From Merchants of Death to Merchants of Confusion

In 1934, a best-selling book called Merchants of Death made a simple and outrageous argument: that arms manufacturers had conspired to drag the United States into World War I because war was good for their business. The accusation was not entirely fair — the book's own authors admitted munitions makers were not the sole cause of American involvement — but it captured something real about the profit motive in warfare. The Senate convened the Nye Committee to investigate. Senator Gerald Nye declared that the committee had found men "striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself."

Ninety years later, the accusation deserves updating. The merchants of death have new products and new distribution channels. They don't sell weapons. They sell confusion.

Consider what happened in March 2026, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat in a Jerusalem café and held up his hands.

Rumors had circulated for days that Netanyahu had been killed in Iranian attacks and that footage of him at press conferences was AI-generated. His response was to post a live video of himself ordering a cappuccino, sarcastically declaring he was "dying for coffee," and spreading his fingers wide to show he had exactly five of them. Within hours, the café video itself was declared a deepfake. The café released photographs proving Netanyahu had visited. Those photographs were disputed. A serving head of government had to marshal documentary evidence of his own corporeal existence, and the documentary evidence was itself contested.

Who profited from this spectacle? Not Iran, which generated some of the original disinformation. Not Israel, whose leader spent an afternoon proving he was alive. Not the United States. The primary beneficiaries were the anonymous accounts, content creators, and platform operators whose revenue models run on engagement — and nothing generates engagement quite like a story about whether a prime minister is alive or dead.