Spooky Cops From Buffy to The X-Files Copaganda Episode 7

If there's something strange in your neighborhood, who are you going to call? Slayer. Look it up. Slayer. Comma. The. There are a lot of different kinds of cops on TV. You've got your gritty cops, your silly cops, your conservative cops, your liberal cops, your quirky cops, your serial killer cops, your serial killer serial killer cops. And for decades, television has been home to shows that feature investigations into supernatural or paranormal crimes. In other words, spooky cops. T.M. Spooky? Do you think I'm spooky? The genre really took off in the 1990s with the premieres of Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, I know what you're thinking. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not really a cop show. Just hold your horses. We'll get there, okay? You're two minutes into a 45-minute video. You can let it breathe a little. These shows told the stories of heroes investigating crime through the lens of the supernatural, but they often bucked against institutions. Agent Dale Cooper is certainly not your average FBI agent. Diane, it's 117 PM. I have just concluded my second meditation of the day in lieu of sleep. Spooky Fox Mulder has been all but banished to the basement when we first meet him in The X-Files. So who did you take off to get stuck with this detail, Scully? Buffy exists outside traditional law enforcement entirely, covertly policing the portal between hell and earth. And then, something strange started to happen. It wasn't all at once, but little by little, the genre became more and more appropriated by the establishment. By the 2000s, The X-Files had become Fringe, a show about the FBI's formalized investigation into the paranormal. Buffy became Supernatural, and then that became a show like Grimm, which ran for six seasons and depicted a police officer as the only person able to see the evil monsters living among us. So, what happened? How did these outcasts become cops? And how did that change totally warp our view of the police? Welcome to Copaganda, a series of videos exploring the portrayal of the police on television and how that portrayal has shaped our understanding of who the police are and who they should be. We've covered how the LAPD helped start the cop show genre by providing creative input and censorship on Dragnet, before breaking down Blue Bloods, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Wire, The Shield, and even the biggest TV series of all time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, the MCU is a TV series, I am not giving up this fight. But today, but today is not about the MCU. For once, a video on the internet is not about Marvel. Today, after months of teasing, we're finally going to be talking about Spooky Cops. TM, skip intro. Now there are tons of cop shows that are spooky, but not all of them are spooky cop shows, TM. Here are the three conventions I came up with. 1. Episodes focus on investigators looking into the supernatural, either from explicit cops like in The X-Files or from some kind of supernatural law enforcement, like Supernatural or Buffy. They're expecting to find something supernatural, and they do. 2. There's a other world, an underground world of evil that has been under our noses this whole time, hiding in plain sight. And 3. The stakes to the crime being investigated are much higher than normal cop shows, often apocalyptic in nature. So, True Detective and Hannibal are definitely spooky shows about cops, but they aren't spooky cop shows, because there isn't anything actually supernatural about the crimes they're investigating. Lucifer is a show about Satan solving murders, but the murders are rather run-of-the-mill, so that's out too. Don't worry, we'll still talk about Lucifer and True Detective in another video, just not this one. I'm also going to save Twin Peaks for later, because I'm just one person, give me a break, okay? Now, even as I've whittled out some cop shows that are spooky, there are a lot of spooky cop shows that I am not going to be able to cover because they're actually a metric f**ked. We have Penny Dreadfill, Constantine, The Irregulars, Hellstrom, and pretty much everything that was on the sci-fi network in the 2010s. But hopefully, this video will help explain those shows at least just a little. If you've been watching this series, first of all, thank you. Don't forget to share, like, and subscribe. But if you've been watching this series, you can probably already notice a pretty obvious pro-police message at work here. By grafting an explicit good and evil onto the police procedural, some of these shows end up equating criminals to the demonic and the police to the angelic, which can be obviously pretty problematic. But I actually want to push past that surface level. I want to look at the shift from outsiders to insiders, why it happened, and how that changed the underlying messages about the police. Because over time, and especially in the fallout of 9-11, these shows have become co-opted by more traditional systems of policing, and the result has been a far deeper and more insidious form of copaganda. I'm going to do my best to keep spoilers to a minimum for Buffy, because a lot of people love Buffy. But the rest of these shows have either been around for decades, or to be honest, you're not going to watch Grimm, and nor should you. It's very