Mother JonesModify

2026-03-12 06:55:50

A US aircraft carrier destroyed by Iranian missiles. American bombs leveling a nuclear power plant. The Burj Khalifa engulfed in fire.

None of it happened, but that didn’t stop people from spreading fake videos online.

In the days since Trump’s weekend strikes on Iran, AI-generated videos realistically depicting entirely fabricated events have been spreading like wildfire on X and other social media platforms. 

For years, X (formerly Twitter) was one of the most valuable tools for real-time information during breaking news events. But that era seems to be over. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, the platform’s usefulness as a reliable news source has steadily eroded. Moderation has been gutted, the algorithm rewards engagement over accuracy, and resources funneled into their own, uniquely problematic AI platform: Grok.

We’ve seen political AI content creep into the platform before—like a fabricated video depicting Jake Paul at Iranian protests—but the recent strikes in Venezuela, and now Iran, have unleashed an onslaught of misleading AI video content.

The motivations behind the content vary. Some creators appear to be celebrating, using AI video to glorify Trump and Netanyahu’s military actions. Others seem aimed at manufacturing doubt about the war, undermining American public confidence, and muddying the information environment so badly that no one knows what’s real.

And in a disturbing sign of how deep the problem goes, Grok—X’s own built-in AI tool—has been misidentifying AI-generated content as real. (A spokesperson for X didn’t immediately address a request for comment, but shared links to recent posts by the firm’s safety team.)

Last month, Mother Jones’ Arianna Coghill spoke with AI content expert Jeremy Carrasco about exactly this kind of scenario. Carrasco finds the fake content concerning, but says the deeper harm is what this flood of AI content does to our relationship with real video. When fake footage is convincing and common enough, people start doubting everything—including authentic footage of things that actually happened. That’s the environment we’re now operating in.

Staying informed has never been more important, but in this moment, that means being particularly careful about what you accept as real—even if you think you see it with your own eyes.

2026-03-12 05:27:08

This article was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. Subscribe to follow EHRP’s award-winning journalism, co-published with mainstream media outlets.

When we watch the news now, we often ask ourselves: what disaster movie is this? Is it the one where Americans are shot in their cars and on the street, where manicurists and gardeners are hauled off to torture prisons overseas, and where the commander-in-chief pronounces “affordability” like it’s some weird German word. But the inverse is true as well. As American reality has begun to feel like the Hollywood film Civil War, 2025’s Oscar-nominated movies almost all—for the first time in decades—reflect our insecure, tormented reality. But these films do more than echo the bare facts. While they’re about economic and social insecurity, authoritarianism and exploitation, they all represent those forces through the uncanny and surreal.

Take Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a hyperreal, pulpy and sometimes dreamlike portrait of American political violence. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) aids migrants as they escape the authorities in what he calls a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation:” his allies ride skateboards and jump from roof to roof as if they were samizdat chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins.

The radicals dubbed the French 75, who take on the film’s ICE-inflected police state, get quasi-Pynchonian, performative names like Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills: their backstory is rendered in commensurately broad strokes, set against backdrops like a desert weed farm-slash-nunnery. As a daughter of Weather Underground members recently wrote in the New York Times, One Battle After Another’s resistance fighters are cartoons of the real McCoy, emanations of an improbable, fantastical style.

In Sinners, Jim Crow-era Black American musicians and entrepreneurs strive for independent spaces for love and commerce, and are robbed of their lives and livelihoods by an Irish vampire with potato famine vibes. Timeframes may meld wildly—the film’s central 1930s Mississippi juke joint dance number includes contemporary hip hop dancers and Cleopatra. Director Ryan Coogler has said that he intended the film as about how Black music, a “system of healing,” was extracted for profit. (It’s a happy paradox that a film so critical of exploitative and racist capitalism has grossed more than 370 million dollars.)

These films exemplify what I’ve called “hysterical surrealism,” a genre that fits our age of Trump, erratic state violence, and opulent overlords who treat our country like their private bunker.

