The monster changes. The business model doesn’t.
So, I have a dual degree in communications and graphic design.
When you study design, you spend a surprising amount of time studying government propaganda. Not as a warning. As craft.
You learn the visual grammar of the Soviet poster – the bold diagonals, the heroic worker looking upward into a red future, the way the composition itself tells you who the good guys are before you read a single word.
You study how the Office of War Information commissioned Norman Rockwell to paint the Four Freedoms during World War II, and how those paintings became some of the most widely reproduced images in American history, raising $132 million in war bonds.
You learn that every government that has ever needed its citizens to accept something they’d otherwise reject has reached for the same tools: a simple story, a recognizable face, the promise of a better time just on the other side of the sacrifice.
I think about that class a lot right now.
The Trump administration’s war messaging for Operation Epic Fury – is probably being studied by every media analyst paying attention, and will definitely be studied by future design students. It will be an undeniable lesson in propaganda. But it will also be a lesson in failure. Because anyone paying attention will see how badly it’s failing to move people. On the contrary, has been an utter failure.
The White House is posting insane videos on its social platforms, splicing real missile strikes with footage from Call of Duty and Wii Sports. Another cut together clips from Top Gun, Iron Man, and Braveheart before ending with the Mortal Kombat audio: “Flawless victory.”
The Four Freedoms posters got Americans to picture what they were defending. This stuff is designed to make bombing a country feel like a video game you’re winning. Different aesthetic, same function: get people to stop asking questions by making them feel something else instead.
If we reverse-engineer their strategy – you’d get to the core question of: What’s the story they need you to believe?
Here’s the thing – the Trump administration, and honestly every administration you can name, has always had the goal to make you afraid. Not of real things, necessarily. Of the right things. The things that keep you compliant, that keep you grateful for whoever’s promising to protect you, the boogie men that keep you from noticing who’s picking your pocket while you’re busy scanning the horizon for the threat they pointed you toward.
But just think about this. The Iran-Iraq War, the one most Americans vaguely remember as “that war in the 80s,” was started by Iraq invading Iran, not the other way around. Iran doesn’t really have a history of pre-emptive strikes or invasions. Even in 2020, when Iran launched missiles at US bases in Iraq, it was after we assassinated their top military commander, Qasem Soleimani, on Iraqi soil. The whole point of the US having a massive military and nuclear weapons is to be a deterrent – and it’s actually been working.
Then Trump got into office and decided that we would not only tear up our nuclear agreement with the country, but we would also attack them and destroy the weapons they have to basically protect themselves from the US. Make it make sense.
Then, this past February, Iran’s foreign minister said a “historic opportunity” for a new nuclear agreement was “within reach” just days before the strikes began, and a third round of indirect talks was underway in Geneva. The Omani mediator described the talks as showing significant progress, with Iran willing to make concessions.
Then we attacked them AGAIN.
A Pentagon source told Congress in closed-door briefings that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran was planning to attack US forces first.
The administration did not even publicly dispute that. They just knew most people would forget about it.
Here’s how propaganda works. It’s not that they show you something false – it’s that they show you something real, stripped of everything that would make you understand it. They show you the Iranian missiles and leave out the fact that the US struck Iran with 900 missiles before they fired a single one back.
They call Iran’s government the “world’s number one sponsor of terror,” while a US missile killed 170 people when it struck a girls’ school adjacent to a naval base in Minab.
They use the Mortal Kombat audio. They post the Braveheart clips. They package the whole thing as a saga of American heroism fighting an ancient evil, and they’re counting on most people being too exhausted or too busy or too underwater in their own lives to ask who threw the first punch.
And yeah, I know Iran’s government is brutal to its own people, especially women. Iran funds proxy groups that have killed civilians across the region. These are real things. But the US has spent the last 70 years funding coups, arming dictators, backing the Saudi government’s war in Yemen, and imposing sanctions that a 2022 UN report found contributed to the deaths of thousands of Iranian civilians.
If “how they treat their own people” is the standard, we are not in a position to hold the gavel.
The FCC chairman recently warned broadcasters that those who “perpetrate fake news” risk losing their licenses, and Trump expressed that he was “enthusiastic” about the stance.
Um – this is happening during an active war that the US started!
Listen. Propaganda doesn’t need to be a poster of a heroic worker anymore. Sometimes it looks like threatening the people whose job is to tell you what’s actually happening.
The tragedy of a well-executed propaganda campaign is that it works even after you know it’s propaganda. I know the history, I know the timeline, and I know what it feels like to feel the pull of the story they’re selling – that some wars are clean, some enemies are pure evil, that the country that turned Norman Rockwell paintings into war bonds must be one of the good guys.
It’s kind of like racism – even when you clearly know it’s wrong – it’s so deeply embedded in your psyche, you have to actively work at not falling prey to it.
Here’s your takeaway.
Propaganda is neutral. It’s a tool, the same way the Bible is a tool – you can use it to show people they must love their neighbors, or you can use it to justify burning them alive in God’s name. The content is decided by whoever’s holding it.
That’s what makes this so maddening.
The same machinery being used to make Americans cheer for preemptive strikes on a country, mid-negotiation, could have been used to make Iranians and Americans see each other as people instead of targets.
It’s been done before. It could be done now. But that version doesn’t sell defense contracts or win primaries, so instead we get Call of Duty edits of real missile strikes and a generation of kids on both sides who will grow up knowing the other country only as the monsters they must destroy.