Today, Explained - Meme warfare

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

Have you seen the video of the US military bombing Iran spliced with clips of SpongeBob Squarepants? It’s an official video released by the US government and represents a new kind of wartime propaganda. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. A screenshot from a White House X post about the Iran war titled "Operation Epic Fury." Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The White House is tweeting videos of the Iran War as a Nintendo game. Holy what? As a scene from Braveheart. What will you do without freedom? The Iranians are tweeting videos of the American and Israeli war featuring Lego Trump and Lego Bibi, Lego Strait of Hormuz. Propaganda is a part of every war. It has not always been this dumb, but there are other differences this time around that might matter more.

Quite often, the moral aspects of war are. laid out before the American public, before any American shooting has begun. That was the case for World War I, World War II. The case was being made around Vietnam before anything happened. That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for the program today comes from Atio, the AI CRM for modern teams. Are you a modern team? Are we a modern team?

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You'll get 15% off your first year. That's ATTio.com slash today explained. chances are your favorite websites used to depend on Google for traffic and money. But that's not really working anymore. Now publishers are scrambling for new lifelines. Neil Vogel, who runs People, Inc., says his company figured it out a couple years ago. You would think, given what everyone said about us, that we would be the guys that would be doing the worst now. We're kind of the guys doing the best now.

I'm Peter Kafka, the host of channels, the show about tech and media and what happens when they collide. You can hear my conversation with Neil Vogel now wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Nick Kull. He specializes in the history of propaganda at USC Annenberg. Nick, in a time of war, what's the objective of propaganda? Well, propaganda has three objectives in wartime. The first is to rally your own politics.

The second is to persuade allies that you're doing the right thing. So maybe they might actually support you. So to make friends friendlier, to make allies more supportive and maybe even create a few new allies. And the third is to demoralize your enemy. So some people would call that psychological warfare to break your enemy's will to resist, to protect images of your strength that are so overwhelming that the enemy hastens to surrender or to compromise. And that's also a very old element in communication in wartime. In the past, this is what propaganda looks like when the U.S. is coming into a war, that you have this explanation of what the war is going to be about, something that appeals to the

American public while also maybe even inspiring international audiences. So President Wilson in the First World War, or on the eve of the First World War from the American point of view, spoke about a war to end all wars, a war to make the world safe for democracy, The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. He had his 14 points for how the diplomatic scene was going to be reformed.

On the eve of World War II, President Roosevelt spoke about the four freedoms and set out a whole vision for a new international order. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Think about President Bush, talking about a war to protect a new order, the first President Bush, on the eve of the war with Iraq, Iraq, the first Iraq war. Iraq will eventually comply with all relevant United Nations resolutions.

And then when peace is restored, it is our hope that Iraq will live as a peaceful and cooperative member of the family of nations. So these are the sorts of messaging that we are used to. Of course there's always been a chaotic, a violent kind of of message around American war and sometimes this occurs in popular culture. One example would be the song made famous by the Beach Boys, Barbara Ann, which was recorded in a parody version by a group called Vince Vance and the Valiants in 1980. And they did a version, Bom Iran.

It had lines in it like, we're going to a mosque, we're going to throw some rocks, we're going to put the Ayatollah in a box. To a mosque, going to throw some rocks, tell the Ayatollah going to put you in a box. It was really bloodthirsty stuff. Got a lot of airplay on radios and then was brought back last year by President Trump. He used it as the soundtrack in a White House video celebrating. the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites. This user says, oh my God, Trump has posted bomb Iran music video. The video shows clips of B2's stealth fighter jets,

the same used in the strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Okay, so during wartime, governments always do propaganda. That's nothing new. Let's talk about the Trump administration. and the war in Iran. Is the propaganda different this time? This time around, what we're seeing from the Trump White House are videos that integrate footage from video games.

Oh, shit. Here we go again. Weird clips from Hollywood movies. Wake up, Daddy Shon. Welcome, no, sir. Strength and honor. What will you do without freedom? Maverick's in that.

And with great declarations of Kaboom, there's even one with SpongeBob. You want to see me do it again? And all of this plays into an idea that war can be communicated through memes, clips from games. So I think it's a memeification of war, a gamification of war, an appeal to warlike images. that are bizarrely taken out of context.

