Think For Yourself. Don’t Be An NPC. Especially Not Now.

The United States military has lawyers in the targeting room. The people accusing them of war crimes have Bluesky.

Let me tell you what an NPC is.

In video games, a non-player character is a background figure controlled by code. It has no agency. No judgment. No original thought. You walk up to it and it says the same line it said yesterday and will say tomorrow. It cannot learn. It cannot reason. It only executes the script it was given.

That is precisely what I am watching happen in real time across Bluesky, Reddit, and the comment sections of every legacy media outlet covering this war.

The script right now reads: “war crimes”. And every NPC is running it on a loop.

Let me offer some basic education that the script writers apparently skipped.

Hitting bridges is not a war crime. Striking power infrastructure is not a war crime. These are standard military doctrine going back to World War II. The purpose is to deny an enemy the ability to move, to concentrate force, and to sustain operations. Every serious air campaign in modern history has done exactly this. NATO hit Serbian bridges and power plants in Kosovo. Nobody called it a war crime. They gave it a standing ovation.

The IRGC is not a conventional military that kindly separates itself from civilian infrastructure. It owns the infrastructure. It uses bridges to move forces. It uses power grids to run command and control. It uses those same tools to surveil, oppress, and murder Iranian civilians who dare to protest in the streets. When you remove that capacity, you are not targeting civilians. You are targeting the apparatus of a regime that has been committing war crimes against its own people and its neighbors for forty years.

You want to talk about war crimes?

Hamas deliberately targeted a music festival and murdered children in their beds. That is a war crime.

Hezbollah has spent decades firing rockets into Israeli neighborhoods with no military objective except to kill civilians. That is a war crime.

The Houthis attacked over a hundred merchant vessels in the Red Sea. That is a war crime.

Iran just put a missile into a six story residential building in Haifa and killed four people. That is a war crime.

The regime whose embassies are posting about the 25th Amendment has executed protesters in the streets, funded proxy armies across four countries for the explicit purpose of killing civilians, and pursued nuclear weapons while lying about it for two decades.

And the NPCs want to prosecute the United States military.

I will say plainly what the script will not permit them to say: they have no idea what a war crime is. They read a post. They felt a feeling. They repeated the line. That is the whole of their intellectual process.

I do not hold Trump’s language up as a model. I do not think profanity belongs in presidential communications, and I will say so clearly. That criticism is fair and I make it without hesitation.

But the men and women of the United States military conducting targeting reviews, applying proportionality analysis, and following doctrine that predates this administration by generations are not committing war crimes. Accusing them of it, based on a Bluesky post and a feeling, in order to score points against a president you despise, while simultaneously running cover for a regime that has made the deliberate murder of civilians its founding foreign policy doctrine, is not righteousness.

It is moral cowardice dressed up as moral clarity.

The NPC cannot hear that. The NPC will run the script again.

But the rest of you can think. So think.