A bill to prohibit the use of Federal funds for the creation and dissemination of warmongering propaganda styled in the aesthetic conventions of the entertainment industry; and for other purposes.
Obviously, I am not member of Congress. I do not serve in any elected capacity, do not represent a district, and I lack total authority to introduce legislation. But I do have a blog, a reasonably functional understanding of how the U.S. government is supposed to work, and the conviction that someone needs to say the following on the record, even if the record is a WordPress database in Vermont.
So here, in the form it deserves, is the WAR IS HELL Act.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the “Warfare Advertising Restrictions and Information Safeguards against Harmful Entertainment-Like Leverage Act,” or the “WAR IS HELL Act.”
SECTION 2. FINDINGS.
The Congress finds:
(1) That William Tecumseh Sherman, Major General, United States Army, said in 1879, after having marched sixty thousand soldiers through the American South in a campaign of systematic destruction that he designed, executed, and understood, “War is hell.” He did not mean this as a colorful observation. He meant it as a warning issued by a man who had looked at the thing directly and was trying to spare the next generation the delusion that it is anything else.
(2) That the United States government possesses a long, complicated, and largely dishonorable history of propaganda. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was Congress’s formal acknowledgment that government-produced propaganda directed at domestic audiences was a problem worth naming. That the Act was substantially weakened in 2012 is the reason we are here today.
(3) That beginning no later than January 20, 2025, the executive branch of the federal government, specifically the Department of Defense (self-styled as the Department of War), the Department of Homeland Security, and various agencies and offices acting under White House direction, has systematically deployed the aesthetic vocabulary of the entertainment industry to communicate about military force, armed conflict, immigration enforcement, and the projection of American power abroad, as detailed by National Public Radio, the Associated Press, and the New York Times.
(4) That this aesthetic vocabulary includes but is not limited to: the sound design and visual language of first-person shooter video games; the editing grammar of military action films; the compression and irony of popular internet meme formats; the musical conventions of cinematic trailers; and the rhetorical posture of professional wrestling, wherein the speaker’s dominance is established not through evidence but through performance of dominance itself.
(5) That the effect of this vocabulary, when deployed by the state about the state’s capacity and willingness for violence, is to transform the prospect of lethal force from a grave and consequential act into a form of content: something to be consumed, shared, reacted to with fire emojis, and forgotten by the next news cycle.
(6) That this transformation is not incidental, accidental, or the unavoidable result of a government learning to communicate in the idioms its citizens use. It is deliberate. It is funded. It is the point.
(7) That when the Secretary of Defense posts a video that looks like a Call of Duty trailer, he is not merely communicating efficiently in the language of his audience. He is arguing, through form rather than content, that war is a game. That the men and women he commands are protagonists in a franchise. That the people in the crosshairs are obstacles between the player and the next level.
(8) That when a government agency releases footage of detained human beings in the aesthetic grammar of a Hollywood action sequence — score swelling, drone shot descending, faces obscured, narrative arc clearly marked — the government is not being edgy, relatable, or cutting through the noise. It is stripping human beings of the quality that makes propaganda about them morally illegible: their humanity.
(9) That Major General Sherman, who knew better than most what it meant to treat human beings as obstacles to a military objective, would recognize this instantly. He called war hell not to celebrate hell, but to deny war the glamour that makes the next generation willing to walk into it.
(10) That Congress therefore finds a compelling governmental interest in maintaining a categorical distinction between war and entertainment, a distinction which, once collapsed by the state, cannot be expected to restore itself.
SECTION 3. DEFINITIONS.
For purposes of this Act:
(a) “Warmongering propaganda” means any communication produced or funded by the Federal government that advocates for, glorifies, or aesthetically normalizes the use of military force, armed conflict, or coercive violence against human beings through the deployment of entertainment conventions, as further defined herein.
(b) “Entertainment-like leverage” means the use, in government communications, of aesthetic strategies, including but not limited to dramatic scoring, action-sequence editing, video game interface graphics, meme formats, and the rhetorical conventions of professional entertainment media, for the purpose of generating emotional or visceral assent to the use of lethal force without requiring the audience to confront the actual human consequences of that force.