If you've got clips from Gladiator, clips from Braveheart, those films are about opposition to totalitarians, about people who fight against evil emperors and evil kings to see them edited to pump up people. who are endorsing a authoritarian approach to foreign policy rather than a voice of the more vulnerable is bizarre. And I suppose shows how we are beyond irony. OK, so then the question is, if a government normally aims propaganda at the broadest section of society to bring it along and to get it to support the war, what Trump is doing, these memes have proven to be,

very divisive. They are not convincing anyone who wasn't already in support of this war, right? So who are they for? And why would the White House not aim at the broadest part of the population? One of the common misunderstandings of propaganda is that people imagine it as being a process where an evil leader thinks up bad ideas and transmits them into the head of an innocent population. And what I see as a historian is that very often the most effective propaganda is not about a leader inventing and transmitting material, rather it's about a leader recognizing things that are already in a population's mind. I mean, the obvious example is that Adolf Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism. Rather, he harnessed anti-Semitism in the population, in the mind of the population of

Germany and linked it into his political career and the success of his party. Similarly, he didn't invent a narrative of German victimhood. He exploited existing ideas in people's minds about German victimhood. What I see going on now is that all kinds of ideas about American strengths, about the great release that comes from successfully destroying the enemy, the kind of energy that's released by a football coach in the heat of a big match. This stuff is already in the minds of the audience or a certain audience and is being appealed to. Well, I see these videos as having been created by young men for young men. They're full of references to the culture of young men, including game culture, including war-oriented

video games, and references that other people just wouldn't get. So it's like they're articulating a visual and a cultural language specific to a generation. So it has a propaganda purpose, but it's not a purpose that is focused on a wider section of the American public. And I think that the president has no interest in people who weren't planning to vote for him, to be honest. So this is evidence that we don't matter, because if we did matter, we'd get different messages. If you ask me who benefits most from this tone in U.S. propaganda, my feeling is that it benefits China because it makes the Chinese look like the adults in the diplomatic room.

And that will have tremendous appeal just by doing nothing. China will have tremendous appeal to the countries of the global south, even to former partners of the United States in Europe, who are appalled by this kind of unpredictable messaging and unpredictable behavior that goes along with it. Nick Cole, USC Annenberg propaganda. Coming up, the meme war. Support for today explained comes from Vanta. If you run a business, perhaps you've noticed a shift.

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That's IM number 8, H-E-A-L-T-H-E-A-L-T-H. dot com slash explained code explained for a free welcome kit five free travel sachets plus 10% off your order IM8health.com slash explained code explained these statements have not been evaluated by the food drug administration this product is not intended to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease this is day today is funny this is good my name's a name is will aramis and I write about technology at the Washington Post. On the social network X, there is a group of accounts that look like sort of generic news aggregation accounts.

They have names like HDX News and GPX Press. These accounts have been cranking out what looks like mostly pretty run-of-the-mill pro-Iran propaganda. But amid that generic propaganda is something a little different. stuff about Jeffrey Epstein. These accounts found a huge amount of viral traction by posting an AI deepfake video.

The video is this grainy footage, and it cuts between a number of scenes, but the most prominent one has a line of young girls, like quite young, probably prepubescent girls. And it has Donald Trump in boxers and an undershirt. And they're all lined up and the girls are blindfolded. And Trump is leaning in and leering at them, leering at their bodies. And in the background is this girl's voice shrieking in German.

And it's extremely creepy and it's harrowing. And it's also completely fake. Okay, so explain how we understand it to be Iranian propaganda. Donald Trump in a video in a compromising position with young girls, Epstein-related, I get it, but how does that tie to Iran? Yeah, so that's what's unusual about this, and it's part of what made me interested in writing about it. A lot of the posts that are coming from these accounts are pretty typical pro-Iranian regime propaganda. Stuff about how the United States and Israel are evil and corrupt. and how the military operation there is illegitimate. There's a meme of a lion with an Iranian flag on it

chasing these two scurvy dogs with Israeli and American flags on them. There are lots of posts that are purporting to show big Iranian successes in the conflict, purporting to show that they've struck a key building in Tel Aviv. Or purporting to show that they, that U.S. forces are on the run or that they've captured a B-2 stealth bomber and captured its American crew. Most of this stuff is unverified and probably untrue. But that's pretty typical propaganda. The Epstein stuff isn't obviously pro-Iran propaganda. And that is the stuff that's actually resonating. two different accounts, at least two of the accounts in this network, posted that video and got more than four million views on each post. One of them got nearly seven million views on its post.

This is an inordinate amount of traffic for pro-Iran propaganda. And it's probably because it doesn't look like pro-Iran propaganda. The people who are seeing it in their feed and resharing it and liking it probably, in most cases, have no idea that this. this is pro-Iran propaganda, because this isn't just an Iranian talking point, right? This is something that people in the United States believe that critics of the Trump administration have also argued that the war or the military operation in Iran is really meant to distract from the Epstein files. And that's why we're involved in this military conflict there. I mean, I'm a journalist, and I have rhetorically questioned whether the war in Iran is, is, a distraction from the Epstein file. So, yes, I mean, what you're saying is true. It's not,

you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to look for reasons why the United States is in Iran in the first place and to look at what was going on immediately before the war in Iran started. So what else are these accounts posting about? So in addition to posting the Epstein content, which has gotten a lot of traffic, and also posting the sort of more run-to-the-mill pro-Iran propaganda that says Iran's doing great and the U.S. and Israel are on their heels and on the run. They have also posted some really blatantly anti-Semitic content. There was one that said,

