Alongside the drones and ballistic missiles, Iran has opened a second front in its war with the US and Israel: a relentless, AI-generated propaganda campaign built around Lego figurines, meme culture and a running fixation on Donald Trump's ties to the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Iran's state-run Revayat-e Fath institute fired the opening salvo shortly after the February 28 strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, releasing a two-minute Lego-style animation that has since garnered tens of thousands of likes and shares across Meta platforms and X.

The video opens with a blocky Lego Trump flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the devil, the three of them leafing through an album labelled "the Epstein file." Trump pushes a red button, launching a US-flagged missile at Iran. Cut to a girls' school in Minab. A backpack. Rubble. An IRGC officer weeping, then raging.

What follows is a tour of Iranian retaliation across the region: drone strikes on the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, missiles hitting US bases in Bahrain and Erbil, sirens wailing over Israel, and Netanyahu scurrying through a rat-infested tunnel. The video closes with a dedication to 178 students from Minab "martyred at the hands of Zionist and American terrorists," written in both Farsi and English.

It was not a one-off. A second viral production, titled Victory Chronicles Part 2, runs to three minutes and depicts Iranian forces and allied groups including the Houthis sealing the Strait of Hormuz, launching cyberattacks and overrunning US and Israeli military positions.

A third, titled Trump's Last Gamble, followed days later. Another features a Trump-like figure dressed as a Teletubby in an American-flag outfit, sitting in the Oval Office playing with toy fighter jets over a map of the Middle East.

The latest video is set to AI-generated rap music and ends with the line: "Your grave mistake of attacking us will be judged by history — and it won't be in your favor." A final coda reads: "No Thanks You For Your Attention to This Matter."

The production quality and reach of the content have surprised Western analysts. Media researchers note that the childlike aesthetic is not accidental: cartoon content is significantly less likely to be flagged or removed by social media platforms than actual war footage, giving the videos a structural distribution advantage over conventional propaganda.

Emerson Brooking of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab told NPR that war was increasingly being absorbed into the attention economy. "It's like this commodification of war, becoming part of the attention economy, which is a very strange and discomfiting experience," he said.

The campaign did not emerge in a vacuum. It accelerated after the White House itself released a media mashup early in the war blending NFL tackle highlights with footage of missile strikes on Iran.

Iran's output has broadly outpaced it in terms of viral reach, with one Reddit post describing the Lego videos as resembling a video game cutscene and praising the visual design even among those opposed to the content.

The White House declined to engage substantively, with spokeswoman Anna Kelly asking NPR: "Why is NPR writing puff pieces about Iran's social media strategy?"

The Epstein angle has been a recurring thread across both the videos and official Iranian rhetoric. The deceased head of Iran's National Security Council, Ali Larijani, used similar taunts before he was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike, suggesting the messaging is coordinated at the highest levels rather than being a purely grassroots phenomenon.

His comments were then picked up by Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who went beyond his former colleague and rival and began offering investing advice to potentially sink the US stock market on March 30.