Iran is winning the meme war. You would not have believed me a year ago.

Last month, the Iranian embassy in South Africa posted a photograph of a car dashboard. A pink-and-blue children’s steering wheel was bolted to the passenger seat. The caption: a response to Trump’s claim that the USA could “share control” of the Strait of Hormuz with Iran.

3.1 million views.

Within a week, the account had more than 100,000 followers. Within two, it was at the centre of a phenomenon The Guardian called “memetic warfare” and the New Yorker described as “the most successful state social media campaign in modern history”.

Now guess. Who is winning the information war during active American bombing?

You would not have believed this a year ago

Iran. A country that switched off the internet for its own citizens. A country the USA has been fighting for five decades. A country most of the West sees as a terrorist state.

And yet.

Johns Hopkins professor Narges Bajoghli has studied Iranian media for fifteen years. In an interview with the Guardian, she said something that should be carved into marketing agency desks: “I have never seen a single piece of content go viral simultaneously across the far right, MAGA, moderate Republicans, liberals and the far left.”

Read that again. One piece of content. Five ideological groups at once. Algorithms that divide American society suddenly agreed.

On Iranian Lego videos.

Lego is a Trojan horse

Imagine the scene. Trump lies in bed in the White House, posting “I destroyed the Iranian fleet” on Truth Social. An Iranian admiral reads it on the bridge of a warship, laughs, picks up the phone and orders an attack. American ships on fire. A rap beat. Subtitles in English.

All in a Lego aesthetic.

The team making this is called Explosive Media. Akhbar Enfejari in the original. According to a BBC interview, it has fewer than ten people. It makes one two-minute video in 24 hours using AI tools. Its spokesperson, known only as “Mr. Explosive”, admitted the Iranian government is a “customer”.

“It is honourable to work for your homeland,” he said.

Why Lego? Because Lego triggers associations with childhood. With safety. Algorithms do not recognise “political content”. Viewers overcome their initial resistance before realising they are consuming propaganda. They share it as “look, this is funny” — not “I am sharing propaganda”.

Dr Tine Munk of Nottingham Trent University calls it “defensive memetic warfare”. I cannot describe it more precisely than CNN or the BBC: “Humour bypasses initial resistance. The message is no longer presented as confrontation — it is absorbed as entertainment.”

Numbers that should make you stop

Let us look at specific metrics, because without them this sounds like a conspiracy theory.

The “Blockade” parody — an AI video where Trump, as an 80s rock star, sings a caricature of the French hit “Voyage, voyage” by Desireless. A mullet, keyboards, melodramatic microphone thrusting. 8.6 million views in 24 hours. 45,000 likes.

The Iranian consulate in Hyderabad — a static meme about Hormuz. 115,000 likes, 2 million views.

The embassy in Tajikistan — an AI video where Jesus descends from heaven and punches Trump in the face. Trump falls into a fiery hell. 7 million views.

The embassy in South Africa — the post “Regime change happened successfully. MAGA.” 6.9 million views, 121,000 likes, 26,000 shares.

The White House built its own meme operation. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt boasted of “more than 3 billion views” of war content — videos mixing combat footage with NFL highlights and a Call of Duty aesthetic.

And yet.

Support for the war in the USA is below 40%. The same as for Trump himself. Harvard professor Matthew Baum identified the asymmetry: “Trump’s content targets a narrow MAGA base that does not even fully support the war. Iran seeks themes that speak to many different groups at once.”

The Epstein files as a bridge between right and left. Trump as Netanyahu’s puppet. Pete Hegseth and alcohol. And above it all, a tone expressing compassion rather than hatred: “We do not harm the Italian people; we love Rome, Rimini, Pisa, Milan, Venice…”

What changed in Iran

This is not evolution. It is a rupture.

Back in 2013, Iran’s digital approach was carefully calibrated. President Rouhani and foreign minister Zarif joined Twitter as part of a “charm offensive” during nuclear negotiations. Zarif tweeted “Happy Rosh Hashanah”. They sparred with Senator Cotton. All in a diplomatic register.

Supreme Leader Khamenei even had an English account where he posted marriage advice and book reviews with the hashtag #AvidReader. It sounds like a joke. It is not.

After Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, they hardened their tone. Embassies began publishing dry press releases and anniversary reminders. Nothing resembling humour.

Then February 2026 arrived.

The first American bombs fell on 28 February. Operation Epic Fury. Approximately 900 strikes in twelve hours. They killed Ali Khamenei and dozens of officials. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz — the passage for a fifth of the world’s oil. From 150 ships a day, the number fell below 20.

And at the same time, the Iranian state did something nobody expected.

An Iranian official anonymously told Foreign Policy: “Embassies now post on X on their own initiative, independently.” The military apparatus “handed digital communication to this younger generation”. Bajoghli confirmed it: the older generation spoke a language of martyrdom that “appealed only to those who already shared its symbolic vocabulary. It reached nobody else.”

