Please, White House, Stop

It’s not particularly brave to say that the Right can’t meme. Increasingly, it feels like someone running the official White House Twitter account learned how to edit clips of pop culture media and is just splicing nearly every popular character from video games, TV, and film for internet brownie points. Unsurprisingly, it’s all so tone-deaf that it’s led to the actual creative people behind those works to say what we’re all thinking: This shit sucks. 

On March 5, the official White House account posted a video that combines clips from Iron Man, Gladiator, Tropic Thunder, Braveheart, Top Gun, Better Call Saul, Halo, John Wick, Superman, Breaking Bad, Transformers, Deadpool, Dragon Ball Super, Star Wars, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and music from Mortal Kombat. The video, captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”(with a US flag and fire emoji), is essentially a word map of what a 12-year-old might think is cool. It’s also a masterclass in the kind of tonal dissonance to be expected from the White House’s “hello, fellow kids” social media strategy. The video not only features characters like Heisenberg, Kylo Ren, and Beerus, who are villains in their own stories, but it also features characters who would strongly oppose the violence that the White House is using as sponsors, cheerleading its war in Iran.

Among the folks speaking out in the video is Ben Stiller. The Tropic Thunder star and director requested that the White House remove the clip from his movie. Stiller says the White House never got permission to use his clip–a clip, we’ll remind you, that is from a movie that smacks you across the face with a commercial about a “booty sweat” energy drink and parodies the misplaced hoorah Vietnam War sentiment in the same (albeit low-brow) way Starship Troopers does. Stiller conveyed having “no interest in being a part” of the White House’s “propaganda machine.”

“War is not a movie,” Stiller wrote.

Joining Stiller in slamming the White House was longtime Master Chief voice actor Steve Downes. Downes wrote a similar message about the Halo protagonist being used (once again), without his consent. 

“I demand that the producers of this disgusting and juvenile war porn remove my voice immediately,” Downes said. 

The video featuring Dragon Ball  Super villain, Beerus, the god of destruction, is the most thematically on point in the video’s desperate shotgun spread approach to pop culture appeal, but Dragon Ball Super English voice director and actor Damian Mills spoke out against the White House’s use of Beerus on behalf of voice actor Jason Douglas.

“I guarantee you most of, if not all of these different people that you are using their likeness to perpetuate your regime do not stand or agree with your message of violence, division, and hate,” Mills wrote. “The blatant disrespect makes me sick.”

Yu-Gi-Oh! voice actor Dan Green noted that the series’ inclusion in the farce of a video was a smack in the face of series creator Kazuki Takahashi. As Green notes, Takahashi died at the age of 60 back in 2022, trying to save people from drowning. While Green took a more apolitical stance, saying the popular card game series is not political and “doesn’t belong in the world of politics, partisanship, and propaganda,” the series became a safe haven for people affected by the White House’s mask-off propaganda abroad and at home. Key among them were queer and immigrant school kids who found a sense of community by playing the children’s card game on cafeteria lunch tables. If that’s not enough, Takahashi was among mangaka, like Pluto’s Naoki Urasawa, who were very staunchly against the US war in Iraq. 

Of course, consent is a term lost on the current administration, which has continued to post Grand Theft Auto and Smash Bros.-style memes about its continued bombings and whatever Robert Kennedy Jr. thinks he’s accomplishing with whole milk. Excuse me while I massage my temple at the realization that the White House has become the coworker who shares the worst thing ever to you on their phone, waiting for you to laugh along.