Just as the US war in Vietnam was the first war of the television age, its horrors projected nightly into the livingrooms of Americans, the current war in Iran is the first war of the brainrot era: a war mediated by, and in some sense predicated on, the sort of mindless online content that defines our benighted cultural moment.
Consider, for instance, the output since the start of the war of the Trump administration’s official informational sewerage system.
On March 6th – a week after the first wave of attacks in which a US tomahawk missile hit a Minab primary school, reportedly killing as many as 175 girls – the White House posted a truly unsettling video to its social media accounts.
The video was posted with the words “Justice the American way” followed by US flag and fire emojis; it’s a 42-second supercut of scenes from Hollywood action films, intercut with declassified footage from US military engagements in Iran. Snippets from Iron Man, Braveheart, Top Gun and Deadpool are spliced with clips of exploding Iranian battleships and fighter jets, to a techno soundtrack taken from the video game Mortal Kombat.
READ MORE
In another, shorter video, we see American missiles hitting their targets, intercut with a clip of the children’s cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants saying: “You wanna see me do it again?” In yet another clip, AC/DC’s propulsive anthem Thunderstruck plays over a mash-up of NFL tackles and exploding missiles.
JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. 🇺🇸🔥 pic.twitter.com/0502N6a3rL
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026
In their use of memes, video games, action movie wisecracks and children’s television characters, these videos make explicit something that has for decades been implicit in US culture: that war, like other manifestations of politics, can be produced and consumed as a form of entertainment.
It might be argued that there is nothing terribly remarkable about this confusion of the categories of politics and entertainment. We are, after all, talking about a country that produced president Ronald Reagan and governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a country whose current president made his way to the White House by way of a successful reality television career.
But these videos are grotesque in a way that feels new and extreme even by the standards of recent American history.
When the “Justice the American way” video was posted, some of the criticism it received focused on its strange use of characters such as Walter White from Breaking Bad or Kylo Ren from Star Wars as though they were not villains.
“For whoever made this video,” as CNN anchor Jake Tapper put it, “you might want to watch the actual content of the movies and the shows that you’re clipping from, because quite a few of the people you’re including are actually the bad guys. Walter White from Breaking Bad is a sick drug dealer who, spoiler alert, poisoned a child and killed an innocent woman … And then Kylo Ren from the Star Wars movies, you know he embraced the dark side, right? And, spoiler alert, he killed his dad, the beloved Han Solo.”
This kind of criticism, accurate as it may be, overlooks the extent to which such content is devoid of any kind of narrative logic or context. It simply doesn’t matter whether Walter White is, as a character, morally any better or worse than John Wick, Deadpool or SpongeBob SquarePants. He exists here purely as a meme, a decontextualised image in a queasy phantasmagoria of violence and power.
And this total collapse of narrative is precisely what is new and disturbing about this war itself. Donald Trump has conspicuously failed to make any sort of public case for the legality or morality of this war of choice.
Even the administration of George W Bush – in preparing for its illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – had the decency to lie to the US public and to the international community about the case for that invasion. The story they told may have been spurious, and it may have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and baleful political consequences with which we are still living today, but at least there was a story.
The true grotesquery of this war is that it is, on some fundamental level, divorced from narrative and meaning. Those White House propaganda videos reflect Trump’s own lack of purpose in creating this chaotic situation: the talk of imminent threat – of Iran’s perpetually being just a few weeks away from developing nuclear weapons, despite no evidence that it has the intention to do so – is palpably nonsense.
There is, it seems, no coherent narrative of even narrow US interest in which this war can be placed. (Israeli interest, of course, is another story entirely.)
After the invasion of Venezuela and the capture of Nicolás Maduro, Trump has developed a taste for spectacles of imperial force and dynamism. He appears to have believed that he could do something similar, though more ambitious, in Iran: decapitating the regime and then bombarding Tehran from the air until regime change somehow organically resulted.
And just as the social media propaganda videos are totally divorced from narrative logic or context, so is the war itself: a kind of self-soothing brainrot for Trump and the Maga base.
In a brilliant essay published last November in Harper’s magazine, the US writer Daniel Kolitz examined the online subculture known as “gooning”. Its mostly Gen-Z adherents, known as “gooners”, abandon any hope of relations with the opposite sex. Instead, they submit themselves to an all-consuming porn addiction and to taking part in communal online masturbation sessions lasting hours or even days.
This new mutation of male heterosexuality has, Kolitz writes, given rise to a new mode of pornography. Referred to as the “porn music video” (or PMV), it formed out of the annihilating overstimulation of endless online content.
“The PMV,” he writes, “is freebase pornography – porn purified of anything that might disrupt its swift passage to the brain. These are schizophrenic porn mosaics of often staggering density: hundreds of clips sourced from existing online porn and spliced into productions of just a few minutes’ length, soundtracked by the kind of ludicrous, pounding techno more often associated with unlicensed weed stores.”
I found myself thinking of Kolitz’s description of this new genre of “freebase pornography” while watching the White House’s social-media propaganda videos, with their fast-paced editing, use of decontextualised clips from other media and deployment of pulsing electronic music.
They, too, are oriented around a self-enclosed stimulation of the lizard-brain, a masturbatory logic of spectacle and sensation as ends in themselves.
