Conspiracy Culture Catches the Car
What happens now that the conspiracy theorists have raided the safe but found it empty?
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.
The mythology within this media always played a kind of chicken and egg game with mainstream conspiracy culture—it was both informed by it and exacerbated it. The X Files drew all of its main themes from a culture of ufology that came out of the height of the Cold War, when the government had a very strong imperative toward opaqueness and secrecy, but in so doing, cultivated and nurtured a general culture of suspicion and paranoia that America never recovered from. Everyone knew that the government was hiding the truth about a secret enemy, and it was communists, but it was also maybe space aliens, but it was also maybe demons and Satanists.
Conspiracy culture was deadly serious to its True Believers, but highly entertaining to its skeptics. I was one of them. For the same reasons that there are so many horror movies about Catholicism, conspiracy culture (which is also a type of religion, I argue) has mainstream secular appeal in the horror genre. It scratches all the same itches if you’re into that kind of thing. The US Government and its Men In Black are scary and fun in the same way that Satan and his demons are scary and fun, and Dracula and his progeny are scary and fun. They all hide in the night. They are all listening to you from the shadows, right now.
But this media also reinforces the culture it references. Even after the Berlin Wall fell, the mythologies of this era echoed through media and put conspiracy culture into a runaway feedback loop. 9/11 dumped the biggest keg of fuel on it since the JFK assassination. Niche radio personalities like Alex Jones turned into media empires. By the 2010s, once fringe ufologists like David Icke were selling out stadiums on world tours.
Conspiracy culture was hammering on the doors of the White House, demanding the JFK files, demanding the 9/11 reports, demanding UFO transparency, but the only way they could get in was to be voted in. Ironically, like vampires, they had to be invited.
Eventually the conspiracists found one of their own to rally around. Donald Trump won their approval by insisting that Barack Obama was a Manchurian candidate born and raised by Muslims in Kenya. It was the most batshit thing a major presidential candidate had ever insisted upon, and for the audience of Infowars it was right up their alley. They were finally going to get a guy in the White House who would pull aside the veil and disclose everything.
The iceberg-like spooky depth of the US government mythology maintained its integrity through 2017-2021 as Trump was able to easily blame this shadow apparatus for his myriad failures. Conspiracy culture’s Men in Black were rebranded the Deep State. A real life version of The X Files’ deep whistleblower characters, Deep Throat or X, existed in an online era character named QAnon. Even though Trump, their Asshole Mulder, sat at the Resolute Desk, he was still the victim of conspiracies and found himself alone, bereft of true loyalists, surrounded by turncoats.
Although the people he installed to reshape the government were ideologically aligned with the far right project they were also, relatively speaking, qualified. They understood how government worked and were interested in keeping it operational, which means they gave Trump none of the answers he demanded.
Trump fixed this in his second term by decapitating the government entirely, removing anyone with government experience from any management level position, and replacing them all with news anchors, entertainment managers, game show hosts, podcasters, Infowars alumni, women he found attractive, and Marco Rubio for some reason. He cut off all of the hydra’s heads and cauterized the stumps.
In under five months he completely destroyed the illusion of dark secret power in the US government.
It would be impossible to take a show like The X Files seriously today. Its portrayal of front-facing federal employees as ordinary people doing monotonous paperwork as a front for dark and powerful machinations has been unmasked, but it’s paperwork all the way down to the bottom. They ripped down the thick curtains and shone full daylight into the dark heart of the Federal engine, but they didn’t find the Illuminati, they found the DMV. Elon Musk was able to cripple the Deep State by making them write bullet point emails to him all day until they either quit in frustration or figured out he wasn’t reading them.
Is there anyone who still believes the US government could pull off 9/11? Does anyone think they could pull off a liquor store robbery?
I believe Trump’s wrecking crew did genuinely believe they were going to find something. The promises started up immediately, were sensationalized with the fervour of an Oscars night. Names were going to be named and lifelong participants in the grand American conspiracism lore, their basements furnished with red string and corkboards, were going to find out who was right all along. The final season of the real life X Files and all the reveals were going to come out. Only to be met with disappointment after flat, anticlimactic, disappointment.
The complete declassification of the JFK assassination files was one of the most hotly anticipated releases. The grandaddy of all American conspiracy theories. Lifelong enthusiasts pored hungrily over the cache of documents to find… Lee Harvey Oswald did it, and did it alone. There is nothing there that contradicts the Warren Commission and what new information they contain is of interest only to professional historians with book projects.
