Reacher Star Alan Ritchson Doesn’t Like Trump or Free Speech
Jack Reacher won’t be wearing a MAGA hat anytime soon. In a lengthy interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Reacher star Alan Ritchson talks a bit about his Christian faith, and his explanation of his stance on Christianity leads him to Donald Trump, whom he… doesn’t care for. He seems to believe the very worst about Trump and questions how Christians can support him. His comments are below:
“Christians today have become the most vitriolic tribe. It is so antithetical to what Jesus was calling us to be and to do… Trump is a rapist and a con man, and yet the entire Christian church seems to be treat[ing] him like he’s their poster child and it’s unreal. I don’t understand it.”
And that’s fine. I don’t begrudge Ritchson or anyone else their opinions, and I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone how to interpret their faith or let it guide them, as long as they’re not hurting anyone. I think the flak over this is mostly coming from his starring role in Reacher, which is a masculine action series with a traditional lead that conservatives have taken a liking to for those reasons (aside from it being a great show). But Alan Ritchson’s opinions don’t take anything away from Reacher; in fact, they make that show even better, since the opinions of one of the key players don’t influence it or turn it into something it’s not. That’s what I want from Hollywood; they don’t have to think a certain way, but I’d prefer they don’t use art to preach to me. As for Ritchson, specifically, as far as I know, he’s never attacked people online or anything like that, so as long as he doesn’t turn himself into an obnoxious lecture machine like a lot of stars do on social media now, he should be fine. In the interview, he talks about abuse in both the Catholic Church and the modeling industry, where he experienced it first-hand, so he doesn’t really come across as an ideologue.
If anything, I find earlier comments he made about Elon Musk, Twitter/X, and freedom of speech a lot more disturbing than who he’s voting for. Bounding Into Comics recounts a video on Ritchson’s Instagram account where he argues against allowing anyone who disagrees with the accepted media narrative to have a voice:
View this post on Instagram
“As a free speech absolutist Elon Musk believes that all speech whether it’s hate speech or misinformation, something that he has a pension for, should proliferate his site… He relied on the Santa Monica Observer, a propaganda site with low credibility rating by the MBFC, the Media Bias and Fact Check Organization. They rate it low credibility for poor sourcing, fake news, lack of ownership transparency, and often they are an impostor site. The owner of the site SMMC LLC appears to be inactive. So there is really no way to know who is running or operating the site and that lack of transparency is a major issue for a newspaper, an online newspaper trying to claim some kind of journalistic integrity.”
He also accuses Musk of interfering in the 2022 elections by allowing “misinformation” on X – “misinformation,” of course, being anything he disagrees with. His analogy of the poison cups presupposes that we trust the person testing for poison, which is where the analogy falls apart. A doctor can be trusted to differentiate between poisoned and unpoisoned wine because his only goal is to keep people alive (assuming there’s no pharmaceutical company offering to pay him for promoting their new cyanide-infused rosé). News fact-checkers, on the other hand, cannot be trusted to leave their biases at the door, which is why letting people decide for themselves is the best option. (Sidebar: seek out an old Humphrey Bogart movie called Deadline USA and marvel at the kind of message about news media movies once preached and never will again.) The authoritarianism in these statements is much scarier than his views on Trump or being a good Christian, which are, ultimately, benign.
I still want to see season 3 of Reacher, though, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare; I’m really rooting for that movie to be good.
Comments (3)
Out of all the things going on and all the problems in the world, he can only muster the strength to attack Trump and Church. Sounds like an NPC or Mark Ruffalo. This is the same message we’ve heard from media for 7 years or more now.
Reacher season 2 was a big flop and mighty boring anyway. Lost all interest.
Idc about this dude, if he loves communism so much he should migrate to China.
Though I’m convinced actors like him only post this stuff to keep their jobs and good relationships with the industry.
He’s a fool and MOUW is going to bomb because World War 2 movies are no longer relevant. Speaks against Trump, but no word on Diddy, Epstein, Weinstein, the cartels, Big Pharma, human traffickers, yeah, he does not take any risks whatsoever and this is the type of person, Alan, that keeps me away from Christianity. The kind of guy who will preach wokeness at you and try to call it Jesus.
All the wars did was get a bunch of white guys killed, so that the west could by run into the ground and sold off by shysters. The wars also just flooded the west with peoples who made no sacrifices.
Not even one word from him about abuse in Hollywood, or Islam or Judaism, which is, par for the course and very typical from the media for our entire lives. Not one word on Dan Schneider and Nickelodeon. There was a very interesting article recently on Anne Hathaway’s former BF who’s business plan it was to buy foreclosed Catholic properties for a real estate fund after using media to promote scandals and loot them. Very good tactics.
No word from Alan on Grooming Gangs, but that would not be first hand. Don’t see how anyone could play dumb and ignorant about abuse in Hollywood. Can’t even take a person seriously that says it’s not there.
Again, his movie is going to bomb because it’s really about anti-German hate. The results of the wars were wokeness, Bolshevism, and soft communism and invasion and rainbow flags for people who did zero fighting.
He managed to land a major role in Reacher and has done zilch since.