Representing social insecurity and precarity in something like a magical realist fashion lets audiences more comfortably watch films that speak to their own anxieties as viewers. Surrealism emerged, after all, as an art genre that was both a reprieve from and reflection of the violent political situation of World War I. After all that grotesque slaughter, who could believe in conventional representational art anymore?

As surrealism partly relieved viewers of that unease—while also capturing new levels of brutality through unexpected symbols—so does the aesthetic of this new crop of films permit viewers to process the extreme social insecurity of our period by portraying aggression and loss in ways that feel detached from the everyday.

In the Brazilian-made Best Picture nominee The Secret Agent, set in that country’s authoritarian 1970s, a pungent sequence features an animated amputated leg, acting as a surreal “stand-in” for police state violence, harming citizens in the film as if it were a slasher. The leg refers to the perna cabeluda (hairy leg), a real-life urban legend from the city of Recife: a severed limb was reputed to hop around dark boulevards kicking people, a metaphor for the dictatorship.

A fourth Best Picture nominee, the sci-fi thriller Bugonia, is also stridently weird, obsessed with both close-ups of bees and the threat of a global conspiracy. So is Marty Supreme, ostensibly a 1950s period drama but with a hyperreal, dislocating aesthetic, full of contemporary-feeling dialogue and editing so rapid that it induces seasickness.

Timothée Chalamet as Marty is a tenement-dwelling, nervy capitalist in the making, hustling ping-pong tables and international table tennis competitions, but he’s also a hyperkinetic liar, careening through every layer of the American social structure: in one scene, he crashes through the floor of a hotel room while taking a bath, landing on a gangster. Marty’s status anxiety and empty ambition is represented, in another scene, by an extended shot of hundreds of ping-pong balls descending on a nighttime New York City street.

Beyond exposing viewers to a stylized and thus less paralyzing version of their fears, today’s gritty, surreal mode of filmmaking genuinely captures our moment. The wild uncertainty and cartoonish oppression of our current moment is best rendered in a weird and confrontational register. Charlie Kirk was shot by a kid who etched Discord memes on the bullets, and everyone saw the footage. DHS now routinely releases white supremacist supercuts of police violence that look like grist for Adam Curtis documentaries. We dwell, after all, in a weird and violent world where it seems that anything bad can happen and often does.

These films stand in contrast to the realist 1970s “social issue films,” the last time politically charged films dominated the typically all-too-conventional film award ceremonies. Those 1970s ancestors of today’s Oscar-lauded films, like Academy Award-winners Rocky and Norma Rae, or The King of Marvin Gardens, were schmaltzily realist and transparent in comparison. Rocky‘s working-class uneducated boxer is a debt collector struggling to get his piece of the American Dream during the economic crisis of the 1970s.

In 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, widowed Alice, who dreams of life as a singer, becomes a waitress in the Southwest to support her child. In Blue Collar, made four years later, Detroit autoworkers including a brilliant Richard Pryor try to keep the faith when their jobs are dull and grim. These films emerged in a time when the postwar promise of working- and middle-class security and income growth started to fracture. (The Nixonian, uncanny political edge of the 1970s was, in contrast, represented in paranoiac—but still more or less realist—thrillers like The Parallax View.)

This year’s Oscar-nominated films about ambitious strivers, faded revolutionaries, and exploited workers, in contrast, are far from realistic. Their hysterical surrealism—a screwball, otherworldly style that seeks to represent inequality and authoritarianism through wacky B-movie elements, pastiche, and anachronism—has antecedents in Best Picture winner Bong Joon Ho’s at times surreal class-struggle film Parasite. All are defined by what the scholars Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho and John Schoneboom have dubbed “surrealpolitik,” an aesthetic expressing a world “increasingly shaped by irrationality, disruption, and the erosion of established norms.”

“Surrealpolitik,” in the words of de Carvalho, is what happens when both culture and politics resemble a “fantasy island: one with little room for rules…and little concern for logical coherence.” If surrealpolitik shapes this year’s Oscar fare, it’s partly because “realism”—surrealism’s opposite—is now so tenuous. AI and other visual tricks have made it hard for us to know what’s factual footage and if it is of an actual event. So little unedited footage gets to us. Meanwhile, every state and politician is a purveyor of some kind of “content,” often similarly distorted, but coming to us with the imprimatur of some supposedly respectable platform or other. Conventional realism, in this context, feels fake.

