Everyone's a Hero in a Fascist Reading of Popular Media: Iran Strikes, Call of Duty, and Dudecore Soundbites

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a massive series of strikes against Iran, hitting locations in Tehran and elsewhere. The pre-emptive strikes, called Operation Epic Fury, involved the assassination of Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. The strikes also killed hundreds of civilians, including 150 students at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab (southern Iran). This school attack, which appears deliberate in the images from the aftermath, is one of the worst cases of civilian casualties across nearly a half-century of U.S. imperial intervention in the Middle East.

On March 4, 2026, four days later, the White House posted a video on X captioned "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue." The video kicks off with a clip from the 'Afghan' map in Modern Warfare III (2023) as the player calls in a Mass Guided Bombs (MGB) killstreak. As an instrumental version of Childish Gambino's 2011 song "Bonfire" picks up, jets scramble and ballistic missiles fly from carriers before a montage of strike footage plays (overlaid with "+100" text after hits). Voiceovers from Call of Duty arrive at :22 ("We're winning this fight.") and :51 ("We've taken control."), both of which are used as in-game feedback to keep players apprised of the tide of their match.

On March 5, 2026, one more day later, the White House posted a video on X captioned "JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY" with a montage of sound bite videos that can be described as dudecore Hollywood bullshit. Here's a transcription of voice-overs with their sources:

• "Wake up, daddy's home" - Iron Man 2 (2010)
• "Strength and honor" - Gladiator (2000)
• "What will you do without freedom?" - Braveheart (1995)
• "Maverick's inbound" - Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
• "You can't conceive of what I'm capable of!" - Better Call Saul, Season 5 (2015)
• "Finishing this fight" - Halo 2 (2004)
• "Yeah, I'm thinking I'm back" - John Wick (2014)
• "I'm here to fight for truth and justice and the American way" - Superman (1978)
• "I am the danger" - Breaking Bad, Season 4 (2011)
• "Time to find out" - Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon (2011)
• "Maximum effort" - Deadpool (2016)
• "Finish him!" - Mortal Kombat (1992)
• "Here it comes" - Dragon Ball Super (2015)
• "MORE!" - Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
• "Now, end this!" - Yu-Gi-Oh! (2000)
• "Flawless victory!" - Mortal Kombat (1992)

It's an absurd montage of media and oft-memed lines (the Rylo Ken Star Wars line is used almost exclusively in memes and as a reaction gif). Every voice is male, most of the movies are about war, and every accent is American.

There is something deeply rotten in how the military and the presidency are presenting themselves in public right now. I previously wrote here about the DHS posting explicitly fascist songs on their social media accounts, and I wanted to expand a little further on what I'm observing this week in the wake of a massive (and deeply unpopular) military campaign led by the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize. I'll proceed here in two parts. First, I'll talk a bit about the Call of Duty video edit. Then, I'll discuss a bit about the dudecore movie clips before offering some closing thoughts.

Video Games and the Crosshairs of War

In 2018, Roger Stahl published a book called Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze. In it, he puzzles over how commonplace it had become (through the media of the so-called Global War on Terror) to see footage from the perspective of a bomb or sniper. He calls this the 'weaponized gaze' and theorizes it as a powerful propaganda frame. This framing, as he writes, can be understood through Althusser's notion of interpellation, which Dr. Stahl describes as such: "the formation of the political subject takes place when some apparatus of the state addresses and thus fixes the subject on a grid of power relations" (p. 15). In the footage of these recent Iran strikes (and the Call of Duty overlays that decorate them), the audience is being asked to view all of this from the perspective of the munition, inhabiting the perspective of the remote combatant. As Stahl wrote, in the age of drone vision (and AC-130 gunship POVs), "the camera typically hovered over [human targets] before releasing its payload...commonly ended with an all-consuming conflagration" (p. 92). We are observing this exact thing as the White House (and CENTCOM) spam social media feeds full of videos of trucks, planes, and buildings exploding.

The MGW killstreak in Call of Duty replaced the Tactical Nuke killstreak from earlier versions of the game. In both scenarios, a player must rack up an insurmountable body count before calling in the munition. The killstreak, when called, starts a timer on every player's screen as an aircraft (or ballistic missile in earlier iterations) flies through the sky. When the timer reaches zero, the entire map is decimated, resulting in a victory for the team that called in the killstreak. The player, like everyone else on the map (including teammates, from their own POVs) are decimated in game-ending fire. Call of Duty lobbies, known for their talkative teammates and enemies alike, light up with cheers as a player nears the killstreak, celebrating their teammate when they finally achieve it. The reality of Call of Duty matches, though, is that if a player is so much better than everyone else that they can come anywhere close to calling in a MGW/TacNuke, the enemy team probably never stood a chance anyway – the killstreak is more of a pwning flourish than a real function of playing the game to win.

There are so many parallels that the White House inadvertently draws for itself. The US military dominates abroad, sparing no expense, just a year after DOGE obliterated social safety nets at home and USAID projects abroad because there wasn't a budget for them, apparently. The leaders, like the players in a COD match, gloat about their win. Death is treated as a score (literally, the +100 elements from COD connect killing with numerical score).

