It's Ben Stiller's turn to be mad about getting turned into deliberately dumb White House propaganda

“Hey White House,” Stiller wrote, with a level of decorum that would price him right out of our current national government’s online classiness range in a scant three words, “Please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.”

And, you might reasonably find yourself asking, isn’t there something a little too on the nose about Tropic Thunder—a movie in which buffoons who believe they are in a movie stumble into an actual military conflict that ends up killing people—winding up in a compilation of militaristic film clips all forced to share space with Pete Hesgeth’s receding hairline and actual footage of actual people being blown up? To which the answer is, of course, that that only matters in a universe where media literacy has not become, not only unwanted, but a quality actively to be mocked; having increasingly devolved into government-by-memes, it’s pretty clear at this point that the White House social accounts are now deliberately doing stupid things (like scoring their war videos to Mortal Kombat audio) in order to mock the desires of those who would like them to conduct themselves with even a sliver of dignity. Unlike, apparently, some of the United States’ key missile defense systems throughout the region, it’s a pretty easy position to defend: Once you’ve described thoughtfulness and effort as negative qualities to be mocked, all you have to do is continue picking the laziest, dumbest choices in order to act from a position of, hey, let’s call it “strength.” It’s an unbeatable strategy—at least, once you’ve radically redefined what it means to not be beat.