These films’ uncanny aesthetic gives the viewer some blessed distance from police state oppression or social class desperation, even when they mirror the prevailing tensions of our own reality. Call it Extractive Capitalism for Dummies.

This weekend, when tens of millions watch the Oscars, viewers will be seeing something different from what we’ve seen in decades: a competition between surreal and hyperreal films about societal and economic instability, for the first time in decades, if ever.

Sure, I’ll be tuning in to enjoy terrible canned banter and over-the-top production numbers, and to hope that someone finally rewards long-deserving Gen X patron saint Ethan Hawke. But I’ll also be waiting for a star or a filmmaker, after thanking their twenty agents, to suggest taxing the rich and that every billionaire is a policy failure, starting with those in the award’s show audience.

They will, after all, have the hugest stage in which to note that America has now become even sicklier and more surreal than the films that have been nominated. They could voice their own critique of the world their films reflect. It’s doubtful that they will, of course, but here’s hoping.

2026-03-12 03:14:34

The United States is responsible for killing at least 175 people, many of them children, in a Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school on the last day of February, according to US officials and others familiar with the ongoing military investigation who spoke with the New York Times. The death toll was reported by Iranian officials. 

The deadly strike on the girls’ school, Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary, followed incorrect targeting intelligence about the area. The school is nearby buildings used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy—which the US also targeted on the same day it decimated Shajarah Tayyebeh. Before it was a school, the site was connected to the base. But, according to a visual analysis for the Times, the school area has been sectioned off from the base for at least a decade. US military intelligence, the preliminary report findings indicate, might have been operating off of old data.

The investigation isn’t over and more information is poised to come out about how the school became designated as a target. While there have reportedly been instances of the US using Claude, the AI model created by Anthropic, in their offensive against Iran, it is unclear if the AI was used in the strike against the school. Government officials told the Times that it may have been the result of human error. 

The Times’ sourcing requested anonymity due in part to the fact that President Donald Trump has suggested, without evidence, that Iran was responsible for the elementary school strike. 

Evidence was already mounting against the United States and their culpability for the strike. For example, the US was the one targeting the nearby Iranian base and its military is the only one involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles. 

Still, Trump on Saturday told reporters that, “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.”

On Monday, a Times reporter asked the president why he was why he was alone in his administration in blaming Iran. Top officials including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have referred to the ongoing investigation when asked about the school strike. “Because,” Trump began, “I just don’t know enough about it.”

Images and videos circulating online of the decimated school and recently dug graves for the dead children illustrated the human cost of the strikes. 

One mother described the scene on that day in February to NBC News. She received a call from the school that the war had begun and she needed to pick up her child. She didn’t make it in time. Her son died in the strikes. 

“By the time we arrived, the entire school had collapsed on top of the children,” the mother, who asked not to be identified, told NBC News. “People were pulling out children’s arms and legs. People were pulling out severed heads.”

2026-03-12 02:35:20

Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran beginning in late February, Iran has effectively halted all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf through which about 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flows. Many Americans are now experiencing the effects: skyrocketing gas prices. That’s not likely to change any time soon.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) shared his observations on social media Tuesday that the Trump administration had “no plan” on how to respond.

Did the Trump administration ever really have a plan? To try to answer that question, and its ramifications, I spoke with Jeff Colgan, a political science professor and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. He’s written extensively about the role of oil in international politics and war, and how it impacts energy and the environment.

What is the Strait of Hormuz? 

The Strait of Hormuz is the most important chokepoint in the world, particularly for oil and natural gas. So this is absolutely the nightmare scenario that many risk analysts have been worrying about for decades.

Although this region has seen a lot of warfare over the decades, the tanker flows [to transport crude oil] have managed to continue. Often, the combatants on both sides want the flow of oil to continue because at least one of the sides are profiting from it.

So this does put us in uncharted waters where the Strait of Hormuz gets bottled up in a modern context.

Why is the Strait of Hormuz bottled up right now?