bad. It's seriously challenging Blue Bloods for most pro-police show I've ever seen. With that out of the way, I'm Jackson, and this is Copaganda. Now in my mind, there are two distinct kinds of spooky cop show, TM. Those rooted in sci-fi, and those rooted in fantasy. While they both hold firm to the three conventions I laid out earlier, it's easier to see how the genre has morphed over time if we compare sci-fi to sci-fi and fantasy to fantasy. The X-Files premiered in 1993, and to date has accumulated 11 seasons, 218 episodes, and two feature films. The show focuses on the X-Files, a division of the FBI focused on unexplained phenomena. The division is made up of a grand total of two agents, Fox, Spooky Mulder, and Dana Scully. Mulder is the true believer. His sister was abducted by aliens when he was a child, and he's become convinced of a vast government-wide conspiracy to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial life. Scully is the skeptic, sent to the X-Files to throw some cold water on Mulder's hot takes with an old-fashioned dose of science and reason. When Mulder and Scully aren't dealing with an unimaginable amount of sexual tension, they travel around the country investigating the occult, the paranormal, and the extraterrestrial. Despite being subjected to the Friday night death slot, 9pm on Friday nights when all the cool kids are out and about and not watching TV, The X-Files gained a steady following. And when it was finally given primetime real estate on Sunday nights in season 4, the show exploded in popularity. At its peak, nearly 20 million Americans tuned in every week. All of this is to say, The X-Files was a bona fide hit, somewhat surprisingly, because the show was pretty anti-establishment in its politics from the very beginning. Turns out, Mulder is 100% correct about a government-wide conspiracy to cover up the existence of aliens and alien technology, something that's revealed at the end of the pilot episode when the unnamed cigarette-smoking man hides away evidence in a covert facility. The tenth episode of the series ends with a pretty long rant where Mulder takes aim at his superiors and tells them how their authority cannot overwrite the truth. How can I disprove lies that are stamped with an official seal? That will be all, Mr. Mulder. You can deny all the things I've seen, all the things I've discovered, but not for much longer. Because too many others know what's happening out there. And no one, no government agency has jurisdiction over the truth. There are lots of theories as to why government distrust was so popular in the 90s, and why The X-Files resonated. Carter, like many viewers, came of age in the 70s, a time in which government lies were exposed in the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal. It's kind of hard to miss the influence of Watergate in particular, when Mulder has an informant in the first season of the show named Deep Throat. But my favorite quote explaining the success of The X-Files comes from lead actor David Duchovny himself. I think The X-Files is very 90s, because everything is left in doubt. There's no closure, no answers. Obviously it's tapping into something the nation wants. I think it has to do with religious stirrings, a kind of new age yearning for an alternate reality in the search of some kind of extrasensory god. Either that, or the Fox network has an amazing marketing department. The heroes of The X-Files are cops, sure, but they're flipping the script. Instead of a few bad apples in a mostly good bunch, The X-Files depicts a few good apples in a mostly rotten bunch. And the good apples are those uncovering the bad. Mulder and Scully are actually investigating systems of power. They're looking at the government itself. It's not a coincidence that one of the show's most memorable taglines was, trust no one. Fast forward to 2008, and there is a new sci-fi spooky cop show, TM, that looks a hell of a lot different. Fringe premiered in 2008, and ran for 5 seasons and 100 episodes on the same network as The X-Files, Fox. Despite coming from J.J. Abrams while he was writing The Lost Wave, despite doing next to no work on that show other than directing the pilot and leaving Damon Lindelof out to dry, Fringe still boasted an average of 10 million viewers in its first season, and held onto a pretty loyal fanbase. It didn't really suffer much of a fall off in viewership once it was banished to the Friday night death slot for both seasons 4 and 5. Like The X-Files, Fringe follows a paranormal division of the FBI, this time called the Fringe Division, which is based in Boston for some reason? The show follows Agent Olivia Dunham, the FBI agent placed in charge of the division and her scientist consultants, a father-son duo named Walter and Peter Bishop. Also, like The X-Files, the show follows a monster-of-the-week formula, and ALSO like The X-Files, it sports an increasingly serialized story that explains why so much weird stuff is happening in the first place. So, on the one hand, we have the 90s sci-fi spooky cop Tenpole, a very anti-establishment, distrusting show. And now, we have Fringe, a show where the FBI is good, actually. They're covering up weird stuff, but it's for our own good. They're on the case. So, what changed? Well, 9-11 and the War on Terror happened. Hey Jackson, big fan of the channel, first time calling in. Just wanted to say, you