Call Of Duty Enters The White House’s Arsenal Of Memes

Yesterday, The White House posted a video to social media interspersing footage from America’s attacks on Iran with footage from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. This should be shocking–our highest level of government treating a conflict that has left a reported over 1,000 people dead, including more than 100 children, as a joke–but what else do we expect from them at this point?

The White House’s minute and five second clip begins with a player activating the game’s MGB killstreak before cutting to footage of the attacks on Iran, including planes and missiles taking off and images of vehicles being blown up, with what appear to be point totals overlaid. The video was posted with the caption “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue” and is set to the song “Bonfire” by Childish Gambino. 

The White House and Activision did not respond to requests for comment. On Twitter, White House communications director Steven Cheung reposted Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell’s post about the video with the phrase “W’s in the chat, boys.”

Earlier today, The White House also posted to Twitter a popular Pokopia meme with the phrase “Make America Great Again,” which is certainly different vibes than the CoD video. But it gets the same tired point across that our government is run by 12-year-olds, except these spiritual pre-teens also have access to an entire country’s arsenal and all of our tax dollars. 

(Update, 3/5, 5:04pm– A spokesperson for the Pokemon company told The New York Times, "We were not involved in [the Pokopia meme's] creation or distribution, and no permission was granted for the use of our intellectual property. Our mission is to bring the world together, and that mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda.”)

None of this is surprising from a presidency that treats everything, as Harwell explains, “like a big joke.” The White House has previously used video game imagery such as Halo, the “console wars,” and Pokemon for social media posts about its assault on immigrants. 

In October, the Department Of Homeland Security told journalist Alyssa Mercante in response to the video game immigration posts that “We will reach people where they are with content they can relate to and understand, whether that be Halo, Pokemon, Lord of the Rings, or any other medium.” 

While space marines and hobbits have a certain distance from the grim realities the government’s posts referred to, Call of Duty feels like a different beast. The series has long been criticized for glorifying war and the military. The Army has been happy to lean into the connection: According to a Vice report in 2022, the Army allocated millions of dollars to reach Gen-Z through games, in particular Call of Duty, before reportedly cancelling many of the proposed events following the 2021 sexual harassment complaints at CoD publisher Activision. The military has used esports and its own games to attempt to recruit people, and games of all kinds familiarize players with real-life weapons. 

In 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attempted to ban military recruiting on Twitch, though the effort failed. And groups like the veteran-run Gamers for Peace and the Games Transformed festival have shined a light on the connection between video games and the military industrial complex. Activision owner Microsoft is a priority target of the BDS movement's boycott over its involvement in Israel's genocide in Palestine.

Call of Duty has frequently leaned into realism, with Infinity Ward narrative director Taylor Kurosaki telling USA Today in 2019 that the series aims to depict “what the modern battlefield looks like.” In that same article, industry analyst Michael Pachter told the outlet that “The games that have performed the best are the ones that are closest to real life ... (and are) something you could relate to and the weapons make sense.”

This doesn’t mean every CoD developer has always been on board with the realism, though. On Wednesday, Call of Duty cofounder Chance Glasco posted on Twitter that Activision had once pushed for a CoD portraying Iran attacking Israel, but that “the vast majority of our devs were disgusted by the idea, and it got shot down.” 

Glasco went on to write that

With Early CoDs we wanted to often remind people that war is hell and not just a video game. If you play the earlier IW CoDs you'll definitely see that throughout the series. We wanted players to feel disgust and we purposefully sought to make them actually feel bad for war.

Those past intentions can hardly hold a candle against the fact that, these days, games look more like real war than ever, and real war looks more like games. In The White House’s video, I actually wasn’t sure if the shots of vehicles being blown up were from real-life Iran or from CoD until I saw the original footage online. If you’re an American, it’s likely your primary images of the Middle East are images from warfare, whether in video games or real life: drone footage, the aftermath of bombs, and civilian casualties. Western games struggle to depict the area as anything other than a site of military conflict, dehumanizing the people and cultures who live there in the process. It’s the same thing our government is doing, and together they can make it harder for Americans to understand the true devastation our military’s actions are causing.   

Normalizing war is a project Call of Duty as a series has long been on, whether intentionally or not, and you could see The White House’s post as simply normalizing that normalization. Whoever is behind The White House’s terrible memes seems to know their audience here: games like Call of Duty make war seem cool, and The White House’s post seems to strive to borrow some of that cool for its unpopular assault.

While it’s easy to be horrified that our literal government would compare a real-life military action to a fictional one, we already know that none of this means anything to these people, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sees the whole thing as a dick-swinging contest and Trump just seems to want to blow everyone up. As Harwell asked, “If The White House treats war like a joke, what will they take seriously?” The answer seems to be nothing but their own egos.

We Have Never Been More 12 Years Old - Aftermath

In the same week government agencies coopted Halo, now we’ve also got JD Vance weighing on in CollarGate

AftermathNathan Grayson