“The ’90s was the decade…in which conspiracism…became a form of kitschy entertainment”

The ’90s was the decade of Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.,” “The X-Files” and late-night Roswell documentaries — the decade in which conspiracism, safely removed from the exigencies of the Cold War and domestic upheaval, became a form of kitschy entertainment. It was an antipolitics well suited to a cultural era that favored irony and disillusionment and put quotation marks around words like “believe.”

Charles Homans, “Secret History”, The New York Times Magazine (2 October 2016), 18.