know, saying 9-11 influenced a TV show is not groundbreaking. It was kind of a big deal for everyone. Respectfully, what's your point? Thank you for your question? Yeah, I know it's not exactly a hot take to say 9-11 changed things, like, duh. But I do think that it's worth thinking about how exactly changes in public consciousness due to September 11th impacted this specific genre so essentially. There are two major factors that make spooky cop shows a particularly sensitive genre to the fallout of 9-11. The first is the national rally around the police and government. Almost overnight, George W. Bush's approval ratings vaulted from 51% to 90%, the highest Gallup has ever measured. While confidence in the police had been falling throughout the last half of the 90s, due in part to a number of high-profile scandals like the Rampart scandal we talked about in our episode on The Shield, it climbed in the few years after 9-11, before reaching an all-time high in 2004. As late as 2016, Pew Research found that Americans ranked the response to September 11th as the time they felt most proud of their country. So this makes cop shows a fertile ground for 9-11, but a more important factor for spooky cop shows is that otherworld. You see, spooky cop shows are often built on a worldview that attributes so much of the chaos in our world to a secret otherworld of evil. Grizzly murder? Vampires. Bank robbery? Demons. Kidnapping? Aliens. 9-11 freaked every American the freak out because a terrorist could be anywhere, at any time. It's kind of hard to overstate the influence 9-11 and the War on Terror had on fringe, especially in its first season. The pilot episode introduces us to the world of fringe science, with an attack on a plane associated with Logan Airport in Boston. There's a trip to Baghdad to meet Peter for the first time. There are references to the Patriot Act, and the whole thing is painted as not just terrorism, but as part of a larger conspiracy of attacks. And if that doesn't convince you of the 9-11 connection, let me point you to Exhibit B. The finale of the first season brings Olivia to a parallel universe, a fact that's made clear when we zoom out of the room she's in to find out that it's in the World Trade Center. The influences of the War on Terror go a lot deeper than surface-level references to national trauma, especially when we compare the show to The X-Files. The other world of The X-Files was being covered up by the government, but on fringe, the government is the only thing protecting us from that sinister evil. Olivia and her superior broils are entrenched in the FBI, and the Bureau is focused on investigating what they call the Pattern, a series of paranormal events later revealed to be a consequence of that pesky parallel universe and the thinning membrane between our world and that one. But don't worry, the FBI's got this. Nearly every establishing shot of the FBI headquarters is a helicopter shot of this building, the John Hancock Building. Now, I lived in Boston for a long time. The Hancock Building is not an FBI headquarters. It's actually just a corporate office building for Hancock Insurance, but I can see why the show used it for its Boston base. Because of zoning laws in Boston to protect its iconic skyline that literally nobody cares about, it has remained exceptionally taller than any other building in the surrounding area. This gives the FBI and fringe the illusion of control. They're towering over the city, a watchful eye protecting everyone. But what I find even more interesting is how the show depicts a government agency that feels powerless in the face of unknowable threats. In the season two premiere, with the Fringe Division's funding being threatened by Congress, Peter and Broyles voice their frustration in their inability to actually protect anyone. We'd sit around and wait for somebody to die some grisly, macabre death, or for the entire fabric of the universe to come shredding apart. We were the cleanup crew. At the end of the episode, Peter finds some leverage to keep the Fringe Division funded, and in a speech mirroring how we took the fight to terror in the 2000s, declares that they're going to be proactive now. We're done reacting. We're not gonna be too late anymore. After all, somebody's gotta save their asses, right? The threats in Fringe are consistently end-of-the-worldy. The first season is about combating ZFT, an international bioterrorism organization. The second and third seasons confront the parallel universe and the impending collapse of the multiverse, and there's some even funkier time extinction stuff happening by the end of the series. Fringe comes off like an inverted reflection of the X-Files. Yes, there are hidden threats, and they're being investigated by FBI agents, but in one show, the threats are taken on by the government, and in the other, the government is the threat. It's not hard to see how a show starring the FBI and the X-Files would become explicitly more pro-cop in the wake of 9-11, but what about something a little less explicitly cop? What about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? We've looked at sci-fi spooky cops, so now let's turn our attention to the OG TV fantasy spooky cop, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered in 1997 and ran for seven seasons and 144 episodes. The show follows Buffy Summers, a high school teenager who