In the early days of the war on Iran, while the White House was busy posting Call of Duty memes and AI slop of dancing bowling pins, the Iranian regime’s state media was flooding the zone with video after video of what was happening on the ground: Explosions over Tehran. Smoke billowing in the sky. Blood on the ground. A Tomahawk missile landing on a school. Grieving parents burying their children. 

Only weeks prior, the authoritarian regime had been struggling to shut down all footage of the protests convulsing the nation, cutting off internet access to the outside world in the longest blackout in Iranian history. When Iranian dissidents managed to circumvent the blackout to post photos and videos of what was happening, the regime decried these images as Zionist AI slop, even as it admitted to killing thousands of protesters.

Then, on February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, killing thousands, including civilians. Now the shoe was on the other foot: As the victims of an illegal war, reality was now the best possible propaganda for the Iranian regime, and Iranian state media found itself hard at work trying to tell the truth, disseminating high-definition videos of American-wrought carnage. 

Prior to the attacks, it looked as though some connectivity was returning to Iran, but as bombs fell, the blackout was once again in place. However, there were some early suggestions that Iran was going to selectively lift the blackout “for those who can carry our voice further” — a kind of tiered internet access for whitelisted people willing to promote, at the very least, an anti-war message. No one could have foreseen what would happen next. 

By mid-March, the most dominant strain of Iranian propaganda was of a markedly different tone. Little Lego minifigures dressed up as soldiers as Lego planes and Lego helicopters burn in an AI-generated desert. Videos crammed in references to Jeffrey Epstein and dead Iranian schoolgirls alongside guns and explosions. It turned out that Lego AI slop was the voice that would carry the farthest. 

The two great conflicts of this decade up until this point have been in Ukraine and Gaza, and both were accompanied by an onslaught of authentic documentation of missile strikes, shelled-out buildings, and dead bodies. An uncanny amount of this footage came from civilians turned into unwilling war correspondents. For a brief moment in time, the Iran war looked like it might follow a similar pattern, as a missile strike on a school in Minab killed 175 people, including schoolchildren. Photos of the destroyed school and aerial footage of graves being dug for the children became emblematic of the unjustness of the war. But even as these images spread, the internet blackout remained in place. Although Minab continues to be a rallying cry for Iranian state media, its outward-facing propaganda strategy started to look a lot like they were just trying to out-shitpost the American government.

Iran lacked America’s military resources, but it had other cards to play. Its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz turned into a crisis that might permanently reshape the global economy. As gas prices soared, Donald Trump spiraled, issuing an apocalyptic ultimatum on Truth Social demanding that Iran open the Strait lest America consign them to “living in hell.” Days later, the nations reached a conditional ceasefire deal — one where Iran’s demands are the starting point for negotiations. The regime’s posting game seemed to live rent-free in Trump’s head, with the president posting on Truth Social on Friday morning, “The Iranians are better at handling the Fake News Media, and ‘Public Relations,’ than they are at fighting!” 

The story of the ceasefire is the story of the MAGA’s insular, far-too-online bubble crashing and burning against the formidable force that is ocean geography. It would be far too much to say that Iran shitposted its way into a favorable ceasefire. But the Lego AI slop didn’t not work. 

Lego AI slop propaganda from what may or may not be Iranian state media: This is a surreal sequence of words that should never have been written. A representative of Explosive Media — the team behind the Lego videos — told The New Yorker that it wasn’t affiliated with the regime, arguing, “Is there any way to prove that you are not connected to Jennifer Lawrence?!”

The group also told The Associated Press that it was producing from inside Iran, though it claimed, “We’re just a group of friends working voluntarily — paying for our own internet, using our own laptops and computers, and doing all of this ourselves.” If it’s true that they are inside Iran’s borders, it’s highly likely that they have whitelisted internet access. Without being sanctioned by the regime, it would be difficult to have enough connectivity to upload these videos, and almost impossible to manufacture them in the first place. 