Because the US attacked Iran and Iran has no viable counter strategy to strike back at the US. In some sense, this is an extreme step by Iran, but they feel like they have no other choice. Their leadership is wiped out, and they’re fighting for their lives. 

So in this war, unlike others, they are using their full capacity to lash out in every direction, including all of the US military bases that are located in the region—in Bahrain, UAE, and Qatar especially. Iran was also in a difficult “use it or lose it” situation with their missiles because the US bombing campaign was directed toward destroying missiles to make sure they couldn’t use them. 

Iran has long avoided closing the Strait of Hormuz because Iran’s own oil has flowed through it and they don’t want to cut off their only revenue source. But their backs are to the wall.

It seems like the Trump administration started the war in Iran without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz. What are your thoughts on the administration’s handling of the situation?

It is shocking and, frankly, appalling how little planning and foresight the White House has brought to the situation. The poor planning of the war appears to be on many issues, including many Americans who are in Gulf countries, munitions, etc. 

It’s striking because it seems like they have tried to walk back from the situation on Monday and say, “We’re going to wrap this war up quickly.”

How do you see the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz from a historical perspective? 

I have been writing for a couple months now about the Trump administration’s return to what I call “petro-imperialism”—the idea that the US, prior to 1973 would intervene in global oil markets in support of American oil companies and use force like the 1953 coup in Iran backed by the CIA when Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized oil. 

This happened in multiple countries: “We’re going to select your political leader, and if you don’t pick the right one, we’re going to get rid of them.” 

In Trump’s rhetoric, with regard to Venezuela, especially, but also with Iran, we see echoes of that.

What do you think is the immediate impact on oil and trade?

One thing we saw in the 1980s was the so-called Tanker War between Iran and Iraq. Tankers are resilient to being hit by missiles so it is possible to keep the flow of oil going during the war. But this warfare has changed. Drone technology [in Iran] is untested waters. 

It’s striking to see how even oil markets reacted very strongly on Monday, bringing the oil price way back down, because the president signaled that we wanted to keep the war from getting out of hand. But it’s not like oil markets always get it right either. 

There’s real uncertainty on how long it will take to restore the flow of oil when statements like the one today from Saudi Aramco [the national oil company of Saudi Arabia] saying that if the situation doesn’t stop very soon, the effects will be “catastrophic.” 

On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright made an announcement on X that the US Navy escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. In response, oil prices plunged and stocks jumped. But shortly after, the post was deleted. Is this mixed messaging something you’ve come across before?

The fog of war is a problem for all wars, where you have misinformation and uncertainty. On the other hand, the Trump administration has far more inconsistency and incoherence than a typical US administration. There are probably multiple reasons why they are more incoherent, but we can observe how President Trump himself has said conflicting things about the war—that it’s pretty much complete and then demanding unconditional surrender in the next breath.

As someone trying to absorb everything going on in Iran, is there something key that you think we should understand?

We have choices about how we consume energy, and what isn’t spiking right now is the price of sunshine and wind. We should be thinking, as consumers, about the choices that [the U.S. government is] making and the energy security, economic security, and national security consequences. No energy source is perfect and there’s always trade-offs, but renewables have a significant national security advantage in situations like this, where the basic fuel source of fossil fuels can be interrupted by political events. It’s not only wars, but also embargoes, as we saw with Russia and Ukraine and the negotiations with Europe about various flows of fossil fuels. What kind of energy we consume does matter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

2026-03-12 00:41:15

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth conducted a remarkably peevish press conference on the United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran. At various points, journalists in the breifing room asked—reasonably enough—whether there was “a concern of this spiraling into a longer war.”

“Did you not hear my remarks?” Hegseth responded, sounding indignant. “I mean, we’re ensuring the mission gets accomplished, but we are very clear-eyed, as the president has been, unlike other presidents, about the foolish policies of the past that recklessly pulled us into things that were not tethered to actual clear objectives.” 

The “mission for our warfighters,” Hegseth added a moment later, still sounding moderately ticked off, “is very, very clear. And they’re executing it right now, violently.”

