It’s one of the defining mental battles of our age: Right wing America vs. satirical depictions of right wing America that they unironically embrace because they’re incapable of recognizing when they’re being mocked.
By no means is this a new phenomenon; people have been observing for years, for instance, the popularity of the skull symbol of Marvel’s Punisher character with police and law enforcement, despite the fact that the actual comic book character in question routinely disavows (and occasionally kills) police officers trying to copy his vigilante shtick. Police simply continue idolizing the Punisher anyway, because they don’t bother actually engaging with the ideas of the fiction they’re fetishizing, only the imagery and surface level themes. The Punisher looks cool killing bad guys outside the bounds of the law, so I want to do that too! That’s as deep as it goes.
This grade school level of media literacy routinely causes MAGA America to embrace other pieces of satirical entertainment specifically warning against their fascistic ideology, with one of the most frequently referenced examples being Paul Verhoeven’s classically campy, 1997 sci-fi action film Starship Troopers, a depiction of a propaganda-dominated future fascist military dystopia that MAGA seemingly can’t resist openly yearning for, because its characters happen to be young, white and attractive. And apparently, even President Donald Trump is on board, this week posting new, AI-generated renderings of “next generation” military uniforms for the Space Force that claim to be directly inspired by Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers … which itself drew heavy inspiration from none other than the Nazis. Who would have thought it would be a lack of media literacy that most directly led to members of the U.S. military being cloaked in SS-adjacent regalia?
And just in case the thematic connection was not clear enough, the terrible AI graphic literally includes text affirming that the uniforms are “inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform” and “modernized for the guardians of the space domain.” Not a lot of wiggle room for interpretation there.
This is all deeply ironic, given the actual intent of Paul Verhoeven’s film. The director of Robocop and Total Recall was born in 1938 in the Netherlands, and quite literally grew up as a young boy in a Nazi-occupied country during the height of World War II–some of his childhood memories reportedly include V2 rocket launches, burning homes, dead bodies in the street and his parents almost being killed by bombs dropped on The Hague in 1945, when he was 7. Verhoeven thus grew up with a burning hatred of the culture and critical thinking-stripping allure of fascism, and would employ this outlook in depictions of the media through his many dystopian films. When he adapted Robert A. Heinlein’s classic 1959 sci-fi novel Starship Troopers, he chose to do so by reimagining the story into a satirical work about a version of the planet Earth that had been fully dismantled and conditioned by a fascist central government, turning its citizens into soldiers-in-waiting, ready to be unleashed against a convenient enemy whenever an opportunity arose for profit. The war against the insectoid “bugs” in the film is eventually implied to be one of man’s own choosing, intended to make the audience question the supposed heroes the viewer has been rooting for throughout, and realize that they’re all impressionable pawns molded by a lifetime of propaganda to blindly support the state.
Verhoeven, by the way, thought all these satirical themes were quite obvious, telling the Guardian in 2022 that his film was about American politics and “fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.” That extended all the way to uniforms for its titular troopers that were heavily inspired by Nazi gear, to the point that Neil Patrick Harris’ character seen above is fully decked out in an all-black kit practically identical to Nazi SS officer garb, which reportedly had people referring to him as “Doogie Himmler” on set. Verhoeven said he directly consulted the Nazi era propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl to more closely depict his characters as “something out of Nazi propaganda.” “I even put one in an SS uniform. But no one noticed.”
Understandably, the film’s director has always seemingly been somewhat surprised and incensed by this: He made an effective satire he intended to be pretty obvious, but the very people he was criticizing have always been among those who unironically embraced the film, genuinely longing for the homogenous, “patriotic” culture of young, hot military zombies it presents. You can lead a MAGA to film, but you can’t make him understand it.
As for the Space Force, one’s first understandable question might well be, “So wait, the Space Force is actually real? What exactly does it do again?” And yes, the Space Force does in fact nominally exist, as it has since Trump created it as an independent wing of the military in 2019, although it is by far the smallest of the branches. The main functions of its military personnel (who are referred to as “guardians”) are not to physically go to space–aw shucks–but rather to operate systems on the ground that support space infrastructure and actively work to defend it from threats such as collisions or active attacks from systems that could threaten satellites, such as ground-based missiles or lasers. The organization also has some level of oversight over military and commercial rocket launch sites, and operates weather tracking equipment and early warning missile systems, etc.
The new motivational posters over at Space Force are pretty good, though…
— JimfromNY (@dissentinator.bsky.social) 4:46 PM · Sep 6, 2026
In terms of its look and aesthetics, however, the Space Force has from its inception always more or less copied most of the elements of what it saw as its most obvious progenitor, the U.S. Air Force. After only six years of existence, it finally got around to distributing a rulebook in 2025 telling enlisted “guardians” how they should look and dress, more or less copying the majority of Air Force regulations, although the Space Force is amusingly slightly looser on some aspects of personal grooming such as allowing hair that “touches the ears” among other things. Before you worry they’re getting too permissive, “beards are not authorized unless a guardian had received an approved medical profile or religious accommodation waiver by an appropriate authority.” After all, you don’t want a scruffy beard ruining the exacting, precise image you’re trying to cultivate when you suit up a young Space Force recruit in a Nazi SS-inspired uniform.
There could be quite a few more of those fresh-faced, budding Nazi cosplayers in the years to come. Trump has been looking to grow the size of the military branch he founded (lord knows he loves things he can take credit for), reportedly hoping to double the size of the branch int he next five years, although it naturally isn’t clear exactly why this would be desired or needed. To that end, the Space Force announced back in July that it would be offering $25,000 signing bonuses to new recruits … if they agreed at the time to serve for at least eight years.
Seems pretty optimistic, if you ask me. I mean, surely we’ll have been conquered by the Bugs before then, right? No doubt as soon as Trump has finally extracted us from the war in Iran that has already brought the U.S. to its knees, we’ll be launching missiles at the Bug home world any time now.