“Over the past 15 years, Khamenei made sure sufficient money, talent, and institutional priority flowed toward digital content creation,” Narges Bajoghli writes in New York. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “operates or funds at least 50 production houses,” and the most significant ones in this moment are the little ones, “small, fast, and built for the internet, made by a new generation coming to power in Iran as American-Israeli bombs kill off the elder leaders — one that is younger, savvier, and less afraid of the US.”

“These freelance studios,” Bajoghli writes, “are not ‘official’ IRGC channels but rather produce media for the broader media arms of the state, and they receive funding from both the IRGC and other coffers of the state and military establishments.” 

Sourced at one of these smaller production houses, Bajoghli describes how the new generation was already waiting in the wings, ready to make content. They had long since been proficient in making “videos with faster cuts and a sense of irreverence,” but the IRGC had previously dismissed the videos as not being “serious enough.” The war became their opportunity to shine.

Whether or not Explosive Media is one of these state-sponsored studios, state accounts — like those belonging to Iranian embassies around the world — were nevertheless reposting its Lego videos. And it wasn’t just the Lego videos that formed the great Slop Wave coming from Iranian state accounts. 

“American soldiers, you’re fighting for JEFFREY EPSTEIN,” posted the Iranian embassy in Tunis, over a clipshow of deepfaked American soldiers. The Iranian embassy in The Hague mocked Trump with Pixar-esque AI slop of the president; the Iranian embassy in South Africa reheated a stale TikTok meme from 2020 to depict an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer — seemingly IRGC spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari, who makes regular appearances in state media. 

Those who stared too long into the Lego abyss came out sounding completely deranged. “Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War,” 404 Media declared glumly. But what war was that, exactly? 

While the White House was posting SpongeBob SquarePants memes for its own base, the Lego slop obviously isn’t intended for Iranians in Iran, says Afsaneh Rigot, a scholar and researcher who has worked on human rights issues in the Middle East and North Africa for many years. The internet blackout is still ongoing. Although Iranians are still able to secure tiny pockets of access here and there between VPNs, “they’re not going to be wasting their tiny bit of access trying to load something like” a Lego slop video. 

As bizarre as they were, the videos were resonating with a certain audience. “There’s a really, really deep understanding of the social media sentiment right now, and the global sentiment,” said Rigot. The White House is addicted to brainrot that projects power, dominance, and cruelty. “These propaganda videos have read the sentiment that there is a desire for the opposite — like a fight back against oppression.” 

“Most people won’t know what’s going on in Iran,” says Rigot. “But they would have known what’s going on in their own neighboring countries in Latin America. Maybe they might have known what has happened to their own historical lineage and ancestors.” 

Iran has “clearly been winning” when it comes to meme warfare, says Mahsa Alimardani, the associate director of the Technology Threats & Opportunities program at WITNESS. “They’ve been resonating internationally.” She described visiting Morocco weeks ago, and how every time she mentioned she was Iranian, people would thank her for the Islamic Republic’s work. It was depressing for Alimardani, who has long been critical of the Iranian government. “International solidarity with the regime has never been higher.”

The Lego brainrot feels true to a real global constituency primed to despise America for all kinds of reasons. Iran’s regime has “created its identity around being a representative for the oppressed, being a representative for the global majority,” says Alimardani. The war set up a “perfect propaganda moment for them, where they are actually in a position where they’re being attacked.” For over four decades, she says, the regime’s ideology and politics have revolved around the notion that the evil American empire and Israel are victimizing Iran. Now, that message has never been more on the nose. 

Iran is a complicated place — a fascist authoritarian state that meets dissent with violence, as well as a marginalized country whose earnest attempts at self-determination have been historically undermined by Western governments through covert operations. In the world of AI slop, everything is blurred, smoothed out, and unserious. Brainrot is about vibes, not facts. There is no need to grapple with the complexities of Iran when all you care about is aura farming and shitposting.

Throughout all of this, many state media accounts were still, for the most part, posting non-brainrot. But the tone of these accounts, too, had shifted since the early days of the war. More recent videos of death, destruction, and ruin tended less and less to be images of atrocities inflicted on Iran. They were instead pictures of downed Black Hawks and purported strikes on Tel Aviv, propaganda much closer to posturing than humanitarian documentation. 