The prickly exchange was notable, considering that the current Pentagon press pool is almost entirely made up of right-wing outlets who typically provide overwhelmingly pro-Trump coverage. The previous Pentagon press corps walked out en masse in October after refusing to sign a restrictive media policy and were largely replaced by a variety of conservative media organizations and influencers.

It was inevitable, then, that one day those reporters and influencers and others in the MAGA-flavored press would be called upon to cover an actual news event that does not always reflect favorably on the president. With the invasion of Iran, that day has now arrived. 

Following that press conference, Hegseth quickly had to bat away suspicion he had again put a thumb on the scale. Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson, who herself has a history of bigoted and xenophobic statements, denied a report from CNN’s Brian Stelter that Hegseth only took questions from handpicked outlets. “He is not Sleepy Joe Biden,” she retorted on X. “Hope that clears up any confusion.” That take-all-comers bravado was undercut on Wednesday when the Washington Post reported the Pentagon had since acted to bar two photographers from further Iran briefings after they published photos of Hegseth his staff deemed “unflattering.”

With the Iran invasion, Hegseth and the rest of the Trump administration are facing unusually heavy criticism from unexpected quarters. Conspiracy theorists who have often been pro-Trump have made it apocalyptically clear that the war has made them sour on the president: Natural News, a floridly weird anti-vaccine and pro-conspiracy outlet, called the Iran attack “the final, convulsive act of a dying American empire,” arguing that it would, in the end, guarantee “a seismic shift in global power, and it hands the ultimate leverage not to Washington, but to Tehran.” But many, more prominent, far-right figures have also come out unequivocally against it, including Steve Bannon, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Infowars kingpin Alex Jones. (Carlson even claimed on his program, which airs on X, that he’d flown to Washington “three times in the last month” to try to dissuade Trump from attacking Iran.)

Those figures seemed clear—unusually clear, in many cases—that the stakes are high. On Monday’s Infowars broadcast, Alex Jones warned that he thought the attacks would “absolutely escalate to World War III 99% of the time.” 

“The full invasion of Iran is going down,” he said, anticipating a ground invasion. “We have days, maybe a week, to stop this… It’s all happening.”

The Federalist, often a home for more genteel pro-Trump puffery, also pumped the brakes, writing that the administration has been asked reasonable questions that “Trump and his top officials can’t answer consistently and coherently.”

The simple questions, according a piece by Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson, include “what is our goal in Iran? Why did we launch this war now? What is our theory of victory, and how will we know when we have achieved it? These four questions in particular deserve answers. So far, we haven’t got them.” 

Other pro-Trump media outlets, including several that make up the new Pentagon press corps, seems less sure how to cover the invasion, toggling between a neutral accounting and— sometimes in the same breath—kowtowing to the president and the administration by framing the conflict in their preferred terms. The National Pulse, for instance, an outlet founded by former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam—he’s also an investor in a “MAGA hot spot” restaurant in Washington—ran an item on Tuesday about how the war is, in Trump’s words, “very complete” and praised US and Israeli forces for “effectively decapitating the Islamist regime’s top leadership and crippling” its military capabilities.

In the Pentagon briefing room, reporters asking questions often use the Trump administration’s preferred language, not only by referring to Iran’s forces as “the enemy” and “the adversary,” but by proceeding from the premise that the war is going exceedingly well. In a (calmer) press conference on Tuesday, for instance, in which Hegseth and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took questions, they often served as opportunities to stress that the mission was under control and wouldn’t expand into a broader war. Alexandra Ingersoll, an anchor with the exceedingly pro-Trump One America News, helpfully asked about the degradation of Iran’s missile capabilities. Another journalist tossed up a softball and asked about Trump’s boast that he had a “really good call” with Russian President Vladimir Putin; Hegseth affirmed that he had. 

In contrast, Eric Schmitt from the New York Times asked about a timeline for the bombings to end, prompting one of the most revealing exchanges of the war so far, when Hegseth responded by declaring that President Trump “controls the throttle,” adding, “It’s not for me to posit whether it’s the beginning, the middle or the end.” 

