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.

St Patrick’s Day Quiz 2026: 50 questions to test your Irishology

Try today’s Daily Eight: A new eight-clue Irish Times crossword

Alannah Weston, retail dynasty heiress: ‘Ireland is where it all started for my family. This is like coming home’

What will €595,000 buy in France, Italy, Portugal Spain and Donegal?

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........

© The Irish Times