Films and Heroics

The media origins from the second White House post vary, in that some are from movies, some are from video games, and others are from TV shows (both prestige TV and anime alike). Some of the films (or the films they are sequels to or reboots of) that this montage contains are ones that Roger Stahl mentioned specifically in his book (he describes Top Gun as "Tony Scott's vapid, rapid-cut ode to futurism...which marked the precise pivot [in Hollywood aesthetics] insofar as it offered up a new set of master images and narratives", p. 30).

The media the White House posted all more or less contain several key themes:

• Masculinity, framed as both dominant and war-making ("daddy," "strength, "capable," "danger")
• Frameworks of action ("inbound," "finishing," "I'm back," "fight for," "find out")
• Descriptions of culminations/endings ("end this," "flawless victory")
• Large, incomprehensible ideographic notions around Americanness ("honor," "freedom," "justice")

I cannot help but immediately think of how much this montage reflects the American man's media diet of the last two decades (Christopher Reeves's 1978 Superman, Mortal Kombat's 1992 phrases, and Mel Gibson's 1995 appearance in Braveheart are outliers, as essentially all other properties were released after 9/11). This media has an educational aspect; it helps an audience craft themselves, their communities, and their enemies through visual entertainment media.

Umberto Eco, in his essay "Ur-Fascism," provides 14 features of fascism. Number 11 of Eco's list is that "everybody is educated to become a hero." I'm reproducing all of Eco's point and it should be quite clear where I'm going with this:

In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

These films are tales of heroism and form a modern mythology of American exceptionalism – a mythos wherein every man is heroic. Their proximity to death (its imminence, even) braids together both enemy and aggressor. While many of the characters in these movies do heroic things on their own, many of them explicitly sacrifice themselves (Iron Man, Master Chief, Kylo Ren) or succumb to their wounds or otherwise die for their actions (Maximum Decimus Meridius, William Wallace, Walter White). What is this saying about American understandings of the role of the hero? How do the American policymakers (and White House social media interns), reusing these characters from the comforts of situation rooms and sterile offices, envision their connection to massive lethal violence thousands of miles away?

Eco's point immediately following his one about heroic education has to do with the role of machismo as a critical mechanism through which to make the stress of permanent war more tenable. Specifically, "the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons – doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise." I am struck by this montage's start with Robert Downey Jr's utterance of "Wake up, daddy's home" and the image of Christopher Reeves's Superman delivering his lines about the "justice the American way" (the caption of the post) while locking eyes with Margot Kidder's Lois Lane. This video of dudecore action content is interspersed with the footage of equipment exploding (the same POV videos I mentioned above), equating these macho lines to the superior firepower of the US military.

Living in Hell

The hell of having to be an American taxpayer seeing my tax dollars go towards blowing up children is a painful one without also having to watch the cretins behind the operations dancing on their graves. We're told that having a government that gives a shit about its people domestically is politically impossible or too expensive or too prone to abuse, but our military continues its expensive adventures abroad, sparing no expense when it comes to killing kids and supreme leaders alike.

The two posts I mention in this blog aren't the only ones that the White House has crafted using the same strike footage. They've got one with Carl "CJ" Johnson from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas voicing his "Ah Shit, Here We Go Again" line before more explosion footage. This time, the overlay isn't "+100" from Call of Duty, but "WASTED" and the audio that plays in-game when this text shows on screen. It doesn't actually make sense in context, though, because this screen only appears when the player character dies in-game, so the video game metaphor falls apart. They've got another with a stale Spongebob meme, again with more explosion footage.

We're really just going to be absolutely subjected to the worst, most unfunny content seeking to make palatable the brutal wars of choice this administration is starting or escalating. It's important, as we are once more inundated with another generation's thoughtless violence, to not become the boiled frog. These videos are shocking, perverse, and – above all – deeply cringe. The people making them think they're the toughest, coolest, slickest people in the world, but they're all snakes, tyrants, and cowards.

In 2021, DC Comics updated Superman's motto from "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" (close enough to what Reeves delivered and the White House clipped into their montage), opting for the more inclusive "Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow." In a mid-movie scene from James Gunn's 2025 Superman reboot, which featured Nicholas Hoult expertly playing a very Elon Musk-like Lex Luthor, Clark Kent and Lois Lane discuss whether or not Kent is "punk rock." Lois tells Kent that he "trust[s] everyone and think[s] everyone [he] ever met is, like... beautiful." Superman replies, "Maybe that's the real punk rock," a theme that is repeated in the film's feature song, "Punkrocker" (featuring Iggy Pop!).

All media don't convey this same fascist-heroic educational message, and even the properties that the White House is cherry-picking from aren't necessarily saying what they're getting from these properties. Hell, Gladiator and Braveheart are largely about heroic resistance to an imperial power! Tony Stark and Kylo Ren are characters who spend a LOT of time on screen being bad guys (serving their own imperial interests) before a massive change of heart leads them to betray those former positions. The people making these policies and montages are largely media illiterate, and they're counting on their audiences inhabiting the same anti-humanistic, anti-intellectual, and anti-peace mindsets. Don't fall for it.