“They’re trying to maintain an image of strength, that the regime is still standing,” says Rigot. This is in character for the regime; for decades, projecting strength and power has been essential to how Tehran speaks to the outside world. And this time, they were speaking on the same frequency as the White House, in a language that Trump could understand.

The Minab strike was one of the first bombings on February 28th. When authentic footage of the Minab strike circulated on X, users accused the videos of being AI. Drone footage in Minab showed rows and rows of graves being dug for the victims killed in the strike, many of whom were schoolchildren. This footage, too, was accused of being AI-generated. 

As photos, videos, and other documentation from Minab went viral on social media, the truth became Iran’s greatest asset. But telling the truth does not come naturally to the Iranian state. In the wake of the Minab strike, the Iranian embassy in Austria posted a deepfake of a child’s backpack covered in blood; a Google SynthID watermark confirmed that the image was a fake. Iran’s South African embassy — perhaps the weirdest of its embassy accounts on X — posted a Ghiblified tribute to the young victims of the strike.

But many of the other posts by state accounts appeared to contain authentic media, including videos of grieving parents. These accounts were simply busy posting what served them best, whether real or fake. And in that moment, what served their interests happened to be real documentation of the war. Conversely, what was in the interest of the regime’s enemies was to sow doubt through an AI fog of war. 

This isn’t the first conflict in which the uncertainty created by deepfake technology has made it difficult to know what is or isn’t happening, where AI is used to generate disinformation while accusations of deepfaking are used to bury the truth. This happened during the still-ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia; it also happened during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025. 

Mahsa Alimardani says that this time, the level of AI fog she saw was “literally quite unprecedented.” The deepfakes rapid response force she works with at WITNESS, which helps journalists and fact-checkers to analyze content suspected of being AI-generated or manipulated, found it difficult to keep up with the AI escalations they received. 

The increasingly widespread availability of AI tools accounts for part of this surge, but on top of that, Iran is, in Alimardani’s words, a “weird laboratory of just so many different actors trying to pursue all kinds of disinformation and so many different kinds of influence operations.” The state of Israel is known to have used AI-generated disinformation, especially during the 12-day war. One video that went viral in June 2025 showed an Israeli strike on the entrance of Iran’s Evin Prison, a facility known to incarcerate political prisoners. The footage implied that the prisoners had been freed by the strike, but it was a deepfake. Israel had actually bombed Evin, but the ugly truth was that prisoners had died in the strike.

The circulation of deceptive AI propaganda by its geopolitical enemies set the stage for the Iranian regime to dismiss images and videos of massive protests in January as Zionist slop. But long before deepfake technology became readily accessible, the information environment in, around, and originating from Iran was already deeply poisoned. The Iranian regime has been elbow-deep in influence operations for many years; back in 2018, Facebook and Twitter deleted thousands of accounts originating in Russia and Iran that comprised a global influence network pushing disinformation. Russia partnered with Iran during the Syrian civil war, a messy multilateral conflict that generated massive amounts of online disinformation. 

At the same time, the Iranian government has used strategic internet shutdowns to control the flow of information in and out of the country — any upswell of internal dissent in Iran meant a blackout was bound to follow. When the regime felt threatened by widespread adoption of platforms like Telegram or Instagram, these apps would be shut down within Iran’s borders. The regime is well versed in sowing doubt, spreading disinformation, and leveraging censorship. 

In such a poisoned information environment, for the individual person, the value of documentary evidence declines, and it becomes even easier for personal beliefs to outweigh extrinsic evidence. Iranians like Bajoghli have written about the infighting in the diaspora, in which the veracity of the Minab bombing is often a touchy subject. Alimardani has seen people she knows call the drone footage of the Minab school burials AI, even though it has been verified as authentic. “That is a very emotional reaction, seeing the regime allow for the burials of these kids when a couple months ago the parents of the children that were killed in the protests couldn’t even get the bodies of their children and couldn’t actually properly mourn their children. So, it’s like this emotional reaction to hypocrisy. Then you put AI into the mix and it just helps you go down your own rabbit hole.” 