happens to be a member of the band Slayer, one of the big four of thrash metal. SLAYER! Um, I'm seeing now that I might have gotten my notes mixed up and, uh, I have the wrong Slayer. Spike looks like he could be into Slayer though. The band, not Buffy. I mean, he's into Buffy too, but this joke has really turned into quite the tangent. Buffy patrols the Hellmouth in the town of Sunnydale, the portal between the underworld and the human world, with supernatural strength and ability, fighting against vampires, demons, and the general forces of badness. Into each generation, a Slayer is born. One girl in all the world, a chosen one, one born with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil blah I've heard it, okay? Buffy the Vampire Slayer is at its best when it's a coming-of-age metaphor, paralleling the perils of growing up alongside the dangers of the underworld. You're behaving remarkably immaturely. You know why? I am immature. I'm a teen, I've yet to mature. But I want to focus on the fighting evil bit, because the Slayer's job description does read pretty similarly to that of the police, with a little extra destiny thrown in there. But on Buffy, the Slayer is distinctly separate from the police. Throughout the series, the police are treated as people who cannot realistically be turned to. Uh, this may be the dumb question, but shouldn't we call the police? And their believers, of course. And dismissal is kind of a best-case scenario. Sometimes, the police are explicitly mocked. Laugh now, missy, they assigned you to the booth for law enforcement professionals. As in police? As in polyester, donuts, and brutality. Other times, they are active obstacles. That's enough. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can- And still other times, they are explicitly the enemy. In fact, Buffy as a whole is even more anti-establishment than the X-Files. For the first three seasons of the show, the upper ranks of the police are aware of Sunnydale's status as a hellmouth, and are willfully manipulating the truth. So? You want the usual story? Gang-related? PCP? What you have in mind? The truth? The police aren't the only government institution to get staked by Buffy, though. The big bad of the third season is Mayor Wilkins himself, and the fourth season deals with the Initiative, a covert government group tasked with capturing and researching demons for military purposes. Hey Jackson, uh, loving the video so far, just wanted to ask you, uh, why are we talking about Buffy if it's so anti-cop instead of its spinoff, Angel, which was literally about a private investigator? Thank- thanks again for your question. Um, the first answer is that I like Buffy more. Actually, when I was researching this, I thought it was going to be kind of hard to pivot into Buffy, but then I read the work of Anthony H. Cordesman. Who's that, you ask? Well, he was the chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, considered the number one American foreign policy think tank. CSIS boasts some pretty famous alumni, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and current Secretary of State Tony Blinken. So, CSIS is a pretty big deal, and back in 2001, they published an article by Anthony Cordesman called Biological Warfare and the Buffy Paradigm, which, and I know this sounds like a joke, but it's not, argues that we should turn to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to face the threat of bioterrorism. I'm just imagining, like, the State Department binging Seasons of Buffy. Do you think they're Team Angel or Team Spike? You see, in the fallout of 9-11, the phrase, a failure of imagination, became pretty popular. Everyone was looking at each other, saying, hey, how could this happen? How did we not catch this? I mean, wasn't this the plot of the pilot episode of the X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunman? I guess now is as good a time as ever to tell you that a spin-off of the X-Files called The Lone Gunman predicted the plot to hijack a plane departing from Boston with the intent to crash it into the World Trade Center in its pilot episode, which aired six months prior to 9-11. It's also worth noting that the perpetrators on that show were rogue government actors. There's no real great time to bring that up, but it also felt really weird to talk about the X-Files and 9-11 and not bring up The Lone Gunman. So, I don't have any further notes, but there you go. Hortisman argued that in a world where threats are so uncertain, we should turn to a show where the threats are similarly unknowable. It's... an idea. In his completely batshit article, he laid out a number of characteristics as part of his Buffy Paradigm, and it should surprise nobody that a number of these elements are either just laughably wrong or betray a total lack of understanding about what the nature of television is. There are too many to go through all of them, but here are two of my favorites. Arcane knowledge is always inadequate and fails to predict, detect, and properly characterize the threat. Yeah, cause we'd never see Buffy and her friends researching old texts and looking for answers. No success, no matter how important at the time, ever eliminates the risk of future problems. Uh, yeah dude, we have a season of television to fill! Isn't it great to know that Hortisman is still in his position at the number one American foreign policy think tank? We can see the trend of this line of thinking in the shows that followed in the legacy of Buffy. Supernatural, somehow the most prolific show I'm going to mention in this video, premiered in 2005 and ran for 15 seasons and 327 episodes. Is that right? 