We’re Being Played Through Propaganda, Memes, and War
Meme-driven narratives use cultural cues to trigger emotion and sell war.
Posted April 1, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Memes can make you laugh, fill you with outrage, or make you feel pride. They repackage shared cultural knowledge to activate existing schemas in surprising, entertaining, or outrageous ways. They are also the weapons of choice for Iran War propaganda. War memes remix pop culture into unexpected juxtapositions of images, short videos, music, and phrases that spread rapidly across digital networks, fueled by their ability to activate our memories and capture our attention .
The purpose of propaganda is to foster patriotism, demonize enemies, and sell war. Propaganda from both the United States and Iran is leaning into memes, blending clips from video games and pop culture to get our attention and gain our support. But the information about the war is on your social media feed, not from the battlefield. We don't hear about the human cost of physical combat. We are caught in the middle of a cognitive battle, with competing memes that tell us who's the hero, who's the enemy, who’s “winning,” and what a "real man" is supposed to do.
A well-constructed meme triggers emotion , tapping into what we already know in new ways (Shifman, 2014). We expect memes to truncate information to provoke a response. They feel innocuous but are insidiously powerful. Humor lowers defenses, suspends critical analysis, and enhances social bonding . Heroic and dominance cues make the message feel morally right, reinforcing social identity and heightening perceptions of us-versus-them. The fastest-spreading content is optimized to activate our emotions, not for accuracy, proportion, or moral weight.
The Age of Memetic Warfare
The White House and Iran have been duking it out on social media with short videos that glorify real missile strike footage by framing it with rapid cuts of video game visuals, gamified war memes, and pop culture icons, like SpongeBob and Captain America. There is no evidence of the human cost. There is no clear boundary between what is real footage and what is fabricated. These fast-paced videos craft mini-narratives of war that reduce the emotional weight of combat and turn conflict into something that looks like play.
How Memes Work in the Brain
Memes are fast and efficient because they operate almost entirely through rapid, associative, emotionally driven information processing (Kahneman, 2011). They make highly effective propaganda by appealing directly to our emotions, group loyalties, and visceral responses, short-circuiting critical thinking, shifting attitudes before we realize we are being persuaded.
Neither the White House nor Iran is creating new visual languages. They are crafting meaning by hijacking existing cultural containers, like Call of Duty , Marvel’s Iron Man , and Pokémon, drawing on our years of exposure as lifelong media consumers. Wrapping military footage inside childhood cultural references triggers the positive memories of recognizable cultural symbols. Emotions act as filters that shape how we interpret information and perceive reality, heavily influencing decision-making and memory . States such as fear , happiness , or pride determine what we see, often causing us to focus selectively on information that fits with what we feel. If you know a SpongeBob fan (and who doesn’t?), seeing him next to an explosion sanitizes conflict and frames it as entertainment, thus trivializing violence and human life.
Young Men Are the Target
When the White House cuts a Call of Duty montage into real action footage, or drops a superhero into a war meme, it amplifies moral authority and macho credibility. The message is the same: war is a game, our side is right, and strength wins. Cartoon versions increase the emotional distance of messages and make us feel safer, reducing conflict further to a game-like experience. Originally, World War II propaganda, Captain America still signals that the mission is righteous and patriotic without ever having to say so. These memes normalize a hypermasculine, militarized response and encourage us to accept policies out of loyalty rather than ask questions.
War propaganda has traditionally functioned as a device for group cohesion, our-country-against-yours, and that is visible in the moral authority embedded in a government's themes. Public response to the war has been highly polarized by political party and gender . These memes are generating attention, but the economic realities of this conflict are a powerful impediment to positive public sentiment. Even if memes fail to build support for the war, they do real harm when they set a new standard for information and how we relate to violence.
Repetition Shapes Reality
The goal of memetic warfare is to shape how people think before they evaluate the facts. Flooding feeds with sizzle reels of gaming clips, superhero memes, and dominance jokes primes people to see war through a lens of inevitable, even desirable, heroic excitement, making certain policies feel right without anyone seeing the boots-on-the-ground reality. Social media campaigns can also inoculate audiences against later, more fact-based information that makes correction harder once the beliefs are set (Lewandowsky and van der Linden, 2021).
The White House has blamed video games for inspiring domestic shootings. Ironically, they are using video game aesthetics to strip the moral weight from real violence and casualties. The media, condemned as a driver of violence at home, has become a tool of persuasion when the violence is state-sanctioned and directed at others.
Iran, meanwhile, supported by Putin’s disinformation machine, understands the game, too. They integrate western pop culture and surreal, nostalgia -driven formats, like Disney's Inside Out , Lego soldiers, rap music, and Teletubbies, into memes. Iran is using mockery and humiliation against a leader whose identity is built on projecting dominance. It is also a coordinated effort to bypass traditional media and influence global perception, particularly among nations the administration has alienated through tariffs, diplomatic pressure, or outright insult. Where MAGA audiences might read the Lego Trump as enemy propaganda, international audiences are already primed by their own grievances with U.S. foreign policy. Iran is not just trolling the president. It is messaging a global audience to build sympathy for their cause.
Both the U.S. and Iran are pulling triggers on mental models the audience already holds. Neither is sharing real facts. The audience, scrolling past missile strikes the same way it scrolls past dance videos, may not notice how it shapes what they accept, ignore, and never think to question. Propaganda has always worked best when the audience doesn’t know it’s the target. Social media memes make that easier than ever. When war is indistinguishable from entertainment, democracy has a problem that no algorithm will fix.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow . Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lewandowsky, S., & van der Linden, S. (2021). Countering misinformation and fake news through inoculation and prebunking . European Review of Social Psychology , 32(2), 348–384.
Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in Digital Culture . MIT Press.
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Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., M.B.A. , is the Director of the Media Psychology Research Center and a professor of media psychology at Fielding Graduate University.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.