Cold Open

Archival — Laura Bush, radio address, Nov. 17, 2001

Good morning. I'm Laura Bush, and I'm delivering this week's radio address to kick off a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and the children by the Al-Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban. Afghan women know through hard experience what the rest of the world is discovering: the brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists.

The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women. I hope Americans will join our family in working to ensure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women and children in Afghanistan. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for listening.

THIS IS PROPAGANDA.

So we're back in the Middle East once again. Trump's big, beautiful war with Iran. Not that we ever left. Over the decades, a lot of words have been used to sell these conflicts: democracy, security, freedom. These are what propagandists refer to as glittering generalities — terms that have enough cultural context to cause an emotional response, but are vague enough where each of us can have them mean whatever we need them to.

But of all the glittering generalities used throughout the forever wars in the Middle East, there's one even many anti-war activists are afraid to critique: feminism.

Act One

In 1996, the Taliban, an armed insurgency that emerged from Islamist networks previously funded by the American government, gained control of Afghanistan. They systematically stripped Afghan women of virtually all legal and civil rights, banning them from work, education, and the ability to move freely, requiring full burqa coverage in public. These decrees were upheld through public beatings and executions.

In 2001, Al-Qaeda, a global jihadist network, led the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The Bush administration wanted a military response, which required a more traditional geo-political foe. The Taliban were ideologically aligned with Al-Qaeda and had allowed what were described as “terrorist training camps” to sit within their borders, so we invaded Afghanistan.

As Laura Bush addressed the nation, the State Department simultaneously released a report titled Taliban's War Against Women.

Archival — U.S. State Department, “The Taliban's War Against Women,” 2001The Taliban regime has waged a war against women. Afghan women have been denied their basic human rights — employment, education, health care, and freedom of movement.

In one rhetorical move, the Taliban's oppressive misogyny and Al-Qaeda's terrorist activity had been fused into a single meaning, while yielding a single enemy. The liberation of women in the Middle East was now a moral linchpin for the justification of this war, making it easier to avoid facing the central question of whether the country of Afghanistan was really the enemy we should be fighting.

At the time, support for the Afghanistan war routinely polled above eighty percent. Prominent feminists like Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright were supporters of military intervention. In spring of 2002, Ms. Magazine, a publication of the Feminist Majority Foundation, framed the invasion of Afghanistan as a coalition of hope. As critics later put it, bombs had been added to the feminist toolkit.

This was the moment American feminism became a powerful tool for selling military intervention to the American people — a strategy that has since come to be termed embedded feminism.

But a notable feminist voice stood firm against this narrative — Afghan women. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan vocally warned from the beginning of the US invasion that the war would only serve to ensure freedom remained out of reach for most women.

Within this frame, the female soldier had become an important PR asset for the military. She's a beacon of Western enlightenment, making the ultimate sacrifice to liberate her sisters under oppression.

The military first used the rhetoric of women's liberation to justify the war, and then used the bodies of women soldiers to execute it. Women played a central role in both the wars in the Middle East and the wartime propaganda back home.

Soon military handbooks began describing a strange anomaly.

Within Islamic society, heavily armed, uniform-wearing female soldiers from the West sat in a liminal social position between the gender binary. Local Afghan men didn't view them as traditional women who were bound by Islamic restrictions and mostly confined to the domestic and family spheres, but they also didn't view them as threatening male combatants.

They were a so-called third gender.

This third gender was granted the respect and authority normally extended to men, but were simultaneously granted the access to the domestic home and family sphere normally reserved exclusively for women. And there was a perception that female soldiers were less threatening: “there to help versus there to fight.”

This insight was soon turned inward, as Western cultures also tend to perceive women in military gear as a break from the gender binary.

Domestically, female warriors could be a symbol of a fundamentally less violent and morally justified military force. Public affairs officers shaped media coverage to emphasize women soldiers performing humanitarian tasks, such as visiting orphanages, running medical clinics, and distributing school supplies. In some instances, officers were ordered to delete photographs of female soldiers participating in combat operations.

American intervention once before helped fuel the rise of the Taliban, who then became our enemy. Now America's intervention would cement an association between the ideals of feminism and a violent occupying military force in the minds of the Afghan people.

Our righteous cause to liberate the oppressed women of Afghanistan planted even more seeds of oppression.

During the following twenty years, the United States would frequently back militias with equally oppressive views toward women out of strategic necessity — underscoring the fact that feminist liberation was not a genuine long-term goal.

The Taliban took back control of Afghanistan in 2021. After more than forty-six thousand civilian deaths, America left the women of Afghanistan facing a human rights crisis that many describe as worse than the crisis of the nineties that sparked international interest to begin with.

As for the third gender, despite perceptions many female warriors did in fact face violent combat while in the Middle East. By labeling them temporarily attached to Special Forces and Ranger units, the military bypassed the policy that officially banned women from ground combat.

This combat experience often vanished from the paperwork that would later determine their access to VA health care and disability benefits.