Something like the Minab case, says Rigot, requires a great deal of work and some time for teams of experts to do verification and promulgate correct information. 

“But at that point, initial denial has happened in the psyche of all of the people that have received that message,” she says. “The damage is done. The damage to the families, the damage is done to those who have suffered, the damage is done to those of us who are trying to do documentation.”

The seed of doubt is easily planted because the Iranian regime is not trustworthy. “The regime are liars,” says Alimardani. “They kill people. They compromise lives.” Somewhere between 3,000 and 30,000 Iranians were killed by the regime in the early months of this year; in the lead-up to the war, Trump cited the brutal crackdown on the protests as a reason to attack Iran.

Thousands of Iranians are now dead in the wake of the US-Israel attacks. “Two things can be true at the same time,” Alimardani says. “You have horrific tragedy and you have a regime using that horrific tragedy for its propaganda.”

As propaganda merged with reality, it was increasingly in Iran’s interest to simply tell the truth, and to tell as much of it as possible. But after decades of using disinformation, internet blackouts, platform bans, and physical coercion to cement its power, the Iranian government struggled to pivot. Shutting down the flow of information has been the regime’s primary modus operandi for as long as anyone can remember. Spreading information, and spreading as much of it as quickly as possible, has not been its forte, and the lack of experience — and, perhaps, reflexive fear of the free flow of information — was showing. 

On March 3rd, an OSINT account on X began to circulate a video showing Tehran’s iconic Azadi Square, surrounded by smoke and flames on the horizon. Alimardani was particularly struck by the quality of the video. Material put out by the regime just months prior, she said, “looked like it could have been made in the ’90s,” but state media was now “devoting the best equipment to capture the destruction that’s happening right now.”

In fact, the footage looked so slick that it was immediately accused of being AI-generated.

The video is watermarked with the name and logo of Tebyan, a state media organization, but it was spread mostly through OSINT accounts or journalists based in the West. When one Iranian state account posted the video, it was as a grainy copy that cropped out the Tebyan watermark. In fact, some Iranian state accounts appear to be gathering and reposting OSINT videos from a variety of sources, behaving like social media aggregators rather than directly broadcasting footage that they are, theoretically, in the best possible position to be gathering. 

But as the war progressed, the kinds of posts coming from state accounts were shifting. Instead of flames billowing over Tehran’s cityscape, they were posting aerial footage of successful strikes on US military logistics. Images referencing the strike on Minab are scattered throughout posts from state accounts, but the bombing of Minab exists more as a symbol — cartoons of children and deepfaked dust-covered backpacks — than in documentary evidence. And the reality and tragedy of Minab is not sacred — one of the viral Lego slop videos depicts Lego Trump enraged at a Lego folder labeled “Jeffrey Epstein File,” prompting him to angrily push a button that launches a missile at a classroom of Lego schoolgirls.

It’s impossible to look at Iran’s Lego AI slop and not see the parallels to the White House’s Pokémon deportation memes. “[T]he Lego videos have succeeded, in part, because they meet the political discourse on the level to which it has already sunk,” Kyle Chayka writes in The New Yorker. 

These deranged online dynamics are bad enough in isolation. When viewed in context, the cursedness of it all multiplies. Sinking to new depths has been the most consistent theme of the 2026 Iran war. 

Only a week after an ICE agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, the president told Iranian protesters that “help is on its way,” part of many early rumblings in the lead-up to the bombings. As the American government violently suppressed its dissidents, it used the suppression of dissent in Iran as an excuse to invade the other country. And when it did, it killed more Iranians. 

Iran has accused the US and Israel of committing war crimes and the international crime of aggression — a sound accusation, and one that is being made by a regime that itself has a long-standing record of atrocity crimes and other human rights violations. 

“It’s depressing because there are no good actors,” says Rigot.

Reports indicated that in some places in Iran, there were no sirens, no designated shelters or evacuation zones. While the bombings were underway, says Rigot, “You do not know who is safe, you do not know where they are, you do not know exactly what’s happening.” During this period, many Iranian civilians were in the dark about where to go during the bombings. “Israel is giving out evacuation notices to a country that has no access to information.” 