The new Pentagon press corps members are often careful to follow up any question, no matter how bland, with some manner of praise for the administration. After asking about the government’s “message to Americans” at this time, and whether Israel “might be taking advantage of the U.S.’s backing,” Jordan Conradson, a writer from the far-right and heavily conspiratorial Gateway Pundit, tweeted that he was “proud to be in the Pentagon asking fair questions for our readers” and thanked Hegseth and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for “for having us taking my questions” [sic]. 

The Epoch Times, which has been traditionally been rabidly pro-Trump, has so far mostly stuck to bland and newspaper-like recountings of the bombing campaign. But the paper, which is backed by China’s Falun Gong religious movement, also ran a carefully worded opinion piece by a frequent contributor, praising the “current mission” as a “precise air and naval operation without American boots on the ground.” But, the author added, “Lessons learned from the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam quagmires informed us that nation building rarely is effective and democracy can’t be transplanted.” 

There’s rarely been a more stark divide within the MAGA press as the one visible between the often-cheerleading Pentagon briefing room and the critics on the outside. On Monday night, Alex Jones said Infowars wouldn’t cover the invasion “like it’s an entertainment show or we’re watching a war movie”—a strong claim from someone who’s covered virtually every mass shooting as though it isn’t real, spinning those claims into poisonous and virulent infotainment for his audience. 

“This is real,” Jones declared, for once. “We’re living this.” He needed, he added, to “stop the show” for a few hours and pore over his clips and headlines in order to better communicate what was happening to his audience.

“When you’re eating bug protein,” Jones darkly added, referring to his frequent claims that Americans are destined to be enslaved by elites and forced to eat insects, “you’ll remember this broadcast.” 

2026-03-12 00:10:57

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

War is an extreme action and, thus, triggers extreme reactions. Including extreme stupidity. It’s always disheartening—or ought to be—to see what should be a last resort comes to pass. It’s worse when a war is accompanied by cruelty, callousness, recklessness, and idiocy, though for obvious reasons that might be unavoidable. As for Trump’s war in Iran—which could well be an immense blunder—it has been enveloped in layers of excessive dumbness.

I’m not talking about the strategic wisdom—or lack thereof—of this attack, which could precipitate calamities throughout the region and beyond. Or the madness of impulsively launching such a war without planning for what comes afterward. I’m referring to how it has prompted imbecility among its supporters, including at the White House.

At 1600 Pennsylvania, the belief seems to be that war is the continuation of trolling by other means. First, the White House released a video intercutting scenes of bomb strikes with video game footage. (Look how fun it is to slaughter people!) Then it posted a video featuring movie clips to hype the awesomeness of this war—a military action that opened with a strike, probably American in origin, on a girls’ elementary school that massacred scores of students.

This White House video moves quickly from Iron Man 2 to Gladiator to Braveheart to Top Gun to Better Call Saul to John Wick to Breaking Bad to other fare, including Tropic Thunder, Superman, and Transformers, and ends with a sound clip from the Mortal Kombat video games declaring, “Flawless victory.” Then a fade to the White House emblem. In the middle of all this, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth intones, “F.A.”—as in “fuck around, find out.”

It’s juvenile and demonstrates a lack of somberness about the nasty and brutal business of war. Kudos to Ben Stiller, who directed, co-wrote, and starred in Tropic Thunder, for demanding the White House remove the clip from his film: “We never gave you permission and have no interest in being part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.” Or a video game.

The video is also pretty dumb. Several of the characters featured, such as Saul Goodman and Walter White of Breaking Bad, are ethically challenged criminals, not the types you want to hail as role models or heroes. Russell Crowe (Gladiator) and Mel Gibson (Braveheart) are from New Zealand and Australia, respectively, and each play a rebel who opposes an invasionary and imperial force. That’s not quite the current storyline.

Making light of warfare that’s killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, and creating potential environmental and health disasters and perhaps a humanitarian crisis shows an utter disregard for human life and dignity. But, hell, pop open a Red Bull and let’s have a ball. There’s no better way to convince the public this war is being run by adults who care about the sanctity of life, respect the Iranian people, and went to war only because there was absolutely no other choice.

