The American President is a romantic comedy set in the White House, set against a backdrop of political issues that are still part of our public conversation. In this episode I analyse the film's politics of nostalgia, its idealisation of the liberal agenda, and its promotion of the military and ...
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A recently-released syllabus for the US Naval Academy's course FP130: American Government and Constitutional Development includes a section that advises students to watch and learn from the 1995 romantic comedy The American President.  Bizarrely, the scene does not involve the military or foreign or security policy in any way, but ...
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In March 2016 I submitted a request to the US Navy for copies of entertainment liaison office reports, script notes and production assistance agreements.  Over a hundred emails and three appeals later they have finally released some script notes to me, but the document is almost entirely redacted. Sometimes people ...
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For the last few weeks I've been working a research project on how the Pentagon's entertainment liaison offices deal with the subjects of military mental health and suicide.  Today the fruits of that research were published by Insurge Intelligence, a crowdfunded journalism platform run by Nafeez Ahmed, who also published ...
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A year ago I published the book National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood.  On this month's subscriber podcast I reflect on the success of the book, its impact on media coverage of the topic of government influence on entertainment and the plans for a ...
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This week I am joined by long-time 9/11 researcher and activist Jon Gold, to talk about his new book We Were Lied to About 9/11. We discuss Jon's experiences both of the 9/11 attacks and of his years of research and activism, along with the legacy of the 'truth movement' ...
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In 1995 the Pentagon supported an episode of the popular sitcom Home Improvement, where Tim and Jill get to drive tanks at a Marine base. This week we take a deep dive into this episode, its feminist subtext, and the DOD’s political censorship of the script, courtesy of a file ...
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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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