13 Hours and Jack Ryan star John Krasinski gave another interview recently where he claimed that appearing in cryptoconservative propaganda did not mean he was doing anything political. Despite admitting privately that the CIA had a huge influence on Jack Ryan, according to Krasinski he’s just an ordinary, affable guy making a few films and no one should read anything into it.
In other words, he’s a lying piece of shit.
This is not the first time Jim from The Office has played the ‘what, who me?’ butter-wouldn’t-melt act. In 2018 he spoke of wanting to be able to play ‘red state heroes’ without it being seen as political. Krasinski has consistently supported establishment neo-con Democrats and has repeatedly spoken of having 11 family members currently or formerly in the military. He wants to appear like a safe-space liberal, but inside his heart he secretly longs for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule us all like a king.
For example, he starred in the Benghazi movie 13 Hours, which is little more than a racist fantasy that every brown person in Libya hates all Americans and wants to kill them. The context of the attack on the Benghazi consulate coming after a hugely destructive NATO war against Libya was entirely left out of the movie, and the CIA removed any indication that they knew about the attack(s) ahead of time. It was released in the run-up to the 2016 election and while Michael Bay claimed it had ‘no political agenda’ it was clearly designed to inflame passions against Hitlery Clinton, who was synonymous with the real life cover-up and largely fabricated conspiracy theories around Benghazi.
To be fair, Krasinski may not have known about this but he did know all about the CIA’s influence on Jack Ryan, where he stars as the eponymous hero. He spoke at a secret preview screening on a US Air Force base in England of his passion for the CIA and how he had ‘a lot of discussions’ with them so that the CIA could get ‘their character’ exactly how they wanted him to be. The producers of Jack Ryan also gave interviews saying their purpose in making the show was to promote and glamourise the DOD and CIA at a time when they were receiving a lot of criticism. It is unabashedly government propaganda.
I used clips from these interviews and presentations in my Jack Ryan video essay, which sparked both a twitterstorm and a string of articles about Krasinski’s transformation from likeable paper salesman into neo-con superhero. Naturally, none of these articles mentioned my video – they reported on the tweetstorm and on the Hollywood celebrity, not on the CIA and DOD’s involvement in productions starring Krasinski.
I conclude several things from this:
- I am right to avoid social media. It’s full of people who are catastrophically missing the point, about everything.
- Most journalists are so lazy that they report on a twitterstorm about a Hollywood celebrity being a CIA puppet but totally fail to find out what caused that twitterstorm and what the CIA’s role is in all this.
- Despite these issues, my work is clearly having an impact because this fresh round of accusations caused by my video resulted in Krasinski giving a recent interview to Esquire where he denied that he’s doing anything political.
- Right wing cultural commentators remain utterly retarded – they are acting like this is some sick conspiracy of Leftists against anyone who ‘supports the troops’. Even RT – which used to be the sort of place that would discuss the CIA’s role in such matters – have rushed out a lazy, stupid op-ed designed to appeal to lazy, stupid right wingers.
So I am ambivalent as to what to feel. Do I feel happy that my work has caused such a shitstorm? Or do I feel disappointed that all the focus is on the celebrity himself and not the institutions his work is promoting and protecting? Maybe it’s a question of step-by-step – my Jack Ryan video was the first in a series of efforts to draw more attention to the importance of this sort of propaganda and it has had a much greater and wider impact than I could have possibly anticipated. That the focus is in all the wrong places pisses me off, but I won’t let it discourage me.