Like so many of us, I’ve been delighting in the flood of Lego-adjacent videos lampooning the Trump administration in general and Trump and Hegseth in particular. There are far too many to link here but just search Explosive Media, PersiaBoi, Southern Punk or Nukta Media. This is not to say I’m a fan of the Iranian regime, obvs, but the fact that most viewers of the videos aren’t, makes the case for what the propaganda producers have achieved. People are watching them, laughing and sharing, despite the world’s long-standing denunciation of Iran’s repressive and violent regime.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about then, sorry, please go back to sleep. We’ll all be quiet.

What I wonder about, as a fly on the wall in either the parent company’s Danish HQ, or in the US subsidiary’s Connecticut offices, is how does LEGO feel about all this? The company has been silent through all the recent notoriety, and I think I get it. Wading into a political propaganda war would be awkward and potentially self-immolating for a children’s toy brand loved around the world.

Any kind of legal action is doomed for so many reasons: no actual LEGO blocks appear so trademark litigation would be symbolic at best; LEGO’s trademark is held in Denmark so legal action would have to come via a Danish court and even if they won there, any decision against an Iranian group would be unenforceable; Iran is not a signatory to trademark enforcement frameworks so there would be no teeth no matter where the matter was litigated.

Basically, if someone appropriates a brand’s vibe or visual identity, through AI or by hand (how many hours and cartoonists would that take?) but produces nothing physical, sells nothing and operates from a jurisdiction with no enforcement treaty, there’s not much to be done about it. LEGO probably knows that and is keeping quiet.

This isn’t to say that LEGO doesn’t sue for copyright/trademark infringement. The company has been pretty quick to jump on imposters or anyone using the LEGO name. In this case the animations aren’t commercial, per se, and what they’re doing is using the general vibe, not the product itself.

It’s certainly possible the execs over at Warner Brothers (The Lego Movie, 2014 and sequels) are chewing the wallpaper but if they are, the doors are locked and blinds pulled all the way down. They might even have a case but again, enforcing a judgment would be symbolic, at best, and serve to advertise the Iranian videos even more broadly, just like the YouTube ban did. Once videos have gone viral on one platform, their viewership is amplified even if the original platform shuts them down. It’s called the “hydra effect”. In the days after the ban the videos got hundreds of millions more views on Meta, X and TikTok. And even if you’ve wisely departed all those platforms, you’d have heard the story on BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24, CNN, the New Yorker and so on and so on.

Essentially the ban was the best free advertising Explosive Media could have hoped for.

Approval ratings for Trump’s “don’t call it a war” were already dismal in mid-March with the US public overwhelmingly against military strikes and boots on the ground. There’s no way the Lego videos have moved those numbers; that heavy lifting is being done by gas prices and overall economic and security anxiety. It’s maybe safe to say the videos gave people who already despise the Trump regime an entertaining vehicle for sharing their sentiments. So, like the many, many explosions in Lego-Iran, the videos are an accelerant for the growing anti-Trump movement. Maybe it really is “morning in America”.

In an excellent Time Magazine article from earlier this month, they note that the Lego videos are immunized against official counter-messaging because any factual rebuttal fails in the face of animated characters and explosions. And where, pray tell, would the Trump regime even find a factual rebuttal?

But what impact has it had on LEGO sales?

Are parents refusing to buy the blocks because someone has channeled their look and feel into what Explosive Media attacks under the banner of “The Epstein Regime”? My grandchildren love LEGO; they’re unlikely to see the propaganda and even if they did, they wouldn’t understand it. There appears to be no public information on actual sales figures, to date.

Here’s what is happening in LEGO land: there was an 82% spike in “LEGO” searches online in March, compared to March a year ago and totally out of character for all previous years. Is that attention good or bad? LEGO seems to be capitalizing on the attention by upping its volume of both news releases and video shorts. If you go to LEGO’s main site you can choose the Play Zone where kids can watch product based video shorts.

The Explosive Media videos are impressive on several fronts, not the least of which is their lightning fast turnaround time, from the real world to the parody. It was scant days before the Gospel according to St. Quentin (Tarantino, not Isaiah) made it into one of the videos.

And, just one day after The Atlantic Magazine published an explosive account of FBI Director Kash Patel’s problem drinking, here’s a Lego version, hot off the edit deck. Pretty much writes itself, doesn’t it?

Thing is, this one isn’t from the Iran-backed Explosive Media but rather from a pairing of BNN (the Brick News Network) and Sophmara, two YouTube creators. Stylistically you can’t really tell the home-grown slams from the IRG-backed ones and maybe that’s the point.

The videos also rely on visually arresting, immediately recognizable tropes, and reflect back to people the kind of thing they’re already familiar with on social media. They don’t rely on argument or logic but go for the cheap shots which are effective in the way all attacks that ridicule are.

What’s known about the group whose Farsi name is Akhbar Enfejari is that it was established in 2025, involves fewer than 10 people, reportedly aged 19 to 25, and characterized as “student-led”. The spokesperson calls himself Mr. Explosive and, like Banksy, appears only in silhouette in interviews, like this one, with BBC.

He says they chose Lego because it represents a “world language”, and one whose visual style was specifically used in the training of AI image generation models, so shortcuts in all places! I would guess many on the team are not that far removed from building their own LEGO space ships and factories on the floor of their childhood homes.

No one knows where they’re located (likely not Iran due to bandwidth requirements, unless the regime has granted special dispensation); and if the Iranian regime is a sponsor or customer (yes, obviously, despite a recent request for people to donate via crypto accounts). They clearly have access to sophisticated LLMs like Claude Pro or Chat GPT+, as well as image and video generation models such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Runway ML, Kling or Pika Labs.

We all hear “AI generated video” and nod as if we get it but really, how do they do that?

The process could look something like this: the kids write or use a LLM to help write a script with the political messaging, rap lyrics and scene descriptions. In other words, the creative threads which rely on their take as to which cultural references, news items and emotional triggers will land.

The image and video generation models are where the technology has escalated dramatically, and recently. Like the last 18 months. Approximately when the team first got together, allegedly.

The programs can take text or generated images and animate them with what look like camera moves, angles and transitional scenes. Let’s say you type, “In close-up, a sweaty Lego Trump presses a red button, a missile launches, camera pulls back to wide shot” and you get a little video clip. Do this over and over until you have all the scenes. Then it’s back to the humans to edit together the clips using conventional tools like Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve. Any fool could do it. (sic)

AI generated music has been much deplored recently, mainly because some of it is terrifyingly good. AI tools like Suno or Udio are probably used to create the rap music tracks, and voice synthesis tools handle narration.

All the underlying persuasive communication comes from the team of kids while the AI tools do the production labour, and they do it fast. Compared to the world before, one of these videos might have cost $500K to produce over weeks or months, and now a small team with all the big AI tools can produce the same thing in days.

And here’s something to take your breath away!

If you take all the tools I’ve mentioned above and price them out based on a standard Pro plan, which could produce the kind of thing Explosive Media is producing, and at the same volume, it will cost you approximately $135 Canadian dollars a month. (Based on an exchange rate of 1.37 on the USD, which is the currency they bill in.)

For what you probably pay for your monthly streaming services, a small and creative team can run a full-scale AI propaganda production studio.

$135 a month. Chew on that for a hot minute.

Here’s your musical offering, an AI generated rap battle from AI Brick Empire. I think we know whose bricks are being thrown.

Until next time, when everything will have changed again! Stay well.

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