(c) “Meme format” means any template, formula, or compressed cultural reference, originating in non-governmental internet culture, that carries an embedded emotional or rhetorical charge independent of its literal content, such that deploying the format constitutes an argument that could not survive if made in plain language.
(d) “Video game aesthetic” means visual or audio language, including HUD interfaces, kill-feed typography, squad-based tactical iconography, or first-person perspective, that originates in interactive combat entertainment media and that, when deployed outside that context, cues audiences to interpret the subject matter through the cognitive and emotional frameworks of sport, competition, and gameplay rather than of armed conflict and death.
(e) “The Sherman Standard” means the threshold below which government communications about lethal force are presumed compliant with this Act: namely, whether a communication, when read, heard, or viewed by a person with full knowledge of what actual combat produces — the sound, the smell, the specific way a human body bleeds out — would strike that person as an honest representation of the thing it describes. Communications that pass the Sherman Standard may be funded. Communications that do not may not.
SECTION 4. PROHIBITIONS.
(a) In general. No Federal funds may be used to produce, distribute, promote, or amplify any communication that:
(1) constitutes warmongering propaganda, as defined in Section 3(a);
(2) employs entertainment-like leverage, as defined in Section 3(b), in connection with the advocacy for or depiction of military force, armed conflict, immigration enforcement operations, or any other exercise of coercive government power over human beings;
(3) deploys video game aesthetics, as defined in Section 3(d), in any official communication concerning the deployment of United States armed forces or the detention of persons by Federal authorities;
(4) uses the intellectual property of the entertainment industry, including but not limited to copyrighted music, film sequences, game audio, or recognizable aesthetic conventions of specific franchises, to lend emotional valence to government statements about the use or threatened use of force; or
(5) fails, in the judgment of the oversight body established under Section 5, to meet the Sherman Standard.
(b) No exception for social media. The prohibitions in subsection (a) apply regardless of the platform on which the communication appears, including but not limited to X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, Truth Social, and any platform that exists at the time of the communication and did not exist at the time of this Act’s passage.
(c) No exception for humor. “We were just being funny” is not a defense under this Act. The government is not a content creator. It is a government. There is a difference, and that difference should have consequences.
SECTION 5. ENFORCEMENT.
(a) There is established within the legislative branch the Office of War Communication Review, which shall consist of five members appointed by Congress, at least two of whom shall be veterans of combat operations, at least one of whom shall be a historian of war and propaganda, and none of whom shall have been employed by, contracted with, or appeared as a regular guest on any cable news network in the thirty-six months preceding their appointment.
(b) The Office shall review government communications upon complaint by any Member of Congress, any veterans’ organization, or any twenty-five citizens acting jointly.
(c) Violations shall result in the disgorgement of all Federal funds expended on the offending communication, public disclosure of the names of all officials who approved its production and release, and a mandatory public statement, to be drafted by the Office and published by the offending agency, reading as follows:
“The United States government acknowledges that the communication identified in [Case No.] did not meet the Sherman Standard. War is not a game. War is not a movie. War is not a meme. We apologize to the men and women who have served in the United States armed forces, to all of the victims who have ever been killed, wounded, or otherwise harmed by war, and to the public for the confusion.”
SECTION 6. SEVERABILITY
If any provision of this Act is held unconstitutional, or is struck down by a court whose members were appointed by a president who has himself produced warmongering propaganda funded by Federal dollars, the remaining provisions shall remain in effect.
SECTION 7. EFFECTIVE DATE.
This Act takes effect immediately upon passage, because every day it does not exist is a day the United States government is allowed to make war look like something it plays at.
When Sherman burned Atlanta, he understood exactly what he was doing and why. He wanted the Confederacy to feel the weight of what they had started. As he wrote, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”
The current administration has decided, apparently, that hell is cool. That hell should have a soundtrack. That hell should be shareable.
I am introducing this bill, in the only chamber I have, because someone needs to tell them what they should already know: war is hell.