We also saw what might be called war frivolity at the Free Press, where Nellie Bowles, who created the site with spouse Bari Weiss, found lots of fun in the latest war news, joshing that Trump will pick Iran’s new leader “via swimsuit competition,” celebrating the torpedoing of a ship (“Welcome back to water warfare, baby!”), and joking that it was a good thing a downed American pilot “didn’t land in Minneapolis.”

Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed political theorist of the far right who denigrates democracy and celebrates monarchy, got into the act. He blamed the United States’ problem with Iran on the American left, tweeting, “The Iranian Revolution was a diplomatic crime of the American left. The Islamic Republic, like its proxy Hamas, is a client power of the American left. Trump is only bombing Tehran because he can’t bomb Brooklyn.”

There is so much inanity in those three sentences.

The Islamic Revolution was a product of 26 years of repressive rule from the Shah, who was installed by the United States after Washington and London orchestrated the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a democratically elected leader who dared to nationalize the British-controlled oil industry. Moreover, the fundamentalists of Tehran have more in common with anti-woke Trumpists than they do with NPR listeners in Park Slope. (Ask them about queer people, abortion, and secular relativism.) And it’s swell of Yarvin to suggest that fellow Americans deserve to be bombed.

Such nonsense from him is not surprising. After all, he has called for liquidating democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law and handing power to a CEO-ish leader who would turn the US government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” Sounds like a nutball, right? Yet he’s pals with JD Vance and Peter Thiel. So be afraid.

For outright ignorance, we have Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.). On Fox News, he proclaimed, “We have been at war with Iran since 1947.”

Nope. As noted above, from 1953 to 1979, Washington was pals with the Shah, helping him run his authoritarian regime. And here’s the kicker: Crawford is the chair of the House intelligence committee. Ponder that.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) probably knows the United States has not been at war with Iran for 79 years. But he sure doesn’t know how to talk to a skeptical public about Trump’s war. One recent poll found that only 36 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s actions in Iran and that a majority believes Iran poses a minor threat or no threat to the United States.

Yet with public sentiment tilted against this war, Graham believes it’s fine to turn up the warmongering dial to 11. On Fox News—of course—he bellowed, “We’re going to blow the hell out of these people.”

Performances like that are sure to settle the nerves of worried Americans. Even Republican pundit Meghan McCain saw how counterproductive such rhetoric can be for the fans of this war. She tweeted, “I’ve known Lindsey Graham since I was a child. I am imploring anyone who will listen in the Trump administration to stop sending this man out as a surrogate. He is scaring people and doing damage to whatever message you’re trying to sell to the American public about the Iran war.”

Daniel Pipes, a longtime Islamophobic foreign policy analyst, expressed his disappointment and surprise that the Iranian people last week did not mount a revolution against the regime: “The populace now appears cowed into near-silence.”

When bombs are raining down, many people might prefer to seek shelter and protect their families rather than hit the streets in protest. Also, given Trump’s erratic signals—first he suggested the US would support an uprising, then his team drew back from that—Iranians opposed to the regime might be a tad reluctant to move on the government, while the 200,000-member Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still intact. Perhaps they can apologize to Pipes for letting him down.

The biggest dunderhead move, though, was Trump’s. As the war raged, with reports of new American casualties and US embassies in the region being ordered to evacuate, Trump this weekend showed the nation and the world that he was on top of things by…golfing. Nothing says you’re serious about protecting the troops and ending a war as soon as possible as zipping about in a golf cart at Trump National Doral in Miami and then signing autographs in the clubhouse. (Look, a buffet!)

You might think that a demagogue keen on imagery and PR stunts would realize the value in creating the impression that he’s a committed and engaged commander in chief during wartime—even if he was only faking that—by spending the day in the Situation Room with military brass or in the Oval Office on the phone talking to world leaders about the various crises being triggered by his war. Instead, he’s devoting hours to swinging a stick at a tiny ball.

Didn’t any of Trump’s brilliant advisers suggest that for just this weekend he skip the links? This decision demonstrated tremendous lack of judgment. It suggested Trump views himself as an emperor who can do whatever he pleases and need not worry about consequences. Anyone who pulls such a dumb move cannot be trusted to run a war—or a country.