Act Two

In October of 2022, Mayra Diaz — a soldier stationed at Fort Hood — was blindfolded, waterboarded, strangled with a cord, and raped at gunpoint.

Her attacker was her commanding officer, Sergeant Greville Clarke. By the time the Army arrested him, Clarke had attacked five women. The Army knew women were being attacked in the barracks and warned no one.

In 2020, Vanessa Guillén was murdered by a fellow soldier, also at Fort Hood. The independent review that followed found, quote, a “total disregard and disrespect for female soldiers.” Ana Basaldua Ruiz was twenty when she took her own life in 2023, after reporting sexual harassment. The Army's own inquiry described the culture around her as persistently toxic and, quote, “permissive of harassment.”

The Intercept published an analysis of fourteen years of Defense Department data. They found that homicide and suicide rates of women soldiers double those of civilian women. An active-duty Army woman faces a higher risk of being murdered than a male soldier does. Out in the civilian world, it's the exact opposite.

The institution that sold America a war on the promise of liberating women abroad has a problem with how it treats women among its own ranks.

Last September, the Secretary of War eliminated the advisory committee on women in the services. It had existed for seventy-five years.

The military spent a century telling its soldiers that violence is masculine and that the female gaze is the cardinal benefit of being a man in uniform. By elevating women from objects to equals — it has now created a contradiction at the heart of its culture.

This creates fertile ground for sexual violence against women in service to not only occur at higher levels, but go under-reported by victims and suppressed by those in charge.

One in three women in the military discloses military sexual trauma when screened by the VA. Pentagon polling finds sixty percent of young women have never even considered serving — and when asked, sexual assault is their top concern, followed by not seeing it as an accepting or welcoming environment.

The military has been working on shifting these perceptions, largely through PR campaigns and entertainment partnerships.

Captain Marvel — the film centered on a female Air Force pilot turned superhero and one of a long line of Marvel films produced with the direct cooperation of the Department of Defense — became one of the most hands-on military-Hollywood collaborations in recent memory. Conversations with the military began before they even started writing the script, and they remained a close partner throughout the entire process.

The military not only provided personnel and equipment for the physical production, they led co-branded marketing for the film. Air Force Thunderbird planes performed a flyover at the Hollywood premiere. And just in case any of this was too subtle, there was an Air Force recruitment ad titled Origin Story that played before screenings in theaters, directly targeting female recruitment.

The next applicant class was thirty-one percent female — the highest share of women in five years.

This Captain Marvel playbook was not much different than what the Navy did with Top Gun 33 years prior. But today the military entertainment complex has a significant long tail, reflecting our more niche, more atomized media landscape.

Streamers, influencers, meme pages. Propaganda has gone horizontal, decentralized, peer-to-peer — and reliant on subcultures.

In the early twenty-twenties, facing significant recruiting challenges with Gen Z, the military shifted more resources to an influencer focus. In twenty twenty-four and twenty twenty-five, the results of these efforts are fully coming to light. The military smashed their recruitment goals, including a more than forty percent jump in female recruits in just one year.

These influencers span from actively deployed troops to veterans, all the way over to Mr. Beast clones, who send a bunch of SAG background actors through boot camp to see who can win ten grand.

There are two key things influencers achieve better than anything that has come before. The first is plausible deniability. It's much easier to believe that a deployed soldier just shot a TikTok on her own than it is to believe that a hundred-and-eighty-million-dollar blockbuster film launching F-18s off an aircraft carrier was filmed without the military's involvement.

The second is atomization. On social media, a thousand different influencers can each present you a thousand different, nuanced versions of the same symbol. When it comes to weaponizing an idea like gender, outsourcing those messages to influencers especially resolves much of the tension we've discussed up until this point.

In this new, fractured media environment, it doesn't matter if the military says a hundred different things about women or feminism. We'll never hear the contradiction over all the noise.

Veteran-related TikTok content amassed over fifteen billion views in one year. One of the most popular creators was Lujan, who titillated her seven hundred thousand TikTok followers with thirst traps such as her firing an M16 in a bikini, though many of her more sexualized clips have now since been removed.

What's even more interesting about Lujan than her frequent exploitation of the male gaze is how openly she admits that she is a psyop. You might think she's joking, but all evidence points to her in fact being employed by the Army Psychological Operations Group in Fort Bragg. This meta ironic wrapping to reality is a familiar tactic we detail in season 1, episode 4. As we put it: calling the game bullshit before your audience has a chance to, help lower their psychological defenses.

As the ocean of monoculture recedes, leaving only tide pools, and the question “what is a woman” can derail a family's entire Thanksgiving, the symbol of the soldier can be as diverse as the American people are.

Anyone willing and able can be called on to serve.

But institutions whose symbols no longer hold meaning become hollow. You can sense this. We all can. Those that used to stand for something are now just standing in place, and the only reason they're still standing at all is because nothing else has gotten big enough to knock them over — yet.

In the resulting vacuum of meaning, the military's identity has become a battleground in the war soldiers don't fight, but politicians and pundits do: the culture war.

THIS IS PROPAGANDA.

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