The new generation knew something else. Anti-elite anger. Humour as resistance. Pop-cultural fluency.

Gen Z state moderators who previously took flak from the media for not knowing traditions. Now they had the green light.

Why it works better than American advertising

Mark Ritson would be annoyed. I am, a little.

For seventeen years, I taught schools how to communicate. I worked with hundreds of headteachers. Advertising, brand building and Generation Z are in my job description. Yet here I sit, having to admit: a group of fewer than ten people in Tehran, with AI tools and diplomatic accounts, achieved what the entire American State Department cannot manage with its government budget.

Why?

Cost asymmetry. A viral meme costs virtually nothing. Projecting military power costs the USA billions. Cambridge’s Neil Lavie-Driver sums it up: “Their aim is to sow enough discontent with the conflict that the West eventually backs down.”

A mirror strategy. Iran turned Trump’s own tactics against him. Trolling. Slogans. Populist irreverence. Kurt Sengul calls it “Trump’s memetic warfare turned against its inventor”. When the embassy in Zimbabwe answered Trump’s ultimatum with “8 PM does not work for us; could we do between 1 and 2 PM? Thank you for your attention to this important matter. I.E.Z.” — the signature “I.E.Z.” parodied Trump’s characteristic “TRUMP, DJT”.

Speed. Trump makes a God-style AI post, then deletes it. The embassy in Tajikistan releases “Jesus punching Trump” before public discussion of the original even gets going. Agenda hijacking in real time.

Cultural fluency through AI. The tools are trained on Western data. A small team in Tehran can create content that feels “culturally native” to Western audiences. The barrier to entry for non-state actors has just disappeared. Dr Emma Briant: “Slopaganda is far too weak a term. This is highly sophisticated.”

Anchors that cannot be banned. X cannot delete diplomatic accounts. Diplomatic status is a shield. YouTube banned the unofficial content (Explosive Media) on 10 April for “deceptive practices” — and copies immediately appeared. The Streisand effect unfolding live. Iran called it “an attempt to suppress the truth” and gained more attention.

Uncomfortable consequences for democracies

Here comes the part I do not like.

Narges Bajoghli and her research team are not naive. HonestReporting documented specific antisemitic images on Iranian accounts — a rat in a kippah riding an eagle, captioned “Who holds the reins?” The BBC found factual inaccuracies and recurring antisemitic tropes in the Lego videos. Mahsa Alimardani of WITNESS highlighted the irony: Iran cuts its own citizens off from the internet, yet has enough bandwidth to upload sophisticated videos for the West. “If you have the bandwidth to create such content, you are working with the regime, officially or unofficially.”

And yet.

Here is a lesson that is uncomfortable for those of us inside a democracy: an authoritarian state has just shown that the openness of Western platforms is a vulnerability, rather than a strength. The freedom we celebrate has become a vector through which foreign actors put messages directly into our citizens’ feeds. Wrapped in humour. Decorated with Lego figures. With an AI-generated rap soundtrack.

Iran did not say “our ideology is better”. Iran said “sovereignty versus hegemony” — a question that resonates in India, Africa, Latin America and large parts of Europe. When Trump insults Pope Leo XIV, even Meloni distances herself. Germany says “it is not our war”. Britain convenes 40 countries without the USA to address Hormuz.

Memes did not cause this. But they gave it a language. A format. An aesthetic people can share.

What I should take from it

I work with Czech schools. I teach headteachers about communication. This is not an academic article about geopolitics — it is a warning.

Tone beats resources. A company, a government, a school — anyone with a small budget and the right tone can beat an organisation with a budget a thousand times larger and the wrong tone. Daniel Neep of the Arab Center Washington D.C. put it this way: “If the 1991 Gulf War was made for television, Trump’s war against Iran is made for meme-ification.”

AI has democratised propaganda. A team smaller than the average marketing agency has just beaten the entire White House apparatus. AI tools trained on Western data create “culturally native” content for the target culture — eliminating the “foreignness” that previously limited foreign propaganda’s reach.

Humour is a weapon. Lego is not a joke. Lego is the cleverest content choice you can make when you want the algorithm to let your message through. Laughter travels faster than fear. A dog looking into a camera beats a ballistic missile in the daily news cycle. It is that simple.

Asymmetry is now normal. Any actor who wants to can now create content on the level of state actors. States, corporations, schools, competitors — anyone. The barrier to entering the information war has vanished.

In a year, universities will teach this as a watershed case. Be ready. Your school, your company, your brand — none of us is immune to being manipulated this way.

And perhaps the most frightening thing — the best at it right now are neither Americans, Russians nor Chinese.

They are Iranian twenty-somethings with ChatGPT.

More in the research: two detailed reports, dozens of primary sources (Guardian, BBC, Foreign Policy, NYT), academic citations (Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, Clemson, Nottingham Trent). I can send them on request.