Over at Vulture, Inkoo Kang’s written an interesting essay about how the rise of Fox News, the Tea Party, and Truthiness ruined The X-Files for her. She loved the show as the teen, as did I, but she argues—persuasively, I think—that the show’s paranoia and skepticism of mainstream science plays a little differently now, when anti-government paranoia and science denialism are real, and not at all entertaining.

The X-Files generally worked by establishing a strange phenomenon and then pitting its two leads against each other to explain it. Mulder was the paranoid and the believer, the one who mistrusted the establishment even as he was certain that the paranormal was real; Scully, the hard-eyed rationalist who rained on his parade. Scully’s explanations were more plausible, but the audience always sided with Mulder—he was our nerd-hero, and besides, he usually turned out to be right.

But is Mulder really a hero? In 2013, he seems more like a dangerous kook, that guy on the bus who’s always telling you that 9/11 was an inside job, that Obama’s a Kenyan-born Muslim; that science skeptic who doubts the truth of evolution, the urgency of climate change, the efficacy of vaccines.

Here’s Kang:

In the twenty years since the show’s premiere, extremism — the rejection of mainstream news, science, and politics — has become its own institution. With the aid of the Internet, birthers, truthers, and vaccine skeptics have joined the UFO believers in establishing their own insular networks of news outlets, social gatherings, political activism. As if the alien bounty hunters with the Icepick of Death had returned to Earth, the Mulders have proliferated in number and influence; they now peddle blogs and endorsement deals and segments on The Dr. Oz Show. Glenn Beck is just another Mulder with a chalkboard, crocodiletears, and a get-rich scheme.