Iranians have, over the years, become extremely savvy with using VPNs and circumventing the shutdown in various ways. But information about bombings operates on a different timeline than other kinds of data. No one can afford to have an evacuation notice trickle out little by little. By locking down access to the outside world during the war, Iran aggravated what was already a humanitarian crisis, even as it accused its enemies of perpetrating war crimes. 

The Iranian regime toiled over the course of decades to build out its capacity to control the internet within its own borders. The architecture it has built is “very similar to what China has, very similar to what at the moment Russia is trying to establish,” says Azadeh Akbari, a professor at Goethe University Frankfurt. “It gives [the regime] unprecedented access to data transfer and data packages between people.” By centralizing control of the internet, the regime was also able to privilege bandwidth toward local apps and platforms, shifting data and activity away from the outside even when not in an active internet blackout.   

How America has fared in the Iran war has far more to do with the Strait of Hormuz than anything else, but it’s likely that the world — particularly governments of a repressive bent — will come away with all the wrong conclusions about how to wage information warfare. What Iran has built — a locked-down architecture, a poisoned information environment, an inexhaustible slop machine — was not necessarily better or stronger than the alternative. But so long as war is treated as an online spectacle, rather than the hard reality of civilians trying to suss out evacuation zones under a blanket of silence, Iran’s authoritarian internet will be judged to be the superior version.

Seen in another light, YouTube’s suspension of the Explosive Media channel that hosted Iran’s viral Lego slop was America’s own response to Iran’s blackout — an American company throttling access to an outsider’s message. It’s an uncharitable read, but one that should be considered against the backdrop of the forced sale of TikTok, which consolidates American internet architecture too, shoring up American digital sovereignty that could once be taken for granted thanks to the ascendancy of Silicon Valley. In this war, Iran met the United States where it was, fighting brainrot with brainrot, holding up an uncanny mirror to the American government. And like a gorilla fighting with its own reflection, America is poised to take things farther, maybe already seeing the possibilities in the Iranian internet strategy.

There’s never been a better time to add facial recognition to everything! The public at large is gradually becoming numb to our Palantirized surveillance state, and American communities are responding to the militarization of federal law enforcement with their own increasingly intricate webs of sousveillance. 

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are sleek, unobtrusive wearables with front-facing cameras and a passthrough display in the right lens that can show maps, texts, social media posts, and more. Name Tag is a new feature that uses facial recognition to identify people you see in real life through the glasses. Perhaps the glasses would have sounded way too creepy in the past; perhaps they still sound creepy now. But who has the energy to complain? A dangerously mercurial president, the blatant profiteering and corporate give-and-take, the expansive use of government surveillance, a supine Fourth Estate owned by billionaires, the rampant tyranny of ICE: These are the best preconditions to introduce Name Tag, brought to you by Meta and Ray-Ban. 

After months and months of ceaseless whining about the doxxing of ICE agents, there hasn’t been a single peep from Attorney General Pam Bondi about the future of facial recognition in Meta glasses. If frictionless facial recognition becomes commonplace, theoretically, ICE is vulnerable to the technology as well. But the government is remarkably complacent on this front. Maybe it thinks that Meta is at the beck and call of Washington, DC, and will change its product to suit the needs of ICE. Maybe the screaming over “doxxing” was never actually about doxxing. Or maybe a little bit of both?

As The Verge’s Victoria Song notes, even though smart glasses “aren’t inherently evil,” the Ray-Bans are automatically suspicious due to Meta’s established history of carelessness and ongoing demonstration of its totally demagnetized moral compass. Meta knows that the glasses are controversial, and that combining them with facial recognition poses serious privacy risks. But the time is ripe to spring the combination on a distracted, jaded public. According to an internal memo from last year, reviewed by The New York Times, the company claimed the feature will be launched “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.” 

