, captioned “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue”,openswith 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.
A third video also melds real combat footage with video-game clips,this timefrom Grand Theft Auto. A character from the game strolls down the street as the video jump-cuts to periscope footage of a US torpedodestroyingan Iranian warship. “WASTED,” the screen announces.
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 thatappealsto nostalgia – especially to the music and movies of the 1980s and 1990s – while also predicting a boisterously optimistic near-future America with a renewed industrial heartland, fewer immigrants, roaring prosperity and defiant national self-confidence.
Source: Drudge Report
