Looking back 30 years is like looking back into a different world, except it's a world that looks very much the same. Like many of you, I suffer from the nightmare of streaming fatigue, where I'm exhausted by the never-ending litany of NetfliHuluPrime series about plucky transsexuals fighting against cisgender patriarchy or plucky female-identifying women who are rarely attractive fighting against cisgender patriarchy. As we've discussed before, there's a lot of woke garbage out there, at least until they make my new "People's Republic" novel, "Panama Red," into a series. That's why Irina and I started rewatching "The X-Files," and what we noticed was kind of remarkable.
You probably remember "The X-Files," the Fox TV show that ran for nine seasons, starting in the early '90s, about a couple of FBI agents before the FBI became a nightmare fascist Gestapo – something that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are in the process of fixing. The series follows intrepid special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (played iconically by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) as they investigate mysterious stuff, such as aliens, monsters, and psychic phenomena. The overall theme is that the government is secretly hiding knowledge of alien plots against mankind. It gets convoluted and silly, like most government conspiracy theories. I don't generally believe in government conspiracy theories because, after working for the government for 27 years, I don't think the government is competent to pull off a conspiracy of any significant magnitude. In any case, "The X-Files'" paranormal paranoia was refreshingly iconoclastic, particularly given the direction Hollywood would later take when COVID came along, and the brave, nonconformist truth-tellers of Tinseltown decided to rage for the machine, rather than against it.
What was remarkable about watching the show was how familiar, yet different, America was just 30 years ago. When I was a kid growing up in the late '70s and early '80s, if you went back 30 years, you were looking at the late '40s and early '50s, and that was a very different era. The cars looked very different. The buildings and signage looked very different. The people looked incredibly different, including wearing hats. Obviously, you also didn't see women or many minorities out in the workplace in jobs similar to white men. Let's not even get started on music.
But if you go back 30 years to the 1990s, it's remarkable how much hasn't changed. Yeah, the clothes are a little different. They look a little cheaper, and the suits are much more angular, like our heroes are wearing a collection of trapezoids and triangles. But it's not that different. If somebody from then walked into today, you might think that they had rummaged through the back recesses of their closet before getting dressed, but it wouldn't be anything like somebody from the early '50s dropping into the early '80s.
The cars are different, too, with many of the older styles still in evidence, but angles had begun to soften, and chrome and hubcaps had already begun to disappear. You notice these aren't late-model cars, and that no Priuses or Teslas are cruising around, but again, it's not that alien. The same with the architecture and signage. The art deco, atom-age futurism, and mid-century modern vibe was significantly different 30 years before I grew up. 1950 America looked very different than 1980 America, not least because of malls, fast food places, and interstates.
Moreover, the tools they use – aside from clunky desktop computers – are remarkably similar to today. After the first few episodes, Mulder starts packing a Glock. People still pack Glocks. In fact, a lot more people should pack Glocks, but that's a different column. Also, after the first few episodes, they've got cell phones. No, not iPhones, and they don't get on the Internet, but they're no longer fishing for dimes to drop into a payphone, as people used to have to do. However, the answering machines stand out as an anachronism. In short, the world of "The X-Files" does not look appreciably different from our world today. It's not exactly the same, but it's not so different that you immediately feel disoriented. But that's in the setting and the sets. In another way, it looks completely different.
Yes, there's existential dread in "The X-Files," but that's part of the story about weird aliens invading Earth. What we don't see is the existential dread we experienced today about whether our society is on the verge of collapse from the corruption, incompetence, and self-loathing of our garbage ruling class. The show takes place in the world before a significant part of our ruling class decided that we are unworthy of continued existence, and that we needed to destroy ourselves through climate hoax panic, the elimination of our borders, and self-hating DEI nonsense that places the priorities of criminals, deviants, and perverts above normal people.
The workplaces you see in the show are not like the ones you see today. Men and women work together just fine. They even sometimes like each other and joke with each other. There's no fear of some harpy from HR coming down to chastise them because someone made a joke or happened to display criminal heterosexuality. And there's diversity, too, but the kind of diversity we used to have where somebody comes along and he's black, and you treat him like a decent person if you're white, and he acts like a decent person if he's black. No one cares. It's not an issue. And that's how it was for those of us who were born in the '60s. We didn't care. But now all you do is care. And you can feel tension. We thought we were past all this racial and sexual stuff, but no, the race and gender hustlers had to make it a thing, and now it's all people talk about.
Oh, and no men are pretending to be women. There is one episode about someone who changes his/her gender, and he/she is appropriately treated as a freak. The alternative sexuality stuff that's so important now didn't even exist then. If someone called themselves "non-binary" or stated their pronouns, they'd be put in a loony bin. There are not even any sassy gay friends who are smarter and more clever and better dressed than the stuffy white guys – OK, the better dressed stereotype may be true, but you know what I mean. And when somebody showed up with a stud of metal poking through their skin, you knew it was a weirdo, and you better put your hand on the grip of your Glock in case it made a sudden move.
It's clear that the mid-1990s were the last normal times. In the late '90s, Bill Clinton bulldozed the norms and stayed in office despite perjury and perversions that would have previously required his resignation. In 2000, we had the Democrats try to steal the election – they've never forgiven America or us for stopping them from taking it for Al Gore. And then in 2001, you had 9/11. We had the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 Wall Street collapse, the nightmare of Obama and his hideous race-hustling, then the Trump counterrevolution, COVID, and Trump 2.0. Things have gotten worse and worse, even as the Trump movement has temporarily held back the deluge.
People have gotten angrier and meaner. Right now, Democrats are promising to prosecute Republicans for the crime of enacting Republican policies after winning an election. It's like they're trying to set up the civil war and the splitting apart of the United States depicted in my "Panama Red" book. That's the source of today's existential dread – are we even going to exist as a nation in 30 years? Are we even going to make it another ten?
It's nice to take a drive down memory lane in a 1993 Ford Taurus and remember America before it went completely crazy a quarter century ago. Townhall VIP members skew a little older than average, by my estimation, so a lot of us were there. A lot of us came of age then. We know what normal looks like. We know what right looks like. And what we have today isn't it.
Now, that's bad for us, but imagine yourself as a 30-year-old. You've never been conscious when America wasn't breaking or broken. You don't know what it's like for America to be normal, to be strong and prosperous, where every election doesn't put your freedom, and maybe even your life, at stake. The 1996 presidential election between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole was the least consequential election of the last century. Both of them agreed on basic things. Criminals were bad. You should not be on welfare. America is good. Today, Democrats dispute all of that. Yeah, there were disagreements back then, but you weren't seeing people shot to death, or nearly shot to death, because they dared oppose the ruling classes' prerogatives. You weren't seeing them try to lock the president up for the rest of his life for the crime of beating a Democrat. And you weren't seeing the country flooded with illegal aliens with the specific intent of diluting the demographics of the people who built and defended this country so that Democrats could win elections.
Lately, conservatism hasn't been about conserving. It's been about counterrevolution against the nightmare the Left has brought upon our country. Sometimes, counterrevolutionaries lack direction. They're just opposed to the status quo. But I'm thinking maybe we counterrevolutionaries need an objective, and that objective should be to make America the '90s again.
Read Kurt Schlichter's JUST RELEASED new bestseller in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic conservative action novel series, Panama Red, and follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter.
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