The sentence is remarkably self-serving, even for Meta. The “dynamic political environment,” one presumes, is the chaotic Trump administration, the very same regime with which Meta and its CEO has curried favor — using slobbering praise and ideologically motivated policy changes and ballroom donations that went toward demolishing the historic White House East Wing. The “civil society groups” would be any of the civil liberties organizations, such as the ACLU, that take an interest in privacy rights; the “other concerns” distracting them would be the rampant surveillance and repression of Americans by the aforementioned “dynamic political environment.” 

Lina Khan’s FTC would have probably had something to say about it; the newspapers would have had a field day in an era before The Washington Post was bought and sold for parts by a Trump-enamored Jeff Bezos. But this is a new world, and the ascendance of fascism can really pave the way for a product launch!

The social violation posed by Meta’s glasses is unusually stark. The front-facing cameras combined with a smart interface and a low-profile appearance make them harder to clock. The ease of surveillance combined with additional computing features, all bundled inside a wearable that isn’t immediately detectable as a recording device, makes for a novel kind of a wiretap. This is not tricky to understand, the way that NSA bulk collection of metadata might be. A judge will grasp in an instant the danger these devices pose to the sanctity of jury proceedings; internet commenters instinctively despise their use in public spaces like the New York City subway. 

Just because you are outside of your home doesn’t mean you have consented to having a random bozo collect your face and your name, the latter of which can enable them to search for your digital presence or even home address. The act of existing in public should not carry those risks. You do not want Name Tag to haunt you just outside the synagogue, gay bar, or abortion clinic. 

Americans’ increasing addiction to filming each other adversarially is a symptom of the erosion of trust in our society; we broadcast each other breaching social norms, and we record law enforcement breaking the law. The institutions that are supposed to solve collective action problems have been hijacked or subverted. The forces that are supposed to keep the peace and curb violence instead sow discord and dole out death. Hostility is the basic mode in which we engage with each other and our government, and filming has become a hostile act. Meta’s glasses are a sleek version of the weapon everyone already has in their pocket; the addition of facial recognition will accelerate the ongoing breakdown in public trust.

The notion that any individual creep can get their hands on these glasses should be chilling: Even a mildly antisocial personality can wreak serious harm with the technology. But ultimately, it is not the regular old stalker who poses the greatest threat when it comes to Meta’s Ray-Bans. Fundamentally, the glasses are collecting data about the whereabouts of other people all over the world while calling back home to computers owned by a corporation with a track record of collecting far too much information about its users and being far too permissive about what others do with it. As with all data collected by third-party corporations, it is highly vulnerable to subpoenas by the government, which is presently engaged in an expansive war on unmasking its critics on the internet. How will Meta safeguard that data, when it wouldn’t even safeguard its fact-checking program in the face of a White House that is hostile toward facts? 

We are no longer operating in a world where we judge technology by what would happen if it landed in the “wrong hands.” It is already in the wrong hands. Industry and government have been captured by the worst people you know. The federal government of the United States is run by white supremacists who believe in the “great replacement” theory, and is currently engaged in a project of forced demographic change through mass deportation enabled by racial profiling blessed by the Supreme Court and enacted by an agency flush with billions of dollars. To be blunt, the work of ICE is the work of ethnic cleansing. And all centralized repositories of data that connect the identities and real-life locations of individuals, if exposed to ICE, will become tools of ethnic cleansing. Even without a formal relationship — that we know of, anyway — some feds have embraced the glasses: A Customs and Border Protection agent was photographed last year wearing Meta glasses at an immigration raid. 

Tech is never neutral; it is owned, created, and maintained by people with specific points of view, priorities, and vested political interests. The benefits it bestows on the powerful and the powerless are not equal or proportionate. As with the removal of the ICEBlock app from Apple’s App Store, Silicon Valley is at the beck and call of Washington, DC. Meta will tweak and adjust the rollout of Name Tag to best appease the “dynamic political environment” that made the launch possible in the first place. Bondi knows the score, and so do the rest of us. Surveillance is their tool, not ours, and Meta belongs to them, and not to us.

