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The Iran war is not a video game

Based memes, real blood.

On Wednesday, the New York Times published the preliminary findings of a US investigation into the recent airstrike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, an elementary school for girls in the Iranian city of Minab. The investigation confirmed what all public evidence had pointed to: that an American Tomahawk missile destroyed the school, killing roughly 175 people per Iranian estimates — most of whom were children.

Alongside the article, the Times posted a verified video from the school in the hours following the bombing. You can see, on the remains of the building’s outer wall, a light blue mural depicting a child playing with a butterfly. You can hear, in the video’s audio, the inhuman wails of someone who had just lost a child dear to them.

The day after this damning news report, the White House released a video depicting the Iran war as a Nintendo game.

The video, set to jaunty childlike music, depicts the United States as a player in various Wii Sports games — tennis, golf, bowling, etc. When the player character hits a hole in one, or bowls a strike, it cuts to real-life footage of a US bomb hitting an Iranian target. “Hole in one!” the Nintendo announcer declares, as we watch human lives being erased.

The video’s overtly childish imagery would be appalling at any point. In the wake of the news about Sharajah Tayyebeh, it approximates a form of moral horror. Yet it is what we have come to expect from the Trump administration, which has been releasing this sort of trivializing propaganda throughout the war.

Various official X accounts have posted videos intercutting real bombings in Iran with clips from more violent video games, war films like Braveheart, sports highlights, and speeches from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth set to movie-trailer-style epic music.

War is not hell, for this White House — it is fun.

In some ways, this is not a surprise. The Trump administration is staffed, from top to bottom, by inveterate posters. They have turned everything — from the end of foreign aid to ICE raids — into memes. Why treat war any differently?

But war, and the school attack in particular, illustrate the pernicious function of this method of governance. Living online becomes a vehicle of moral trivialization, where tangible consequences of stakes of policy become secondary to the more immediately accessible world of likes and reposts. They are doing war for the chat.

In this world of Content, the meaning of a bombing raid is not the lives lost or strategic gains won but how good it looks when repackaged into a sizzle reel featuring Master Chief from Halo. Dozens of dead girls matter less to the White House than how Hegseth sounds when he says “lethality.”

This online war, lacking in any clear real-world justification, creates its own. And in doing so, it turns atrocity into afterthought: killing not with a clean conscience, but with no consciousness at all.

The origins of online war

Historically, American wartime propaganda follows a fairly........

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