I have had the misfortune of seeing some recent Fox News coverage of the FEMA response to places like Asheville so far.

It is entirely, 100% absent of any mention that the reason FEMA is underfunded and isn’t doing more faster… is because congressional Republicans recently voted down a bill that would have given them more funding.

Its also full of … I mean, legitimate disaster victims, but they are incredibly sanctimonious and whiney about how they aren’t getting any help, and how somehow this us all Biden and the Democrats fault.

… I’ve spent a year homeless, seriously injured to the point of being crippled, and spent the last year living in a roach motel trying to figure out how to get any permanent housing or aid from any existing resources.

I have less than 0 sympathy for someone whining that they are just deserving of help, that it should literally fly out to them on a helicopter, that the government should pay to rebuild their house or rehome them, pay for all their lost property.

… Especially when said sanctimonious people almost certainly voted for people who they should have known would cut aid and resources to themselves, and would almost certainly be completely fine with someone like me just dying in agony.

It features heavily in the DX franchise because … well DX was written in Texas in the mid to late 90s, around the same time Alex Jones had a public access TV channel.

They quite literally could have just worked in half the conspiracies he mentioned, and that would have been about 80% of the more fantastical stuff.

I’d say they did a compelling job of weaving in batshit conspiracy stuff (it does make for dramatic storytelling, wild enemy types and locations) with … fairly prescient actual stuff around the unchecked progression of capitalism and technology.

I can’t believe I am saying this, but compared to a whole lot of modern media franchises, they actually did a lot of continuity work to make the FEMA thing make sense in HR as a plausible precursor to how much more widespread it was in the original.

I don’t think it really features in IW at all, as by that point the US government doesn’t… really exist, almost every where that still has a functional technological society is managed by a mixture of UN/WTO authorities and gigantic megacorporations.

Also I guess worth mentioning: DX accidentally contributed to conspiracy culture even further by ‘predicting’ 9/11.

When playtesting Liberty Island, enough people noticed that they’d cheaped out on the background worldbox/skybox by mirroring it, not including the Twin Towers, that they wrote it in a minor lore blurb that they’d been destroyed by terrorists in the early 21st century.

Game is set in 2052… but came out basically a few months to a year (depending on your region) before … 9/11 actually happened.

Agree to disagree. Back in the 90’s there were plenty of fun conspiracy theory shows on discovery and other channels that weren’t in the same vein as ancient aliens or other shows out today which are trying super hard to prove the theories as fact. They were campy and fun and not hosted by coke addled pseudoscience psychopaths with fake degrees.