I was tear gassed by the government for the first time in July 2020 at one of the many Black Lives Matter protests that broke out all over the country. The feeling is excruciating, like your lungs are trying to kill you from the inside out. The sting in your eyes is painful, too. But oddly, after you’ve been tear gassed enough times, you mostly just resent the inconvenience of having to stand around and involuntarily gasp and sob. That summer, I learned the art of walking out of a cloud of tear gas — briskly, but not too briskly, lest you lose breath control and take in a huge huff of aerosolized pain. 

I thought about this five years later, as I watched Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi appear on Fox News after Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” she asked, incredulously. “These protesters — would you know how to walk out on the street and buy a gas mask, right now? Think about that.”

As a longtime gas mask user, I can sympathize. There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.

The best gas mask for most people

Parcil Distribution PT-100 Respirator Mask

Pros	Cons
Full face Blocks out tear gas from both federal and local law enforcement Adjustable straps to fit a range of head sizes Filters included Affordable price point	Rubber straps can tug on your hair Plastic cinching components broke five years after purchase Does not fit with most bike helmets Difficult to wear for longer than an hour at a time Unclear how well the default filters handle particulates

Where to Buy:

• $119.97 at Amazon
• $119.97 at Parcil Safety
• $119.99 at Walmart

The first time I went out into the Portland protests, I walked into a cloud of pepper spray and ended up crying and coughing while doubled over on a nearby sidewalk. So I bought some goggles. The next time, I was tear gassed. I bought better goggles and a half-face respirator. About a week later, I owned a full-face gas mask; one ex-military friend remarked that the gas mask looked more hardcore than the ones that the US Army handed out to joes. This was just silly, since the mask I had bought was technically a full-face respirator, rather than a proper military-grade mask, but I had to admit that my new equipment looked very extreme.

Dozens of my fellow journalists were already on the ground by the time I got there; as the feds escalated in force, we all upgraded our equipment bit by bit. The mask I got was pretty good. I practiced taking it out of my bag and pulling it over my head, anticipating the moment I heard the telltale hiss of a gas canister; I learned how to tighten and adjust the straps while on the move. With the mask on, I could stand in the thick pea-soupers of brownish tear gas that the feds were so fond of, and pull out my phone and start tapping out my reporting notes. 

When I eventually sat down to write my article about the Portland protests, I had a strange kind of epiphany, if it can even be called that. Out in the real world, when drowning in tear gas and adrenaline, I only thought of the feds as an antagonistic, occupying force; later, in the confines of my home office, I found myself considering their perspective. But rather than adding nuance and clarity to the fucked-up warzone less than a mile from my apartment, I was more confused than ever. 

Why did tear gas even exist? I wondered later, as I sat at my laptop to write my piece. As far as I could tell, all it did was make people angrier. If it neither killed nor neutralized, and merely hurt and enraged people, for what situation could it ever be appropriate? Why was it being used at all? 

I struggled, too, with vocabulary. I was at my computer, trying to point to concrete proof to explain that the protests were protests rather than riots, but I found myself baffled as to what the hallmarks of a riot even were. I had thought that a crowd being tear gassed in the dead of night might be similar to a mosh pit at a concert, but riddled with fear instead of elation — a crowd pushing and shoving, overcome with heightened emotion. But I found that the people around me, even when they were screaming and throwing eggs and other produce at the feds, would apologize if they even slightly jostled me. I did worry about being trampled one time, while standing next to an underprepared television crew that had come without gas masks and kept panicking throughout the night. When did a gathering turn into a riot? Were riots even real? 

I started polling my friends on whether they’d ever witnessed something they could describe indisputably as a riot. Everyone I knew had only ever seen clashes with the police that were disputed as protests, riots, or uprisings. There was only one outlier: a friend of a friend, a European who had once been caught up in a soccer riot. Tear gas had been deployed, and instead of exacerbating things, the tear gas had worked. The two supporters’ clubs had disengaged and dispersed.

This revelation had me reeling. I had spent my entire adult life thinking that riot cops existed to fight protesters, and although I had long been critical of police brutality, for some reason, I had come to accept that there were two sides to a conflict and that the police would be one of those sides. I had forgotten that there could ever be domestic conflicts where law enforcement were not themselves belligerents. 