Now we know why Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews. There's another one that said, you know, that compared the U.S. and Israeli leaders unfavorably to Hitler and said, at least Hitler was kind to children. Wow. Okay, so who's behind the accounts that are tweeting and sharing these videos, do we know? What's interesting about this is that we don't actually know for sure who's behind these accounts. This network was brought to my attention by researchers at a nonprofit called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue,

and they were the ones who first noticed that these fake Epstein Trump videos seem to be coming from a network of X accounts that were interconnected. Many of them also have the blue checkmark next to their account name, which is supposed to indicate that they are authentic and have been very, But these days, a blue check on X mostly just means that they're paying X for a premium subscription, and that blue check mark comes as a perk of that subscription. Presumably, X has some information on them, but if it does, it's not sharing. What we know is that the content that they're putting out is absolutely aligned with Iranian state propaganda. It's using talking points from Iranian state media. but who is actually behind it, we just can't say for sure.

So the White House we know is very online, more online than any other White House in the history of the universe, and the history of America certainly. What is the White House saying? They must recognize this as a problem. Yeah, well, the White House, it was interesting. When I reached out to them for comment on my story, they said, yeah, there's a lot of, you know, fake stuff going all around. a lot of pro-Iran propaganda, and that's why we warn you folks in the fake news media

not to fall for it and amplify it. I mean, I think the Trump administration is actually interested in this idea that a lot of these criticisms are stemming from Iranian propaganda. Terrible situation. That's a terrible situation. They showed all sorts of things happening

in the last two weeks that never happened. But of course, we know that the Trump administration, and President Trump, himself on his truth social account have on many occasions I've done something pretty similar, which is to put out fake AI videos of people that he disagrees with or wants to criticize. Donald Trump has posted a fake video to his truth social media platform, showing former U.S. President Barack Obama being arrested. Trump posted an AI video depicting himself in Russell vote as the grim reaper going after

Democrats. Sharing a video on truth social that depicted the Obama's as apes. Some might question what ground the president is standing on when he criticizes Iran for using AI to spread disinformation. You know, well, I'm going to admit that I've always been a bit of a skeptic about whether disinformation really changes people's opinions. I'm inclined to think you, American individual, you know whether you think the war in Iran is legit or not. And regardless of what you come across on Twitter, you're going to hold the same opinion. But I can be wrong. What do we know about whether these memes and videos are swaying public opinion on the legitimacy of the war in Iran?

That's a great question. I'm glad you asked it because I do think, having covered misinformation and its impacts for a decade, I do think it's nuanced. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that just because there's false information on social media and people are sharing it, that that means that people are being duped or falling for it or completely changing their mind. about something based on false information. What we know in general is that much more often, these are people who are already inclined to agree with a certain point of view, right?

So these are people who already think that Trump is using the Iran war to distract from the Epstein files, and they see this fake video, and they're like, ah, here it is, you know, here's the proof. Do they, are they being deceived? Do they really think it's true? In some cases, probably yes. In other cases, they may not care, right?

It's more like sharing a political cartoon or a meme. It makes your point for you in a vivid way, but it was something that you already believed. I think the success of the Epstein content in particular from these pro-Iran accounts underscores a lesson that we've seen several times over the years when it comes to propaganda, misinformation, conspiracy theories. The stuff that resonates the most is not something that just sort of comes out of the blue. It's usually something that's picking up on an existing rift in the culture or in our politics. They're taking something that is already dividing Americans, which is the mistrust around the Epstein files,

mistrust around the Trump administration's motivations for military conflict in the Middle East. It's taking that and it's blowing it up. It's playing on it. It's exploiting that. And I think that that is a sort of a more subtle and effective way for a lot of these propaganda campaigns to have an impact is to just try to drive that wedge in a little further around a military operation like this. Because the Trump administration has failed to convince a large swath of the American public as to its motivations for the military operation in Iran, people are already inclined to be skeptical. of why we're going to war there.

And so that makes the Iranian message that this is an illegitimate war by this corrupt Epstein regime. They've even picked up on calling it Operation Epstein Fury instead of Operation Epic Fury. You know, that makes that message all the more likely to resonate. That is Will Aramis.

He writes about technology for the Washington Post. Dustin DeSoto and Peter Balinan-Rosen produced today's show. Amina El-Sadi was our editor, Patrick Boyd, and David Tattashore engineered. and Andrea Lopez Crusado, check the facts. The rest of the team includes Miles Bryan, Haudi, Arianna Spudu, Daniel Hewitt, Kelly Wessinger, Avasi, Artsy, Joliemeyer, Jolie Myers, Miranda, and Sean Ramosfirm.

I'm Noel King. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. It's part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. For more award-winning, excellent podcasts, check out podcast.com. You can listen to ad-free by signing up at Vox.com slash members. It's today explained.