Let me be frank. Many, many, many years ago I sat in a windowless room in a desert and discussed disinformation tactics with military staff.
The details are as real as someone training on how to open the bomb bay doors.
And what I keep seeing the press do today is amplify the disinformation.
“Epic fury” is definitely not what people should be hearing when they watch hundreds of innocent children being pulled dead from double-tap destruction of schools and hospitals.
According to Rohollah, his daughter survived the first strike and was moved to the prayer hall. The second strike hit before he could reach her. “My little girl was completely burned,” he said.
“There was nothing left of her. We could only identify her from her school bag, which she was still holding. She was completely burned.”
Double-tap is a war crime.
Beck isn’t confused.
Bayless isn’t confused.
The IDF social media team isn’t confused.
They all understand that a meme layer provides them cover, and they reproduce it because it works. Nobody was “just making content” the same way nobody was “just following orders.”
A toddler says “just joking” because they’ve learned that humor occupies a protected category, that you can’t punish a joke without looking like the problem. The Trump operation scaled that instinct to state power.
The meme doesn’t make the crime okay, it makes the crime undiscussable. You either engage with the meme on its own terms, in which case you’re participating, or you insist on seriousness, in which case you’re the killjoy who doesn’t get it.
Just look at Winkie’s new piece, which stays stuck at “isn’t this surreal.” He’s caught in the trap.
We’re all living in the nightmare of an evil-yet-also-camp presidency.
The campiness registers as an aesthetic observation when it’s actually a governance technique. The Call of Duty overlay on a cruise missile strike isn’t commentary on the strike, it’s the information operation that accompanies the strike. Two weapons, one target.
Disinformation is warfare and Americans are awash in it right now without defenses.
The Joker is the perfect figure to explain this because the whole point of the character is that the performance of chaos is the strategy. He’s not actually crazy, just using the appearance of crazy to make his actions unaccountable. “Why so serious” is a dominance move, not a question.
Think about what’s being done to you, right now, with your attention, while more and more children are dying in a forever war.