For decades the Eurovision Song Contest has been a platform for projecting soft power and engaging in cultural warfare.  In this month's subscriber-only podcast I look at how Eurovision entries have been used for propaganda and have been subject to political censorship. I discuss this year's winning entry - which ...
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In 1974 former CIA officer Victor Marchetti and former State Department official John Marks published their book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. This week I examine a file in the JFK archives that details what the CIA censored from the book, and why. I look at several categories ...
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This week I review the most recent Star Wars film The Last Jedi and analyse its politics. I discuss its anti-war and progressive tokenism, and why this is ultimately undermined by being symbolic, and not narrative-based.  None of the ‘progressive’ character moments or dialogue in the film have any meaningful ...
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I recently joined Robbie Martin of Media Roots to discussion the Salisbury poisoning, the Skripals, the Syrian airstrikes and the general state of politics and Russophobia.  We covered many of the reasons to be sceptical of the official story about the poisoning of the Skripals, how this relates to the ...
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In this month's subscriber-only podcast I take a look at three TV series which predicted or reinforced various aspects of the official story of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.  I examine Salvation, Homeland and Strike Back have featured dialogue and storylines about Litvinenko, Russian assassination of former spies, ...
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On March 4th Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in the sleepy British city of Salisbury, by forces currently unknown. The British government immediately blamed Russian intelligence, leading to weeks of accusations and counter-accusations, diplomatic expulsions and lots of conspiracy theories about who really did this, and why ...
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I am joined today by Robbie Martin and Pearse Redmond to talk about the 2008 9/11 conspiracy thriller The Reflecting Pool. We pick on various aspects of the film that relate or comment on the 9/11 truth movement, including the bizarre consensus that thermite brought down the WTC which has ...
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Newly released documents in the JFK files have cast fresh light on the CIA's plots to kill Fidel Castro.  One interview with William Harvey - known as 'America's James Bond', reveals that Robert Kennedy invoked 007 while trying to urge the Agency forward in its anti-Castro operations. William King Harvey ...
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Russiagate has become both the gift that keeps on giving and the scandal that will not die. This week we take a look at the allegations, the perceptions and the misconceptions, examining how the ‘fake news’ crisis grew out of the claim that the Russian government hacked the 2016 US ...
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In this special podcast just for Pearse's patreon subscribers (also available to my subscribers) we discuss all things Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix and Christopher Wylie.  Fundamentally we ask whether their activities are new or unique, or merely the most well-known when dozens of other companies and government agencies do the ...
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In our mid-season review and analysis of Homeland season 7, Pearse and I get into various strands of the show including the Brett O'Keefe/Waco arc, the Russiagate conspiracy, how the CIA should be portrayed as having utterly failed the country but have somehow dressed themselves up as the heroes, fake ...
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I was recently invited onto the Rory O'Connor podcast to talk about National Security Cinema, the research methods we employed to get the information and documents, and the difference between the DOD and the CIA's approaches to Hollywood. Via the Rory O'Connor podcast: I talk to Tom Secker about his ...
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On this month's subscriber-only podcast I talk about my new job and why it means I've been unable to produce much content recently, and about the US Air Force's competition to name the in-development B-21 strategic bomber. From the Trumpnator to Bomby McPlaneFace, a lot of the suggestions are very ...
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Professor CJ invited me onto his Dangerous History Podcast recently to discuss the research behind National Security Cinema, what we found, and what it means.  We talk about conspiracy theories, how I got into this line of research, what methods I employed, the nature of the entertainment liaison offices and ...
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