🔒 Conspiracy Culture Catches the Car

 My favorite TV show of all time was (and probably still is) The X Files.

 Although there is an evil alien race involved and all the protagonists are feds, the primary antagonist—the Big Bad, the villain of villains—is the United States government. It’s a very frightening villain specifically because it is so powerful and so unknowable.

 Neither the current president nor the Director of the FBI are ever shown or identified, to keep the show from becoming dated, but also to keep the villain’s face shrouded and inhuman.

 (Interesting bit of trivia:, the FBI Director during the show’s entire run was Louis Freeh, who was hired the very same month that the show began in 1993 and left the position shortly before the show ended [discounting its later revival] in 2001. In our timeline, Freeh was an almost completely forgettable figure you’ve probably never heard of and he presided over none of the FBI’s biggest controversies [Waco and Ruby Ridge happened just before him, September 11 just after] but in the timeline of the show this makes him, by a very large margin, the most significant and uniquely evil human being in history)

 Even if you don’t believe in aliens, or any of the other supernatural goings-on in the Chris Carterverse, this show could make you believe, by proxy, specifically because of how the government was portrayed. This was a deep state of unfathomable power and intelligence that could not be outwitted or reformed because it was above politics, its immortal mission outlived the checks, balances, and limits of the puppet politicians and bureaucracies it permitted to exist as a circus show for the citizenry. Its patience was infinite and its machinations intricate. This was an organization that actually could have pulled off the 9/11 hoax, not because they were good at complex capers, but because they had been planning it since before the towers were built.

 This show made you ignore the rational and correct parts of your critical thinking brain that demand evidence before going all-in on spooky stuff because it convinces you that, if the evidence existed, the government could easily hide it from you. When it becomes impossible to know anything either way, suddenly anything is possible.

 In its dead serious “mythology” canon (as opposed to the much lighter “monster of the week” episodes in which Mulder would fight a vampire or outwit a genie or get sucked into a videogame or something, and yes all these things happened) The X Files worked by, for better or worse, reinforcing the mythology that the real life US federal government wanted everyone to believe about it.

 It was a theme that was big in the 90s and equally present in non-supernatural media thrillers like Enemy of the State and Mercury Rising, which came out in the same year and both portray the deep government as omniscient and omnipresent, harboring secrets that would rewrite entire history books if they were exposed, technologies decades ahead of anything known to the public, and the power and the willingness to track down and eliminate anyone at will.

 The government was invariably the antagonist in all of these shows but they still served as a kind of propaganda.

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