With just a week to go before season 2 of Amazon's Jack Ryan is released and the eponymous star John Krasinski has tried to downplay allegations that the show is propaganda for a US coup or war in Venezuela. In an interview he trie
The original Cultural Cold War has been the subject of numerous books and articles on both sides of the divide, but the new version has been almost entirely ignored.
As prep for my forthcoming video on Amazon's Jack Ryan as next-gen propaganda I've been keeping an eye on promotions and events around the launch of season two in November. The first episode was shown at New York Comic-Con a few days ago, and at a panel disc
This week, I welcome to the show author and friend James Oddy to discuss the JFK assassination case and its treatment in the Oliver Stone movie JFK. We look at the psychological and political consequences of the assassination, as well as the political and cultural impact of the film.
In 1998 the CIA got an opportunity to infiltrate one of their spies into the Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, but turned it down. This week, I examine the autobiography of that spy – Aukai Collins, an American jihadi who became a deep cover agent for the FBI and CIA.
The latest trailer for Amazon Prime's Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is a perfect illustration of Western double standards and hypocrisy over the global arms trade. As I predicted in an earlier article, the plotline centres on Venezuela and in all lik
Why isn’t the ‘political film’ a genre of cinema? Hollywood puts out a consistent stream of politically-themed films, but rarely if ever promotes them as such.
I recently obtained 50 pages of documents from the CIA on the support they provided to Michael Bay's Benghazi movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. In this investigation for Shadowproof I outline how the relationship between Bay and the Agen
The teaser trailer for season 2 of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan depict John Krasinski as the eponymous hero in a Latin American country where there is an uprising against the government (coug
The relationship between government liaison offices and the entertainment industry usually works well, resulting in added production value for the industry’s products and the furtherance of the government’s agendas. But sometimes things go wrong.
Michael Bay is well known for working closely with government agencies when making his films, mostly the Pentagon but also NASA. Less well known is how he worked with the CIA to vet his script for the Benghazi movie 13 Hours, and how his request to film the 
On this feature-length subscriber podcast I analyse the Hulu TV drama The Looming Tower (ba
Morten Storm is a Danish man who converted to Islam in the 1990s and got involved in the jihadi scene in Denmark, the UK, Yemen and Somalia. In 2006 he suffered a loss of faith, and turned to Danish intelligence and offered to help them fight the war on terror.
The soft reboot of the political drama Designated Survivor recently dropped on Netflix and in spite of Kiefer Sutherland making the least convincing president since Sarah Palin it is a considerable improvement on the first two seasons.
Today I received an email that I thought I would share with you, from the publishers of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. It said that the two articles I penned for the journal were among the top 20 most-downloaded arti
The DOD's directive on working with Hollywood says that they can provide production assistance if it is deemed 'in the best interest of the Nation', but as with all their criteria for deciding whether to give support the
Iran-Contra is in many ways the definitive government conspiracy – involving guns, drugs, anti-communism and black operations, it went all the way to the White House.
In 2014 the Washington Post's Adam Goldman published a story about the CIA producing dolls of Osama bin Laden as part of an influence operation designed to diminish the former Al Qaeda's leader's popularity in the Middle East. The dolls would be made so the paint on the eyes would easily rub off, revealing 'devil eyes' underneath.
Superman is one of the world’s most recognisable cultural icons. A symbol of human idealism, he has been subject to a range of political and philosophical agendas over the last 80 years.
Black Panther and Django Unchained are perhaps the two most successful movies featuring black actors in lead roles that Hollywood has ever made. But are they as radical as they seem?
There are many reasons to dislike Game of Thrones - the endless hype, the gratuitous sex and violence in lieu of a meaningful plot, the experience of having to listen to fans of the show blather on long after you've told them you don't watch the show and aren't interested
While it is now considered a Cold War classic Ice Station Zebra was a flop when it was first released.
In what appears to be little more than a promo for the third John Wick film, a recently-released video shows star Keanu Reeves being trained by former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan. A veteran of the war on terror, the video shows Ryan teach
Osama Bin Laden’s death is the perfect postmodern event, in that most of the reports detailing how, where and when he died contradict all the other reports.
The 1968 spy and counterspy classic Ice Station Zebra was inspired by a real life event during the CIA/Air Force Corona spy satellite program. In April 1959 the satellite Discoverer 2 became the first to send a recovery capsule containing satellite surv
George Crile’s book Charlie Wilson’s War is the most in-depth account of the CIA’s support to the Afghan mujahideen, based on countless interviews with inside sources.
The FBI recently released a tranche of documents on the USA Network TV series Burn Notice.