It has been more than six months since U.S. missiles first struck Iranian targets in what has become the defining foreign policy crisis of the second Trump administration. Less defining is the language the White House has used to describe what’s taking place between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran. While President Trump often refers to the violence in bombastic terms, other members of his administration have avoided calling the ongoing missile firings part of a larger “war.” 

‘Small potatoes for us’
Vice President JD Vance argued this month that the “current hostilities shouldn’t even be called a war,” since “‘active combat operations’ ended months ago,” said CNN. His claim came “despite three consecutive days” in which the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire. “I can understand what he’s saying,” said Trump during an Oval Office press scrum. “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.”

Americans have been “getting conflicting messages from the Trump administration and congressional leaders” about what, exactly, to call the violence, said FactCheck. Given that Congress hasn’t officially declared it as such, “if political leaders were to say that this is a war, they would also be acknowledging that the administration’s actions were unconstitutional,” said Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University’s Costs of War project, to the outlet. 

White House officials have “downplayed the scale of the conflict” in the “apparent hope that it will recede from the headlines,” said The Atlantic. But hostilities have “already lasted far longer than the president’s initial predictions of victory within a few weeks.”

‘Just playing to his base’
Trump has “contradicted himself and his own Cabinet” in his assessments of the conflict, said the Los Angeles Times. The evolving language is part of an effort to “control the narrative.” 

The president’s more bellicose rhetoric, like when he repeatedly refers to a “war” with Iran, is being used to “save face for the quagmire he has put himself and Republicans in” ahead of the midterms, said Khaled Elgindy, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, to The New York Times. The wartime language is “just playing to his base, whether it’s true or not.”

Hundreds of arrests across dozens of countries have been linked to The Com, an online community of predominantly young men who carry out acts termed nihilistic violent extremism, or NVE. It’s violence “for the sake of violence,” said EU counterterrorism coordinator Bartjan Wegter to The Associated Press. There’s “not a direct link with ideology.” 

What’s ‘nihilistic violent extremism’?
These violent acts lack an “ideological motivation” and are “driven by a misanthropic worldview,” said the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank dedicated to combating extremism. Communities such as The Com (short for The Community) form a “decentralized web of chats, forums and channels characterized by support for violence” but with “no specific political, ideological or religious goal.”

Only some factions have adopted extreme right-wing beliefs. The tactics and resultant harms of nihilistic extremists “often mirror those of ideologically motivated extremist networks,” with “some overlap” of “digital ecosystems, activities and cultural references,” said the institute.

This is violence as a “means of asserting oneself,” said Wegter to the AP. It’s a “means of gaining status in those online communities.”

How do these networks recruit and operate?
The Com encourages and engages in cybercrime, extortion and violence. Largely made up of young, male native-English-language speakers, members range from “11-year-olds trying to hack Minecraft to people in their mid-20s targeting vulnerable kids online,” said Aiden Sinnott, a principal threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Sophos, to The Guardian. Communicating via encrypted platforms such as Discord and Telegram, the networks serve as a pipeline where “older members of The Com contact kids and try to get them to commit increasingly sophisticated acts of criminality.”

Activities are split into three subsets. Hacker Com includes groups such as Scattered Spider, linked to some massive data breaches of retailers last year. In Real Life Com phones in fake bomb threats to schools, offers violence-as-a-service contracts and is associated with a spate of random stabbings over the last year. And Extortion Com coerces young people into sharing or live-streaming acts of self-harm, sexually explicit behavior or even suicide.

What’s being done?
Researchers at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center have identified at least 295 arrests across 33 countries linked to The Com. And over the summer, investigators from nine countries participated in “Referral Action Days” to disrupt the online ecosystem, limit propaganda dissemination and find new investigative leads, including identifying about 4,340 web addresses linked to The Com.

Supporters of the Kenyan opposition Linda Mwananchi (Protect Citizens) coalition gather at a rally in Nairobi. Edwin Sifuna, who’s challenging President William Ruto in the 2027 election, is “building support by tapping into public anger over corruption and political violence,” said AFP.

Luis Tato / AFP / Getty Images

The best movies in this genre use their characters’ paranoia and uncertainty to create similar feelings of dread and doubt in their viewers. These classics skillfully keep audiences guessing while depicting different kinds of waking nightmares, making the protagonists’ traumas our own for a few entertaining hours.

‘Vertigo’ (1958)
Possibly the best-known and beloved of director Alfred Hitchcock’s library of psychological thrillers, “Vertigo” (pictured above) is both a literal rendering of the main character’s syndrome and a description of what you feel as you watch the film. A “strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance,” it keeps “bringing us back to the same places, turning us in relentlessly on ourselves,” said Terrence Rafferty at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)
Director David Lynch’s audacious, trippy landmark is like two movies in one, with the plots looping and falling in on themselves. The film asks viewers to “interrogate ourselves, again and again, in search of some kind of absolution,” said Suzanne Enzerink at the Los Angeles Review of Books. (Prime Video)

‘Watcher’ (2022)
In this slow burn, a young woman struggles to figure out what to do with herself when she moves with her husband to Bucharest, where there’s a serial killer on the loose. The movie makes viewers “just as anxious as Julia, staring into the faces of every man that walks by,” and stands as “one of the best thrillers of this style to come out in decades,” said Stephen Rosenberg at Horror Geek Life. (AMC+)