If this book has a hardest chapter, this is it.
Because the argument I have been slowly building — that the Iranian embassy network and Explosive Media are running a sophisticated AI-enabled propaganda operation during a shooting war — has an uncomfortable pair to it. The pair is: the American government is doing exactly the same thing. In a different register, with different aesthetics, aimed at different audiences, with different levels of official-vs-contracted arrangement, but recognizably the same move.
And not just the American government generically. The official White House Communications Office, on the official White House social media accounts, with named staff putting their names to the work, during the same months that Iran's embassies were running the operation I just described.