Chris Carter sat down for an interview to talk about his show’s return in 2016. While there were a lot of things that he had to keep in mind while bringing the show back, an important part of the process was keeping in mind the political climate of the the time, which was late 2015-early 2016.
While talking about the manner in which the public has come to engage with the government at the time of the interview, Carter contrasted how his generation dealt the politics of his time, especially the Watergate Scandal, and how today there is a fear to speak out against institutions that people have become disillusioned with.
Chris Carter believed that the state should keeps secrets and whistleblowers should be protected
When Chris Carter asked about how the political and cultural landscape had changed since the show first aired, there was a lot to unpack. To begin with, Carter talked about how his generation received a culture shock when the Watergate Scandal was unearthed. Regarding that, he said:
We trusted our leaders, that they were making the right decisions and weren’t lying to us about a significant war, and then all of a sudden we find out that they were big cheaters and liars. It turned us all into—overnight, almost—skeptics and cynics.
Contrasting with the political climate of the day, Carter opened up about what was happening around the country at the time of the interview, from protests on campuses to calls for racial justice in institutes.
When specifically asked about Edward Snowden, he said:
It’s funny that the current government—which I find to be exemplary in its protections of our freedoms and liberties—wants to prosecute Edward Snowden. While I believe that there should be protection for whistleblowers, I also believe that there should be secrets to protect us because things cannot be accomplished in the intelligence community without maintaining a certain amount of secrecy.
Chris Carter’s views on the government’s willingness to prosecute Edward Snowden were mixed, in that the X-Files creator found it odd that there was such a clamp down on the freedoms of the whistleblower. However, there was also the fact that he believed the security of average citizens merited a certain level of secrecy for intelligence cells of the government.
Chris Carter found it odd that Edward Snowden’s revelations were taken in stride by the public
Edward Snowden made it known to the public that there was a lot of surveillance on the average citizen in the name of security, most of which people were not aware of. Chris Carter believes there was not enough of a reaction to the revelation. He said:
He sacrificed his freedom and his safety, and what it did was expose that we were being spied on and we were not being told about it. But the amazing thing to me is that we’ve taken it in stride, and there seems to be an apathy to it. We so freely give up our privacy generally now on the internet, that the idea that we could have people spying on us doesn’t seem to matter to people, even though that information could and might be used against you in the future.
Given that the internet has made it comfortable for a lot of people to share their personal information online, the revelation that they are being spied on by the government for their own safety might have just glossed over for most people. However, Chris Carter, while being firm in his stance, was sympathetic to Snowden’s crusade, which eventually led him to settle in Russia.
