Last week, the White House tweeted out a montage of a so-called “killstreak” sequence from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III crossed with drone video of lethal strikes on Iran. The intro to Childish Gambino’s “Bonfire” played over the carnage, a song that includes these lyrics: “Drop it like the Nasdaq / Move white girls like there’s coke up my ass crack.” To be clear, those lyrics aren’t heard in the video. Just the intro. Still. @WhiteHouse is the account of the executive branch of the United States of America.
This is Operation Epic Fury, as named by Secretary of Warfare III Pete Hegseth. President Trump, long in cognitive peril, has lost control of whatever creaky reference set—Patton, Apocalypse Now, Shark Week—he used to deploy to get MAGA androgens pumping. So the snickering gamers who now run White House comms are left to hype the bloodbath. As The New Republic’s Grace Segers and Tori Otten recently reported, the gamification of violence is this administration’s trademarked move.
Steven Cheung, the White House comms director formerly of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, was proud as punch of the video. When Drew Harwell at The Washington Post explained the snuff video in a tweet, Cheung shot back, “W’s in the chat, boys!” That’s streamerspeak for a high five. Cool.
This aesthetic seems very pimply incel. But the Twitch memes are blending seamlessly with the equally bloodthirsty rhetoric of the higher-ups, the delusional Christian nationalists who issue actual commands. Brains like those of Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, have steeped in the twisted Book of Revelation for so long that their hearts, too, thrum to cartoony gamer apocalypses involving psilocybin-style hallucinations.
We also learned last week, according to some 200 complaints filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that U.S. troops were told that a war in Iran is God’s plan, and that Trump has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His return to Earth.” Armageddon is in the chat, boys.
Armageddon is a fictional battlefield, and it appears once in the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, that sketchy final entry that reads a bit like Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. Revelation doesn’t mention feeding the poor or welcoming the stranger, as the Gospels do; it mentions dragons, lakes of fire, and a lamb with seven eyes.
And the war in Iran is being led by men who like that Bible.
Revelation 16:12-16 has it that frog-like spirits in Armageddon pour out of the mouths of a dragon (Satan), a beast (Antichrist), and false prophets (liberals, according to Hegseth) to perform miracles and gather global leaders for a final war. In one scene, a woman on the moon gives birth while a red dragon with seven heads waits to devour her newborn. In another, an angel opens a bottomless pit, which then explodes with locusts with human faces.
Many theologians, including Martin Luther, have considered Revelation the least Christian book of the Bible. Indeed, you’d hardly recognize the peacenik Jesus in the Book of Revelation. He’s been crueltymaxxed. With a sword in his mouth, this “Jesus” slaughters numberless people without mercy, while also appearing as a white horse with eyes of flames, a bloody robe, and a tattoo. “The wrath of God” becomes a wine press, and “the blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.” Quite a killstreak, even for God and the Pentagon. Small wonder that among Revelation’s devotees was one Charles Manson.
Cold comfort: America’s hawks don’t talk in neocon doublespeak anymore. The last forever wars in the Middle East were framed by folks like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney as somehow involving important-sounding things like “stability in the region,” “national security,” and of course “WMDs.” True, there were also earnest Christians in the Situation Room back then. Those pious warriors—notably, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush—spoke righteously of freedom.
Twenty years ago, in other words, neocons and neolibs could justify war with “values” (coded Christian) and “interests” (coded capitalist). Violent superstitions were supposed to belong to the other side. Today, Trump’s men have no problem citing pure pinwheel-eyed science fiction as a rationale for war.
In the end, the U.S.-Israel war in Iran is unpopular, unconstitutional, and without secular justification. If, as Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio say, regime change is off the table, and if, as Trump has said, Iran’s (reportedly nonexistent) nuclear program is already “obliterated,” there’s simply no case that destroying Iran advances American interests. This is why Republicans in Washington are not talking much. They’re either falling mutely in line with Trump or pointing vaguely to Sunday school lessons to explain the war, which has killed over 1,000 civilians so far, according to one human rights group.
Way back in 2001, Operation Enduring Freedom may have been predicated on hopes for something like nation-building. But nation-building is far too woke for Trump’s guys. Operation Epic Fury is just a bunch of men, several with extremely violent personal histories and fantasies, jacked up on geopolitical rage and a meme set that combines medieval superstitions, Call of Duty, and the glorification of violence as an end in itself.