The best high-end gas mask

Mira Tactical Gas Mask CM-6M

Mira makes the best masks that money can buy. Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards podcast owns multiple Mira products, and recommends all of them. Sergio Olmos, who has reported from both Portland and Ukraine, swears by Mira’s CM-6M specifically. 

Pros	Cons
Full face with excellent coverage and filtering Military-grade Comfortable Adjustable straps don’t drag on your hair Highly durable	Expensive Filters not included Can be heavy if you run it with two filters You look like a character in Fallout 4

Where to Buy:

• $275.95 $199 at Mira
• $275.95 $247.97 at Amazon

I kept the gas mask long after I had filed my draft and the piece had run. It still got some use now and then, but as the protests petered out, I eventually put the gas mask on my bookshelf as a memento of a surreal era, and as a reminder that fascism lurked just beneath the surface of American civic life. 

The longer I wear the gas mask, the more the rubber seal presses against my skin. When it’s tight, it’s uncomfortable; when it’s loose, it slowly drags down and chafes the skin. I hate that you have to lean in real close in order to talk to people; I hate the vague sensation of being trapped inside a fishbowl. I also strongly suspect that the mask is not adequate protection against the particulates in tear gas from a health standpoint — I didn’t have a normal period for six months after the 2020 protests. 

But even if the mask wasn’t handling all of the particulates, I was pain-free while wearing the mask, and that was the most important part in a chaotic, low-visibility situation where I had a job to do. My body still remembers what it feels like to get tear gassed, and even the sight of a deployed smoke grenade will make me tense up. I have never coughed, cried, or thrown up while wearing the gas mask. In 2025, I took the gas mask off my shelf. It now resides in my reporting bag. Its presence there is reassuring; I know I can do my work even when trapped in a chemical haze. 

Also a great choice

3M 6800 Full-Face Respirator

Pros	Cons
Full face 3M manufactures a variety of filters Durable enough to survive a scuffle with a right-wing extremist, even if the bones of your hand do not	Filters have to be bought separately 3M does not provide product information on which filters are best for government repression No one can hear anything you’re saying

Where to Buy:

• $199.69 $140 at Amazon
• $189.99 at Ace Hardware
• $189.99 at Acme Tools

For a while, it felt like the world had forgotten about what happened in Portland in 2020, that this cataclysmic event over the course of four months that left so many of my peers battered both physically and emotionally had been memory-holed for being too heavy to grapple with. But as the feds surged into Minnesota, orchestrating an invasion bigger by several orders of magnitude, I realized that the past was not dead and buried. I could see the legacy of 2020 in photos from Minneapolis — the unmarked vans, the ICE agents dressed like right-wing militias, the protesters in gas masks and helmets. Even phone calls from other reporters asking what kind of gear I owned was a reminder that nothing is truly in vain. 

The 2020 federal invasion of Portland ended with DHS withdrawing from the city — not because the protesters breached the walls or killed the feds or captured the castle, but because the protests simply refused to subside. 

No matter how much tear gas the feds flooded into downtown, the crowds got bigger, not smaller. When the news of the van abductions spread, the protests swelled with people who looked like they belonged at an HOA meeting, rather than shoulder-to-shoulder with black bloc anarchists. Eventually, thousands would throng the park blocks in front of the downtown federal courthouse.

This was not a case of fans of rival football clubs getting too drunk and rowdy and then coming to their senses after a little jolt of weaponized capsaicin. Portland donned its gas mask and stood its ground. 

As we’ve learned in the last year, Portland is far from unique. Cities across America have shown resilience and courage in the face of sudden abductions, unmarked vans, and masked agents. We do not have time to heave, cough, or weep — so we pull on our gas masks and walk forward into the mist. 

What is tear gas for? It is for inciting riots. How did people go out and get gas masks? They ordered them online, because they do not want to riot.

Correction, January 29th: An earlier version of this article misidentified Robert Evans’ respirator as a Mira. It is a 3M.