A lot of right-wing Spooky Mulders like Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files lieutenant turned kooky UFO weirdo, have been eagerly awaiting alien contact disclosure, repeatedly testifying to congress that he’s “heard stuff.”
And yet an eagerly awaited documentary, The Age of Disclosure, which promises to be the most revealing UFO film ever made, facilitated by top Trump officials with direct access to all the government and military secrets, has been hitting the festival circuit and professional reviewers who aren’t hypnotized into a credulous stupor by blurry images of discs taken by a Game Boy camera in 2025 are saying that it’s 109 minutes of the exact same shit we’ve heard for the past 60 years.
Then there’s the so-called Epstein Files, possibly the biggest whale of them all. For six long years America and the world have been eagerly awaiting the government’s full disclosure of everything it knows about the Tin Pot Governor of Rape Island, Jeffrey Epstein—most importantly, his client list, and the name of the person who murdered him in prison.
This was the most sensationalized of all the Trump administration’s Deep State disclosures, and I have little doubt that Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and the rest of Trump’s Justice Department bag of nuts thought they were going to hit paydirt but started to panic once they discovered what little they actually had.
In February, the stalling began. Bondi summoned a group of 15 right-wing internet influencers to the White House and handed them some ring binders titled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1,” which later turned out to be full of information that was already publicly known.
When the cogs turning in MAGA’s heads finally cottoned on to the fact that this was a diversionary tactic, Pam Bondi started claiming that there was an FBI field office in New York that was hiding the rest of the documents and they were actively working to retrieve them.
Then, nothing for three months. There was never an Epstein Files Phase 2 and there were never any hidden documents in a New York field office. In a recent interview with the two podcasters currently in charge of the FBI, they were forced to admit—to the fury of conspiracists both pro and anti Trump—that Epstein killed himself and there is no “Epstein list” outside of the brain that died with him.
As much of a blow this all is to an American State that has long enjoyed a mythology of its dark and mysterious power, it’s also a blow to Trump and the gaggle of idiots in his administration. They thought, by penetrating and overthrowing the liberal democratic order, they would show the world the superior power of fascism. They wanted to performatively and valiantly slay a mighty dragon, but when they opened the door to the beast’s lair they found only cobwebs. The myth of the dragon was the source of America’s power and in their hubris they neglected to check the cave wasn’t empty before they called the newspapers to witness its opening.
Where do they go from here? There are still some avenues Trump’s administration are exploring to find that missing dragon. Robert Kennedy Jr, the Trump official possibly the most invested in conspiracism as he is literal conspiracy royalty, is trying to revive Pizzagate of all goddamn things. Patel and Bongino are promising bombshells about January 6 and the rigging of the 2020 election against Trump… as soon as they get their story straight on what those revelations will be and how to properly gift wrap what will surely be another disappointment.
Here's the other side of this coin, though: As Trump vanquishes the illusion of America’s hidden strength, he needs to replace that fear with something else, and it turns out his uncreative solution to killing off decades of mystery and deep mythology is just to replace it with displays of dumb, brutal violence.
The American government under Trump is still frightening in the absence of a Cigarette Smoking Man yanking puppet strings in the darkness, but now it’s just frightening in a buses full of ICE agents pouring into your neighbourhood and sending your uncle to an El Salvador concentration camp for the rest of his life because his haircut is common among members of some foreign gang none of you have ever heard of kind of way. Where the government would once imply with a wink that they have spies in every European coffee shop, it now straight up says give us Greenland or we’ll nuke Copenhagen.
All things considered this might be one of the very few, albeit inadvertently, positive things to come out of the Trump administration—the withering of American conspiracy culture, the depletion of its power mythology, and its reduction to dumb direct threats. As an enjoyer of the once great American government thriller, I will miss it, but the greater picture is it’s probably better now that all the cards are on the table.
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What I like about S Peter Davis’ work is that none of this occurred to me and yet now I read it, it seems really helpful.
The problem is that conspiracy thought is now *core* to the philosophy of the GOP and MAGA. If you look at their rhetoric, *everything* has a conspiratorial air to it. Hell, Project 2025 was FULL of conspiracy, because it's now mainstream. (And the far right has been relying on conspiracy and paranoia since the 18th Century, but that's another story.) It's also part of the Evangelical/NAR influence, since the idea of the war of unseen forces of good and evil feeds really well into conspiracy. It's still part of the culture as well - look at the popularity of The SCP Foundation, which I love but I could see further fueling a Deep State mindset.