327 episodes? Jesus f***ing Christ. The show follows the Winchester brothers, Dean and Sam. I mean, Sammy. A team of demon-hunting outlaws. The show started as a revenge story with Dean and Sam looking to catch the demon who killed their mother, but it quickly spiraled into something far more grandiose. The brothers fought angels and leviathans and Lucifer and Death himself and the literal embodiment of darkness. Like Buffy, Supernatural is fairly dismissive of the police. Dean and Sammy are easily able to con the police with fake IDs and sheriff badges. When they are arrested, it's little more than an inconvenience. You think you guys invented lying to the cops? While the Winchesters operate outside the law, they still behave as cops. In her excellent piece from last year, Supernatural is the best cop show that's not about cops, Gabrielle Bruni notes that while Dean and Sam don't wear real uniforms, they still behave like f***ing cops. They study corpses with medical examiners. They collect evidence. They interview witnesses. Episodes just tend to end with bad guys succumbing to wooden stakes and silver bullets rather than being led away in handcuffs. Still, while Supernatural seems more or less resistant to the post-9-11 rallying around the police, it is not immune to the way the attacks warped other worlds. Buffy works with a number of demons and vampires. Her main two love interests in the show are vampires and Angel and Spike, which immediately blurs the lines between good and evil. Meanwhile, Supernatural offers a pretty black-and-white worldview. The entire plot hinges around biblical characters like angels and demons. Demons are always bad. Even when the Winchesters worked with the demon Ruby in seasons 3 and 4, it is revealed that she was really bad all along. Angels and gods on Supernatural can be bad too. Really everything is kind of bad on Supernatural except Dean and Sam and most of the time, Cas. They're tempted from time to time by power, but they kind of always end up on the right side of things because, you know, they're cops. Demons and baddies are much harder to detect on Supernatural than Buffy as well. While vampires can hide amongst the population, there are some telltale signs, and Buffy has a pretty good vamp radar. Other demons are usually pretty obviously demonic, fighting Buffy in large prosthetic costumes. The demons on Supernatural, however, reside inside human vessels and look exactly like anybody. Fast forward to 2011, and we have the premiere of Grimm, which combined the idea that the enemy is right under our noses with the police and a dash of veiled xenophobia. Grimm ran for six seasons and 123 episodes on NBC and tells the story of Nick Burkhardt, a police detective who discovers that he's descended from the Brothers Grimm, or they're not actually the Brothers Grimm, it's just like they're the people. It's way too complicated and nobody who's watching this cares, I'm positive. Grimms are the only humans who can detect the presence of these animal-based monsters called Vessim. Yeah, it's exactly as bad as it sounds. There once was a man who lived a life so strange it had to be true. Only he could see what no one else can. The darkness inside. The real monster within. And he's the one who must stop them. This is his calling. This is his duty. This is the life of a Grimm. It is easily the most straight-up copycanda show I've covered since Blue Bloods. Grimm has all of the hallmarks of blatant pro-police propaganda. Remember who you are. Trust your instincts. And nothing else. There are laugh lines about skirting warrants and due process. Don't you need a warrant for that? You're right. You open it. Oh. Okay. There's some good old-fashioned blue wall of silence stuff going on. You don't want to tell me about it, it's okay. I just want you to know I trust you. And there are a lot of casual fatal police shootings, like an alarmingly high number. There's even a scene in the second season where Nick shows up as a detective to investigate a quadruple homicide that we saw him commit the episode earlier when he beat a bunch of vessen to death with a bat. What do you want to do? You want to arrest them or what? Or what? Okay then. But aside from all of that, Nick is the only person who can see the vessen, the criminals, for the monsters they really are. Whereas Supernatural's demons are hard for anyone to recognize, it is a single cop who is literally the only person who has the power to see them on Grimm, and it's his job to hunt down these monsters. I thought he was gonna kill me. Why? He's a Grimm. It's what they do. Of course, the ability to see the evil lurking beneath us, combined with the police, isn't an accident. Making Nick an explicit cop who investigates homicides makes the metaphor between vessen and criminals even more direct. From the jump, the vessen are portrayed as inherently evil. The pilot episode draws a pretty strong parallel between neighborhood pedophiles and the big bad wolf. Called a blootbot on this show because everything is vaguely German for some reason. How many of you blootbats are there? First off, the plural is blootbotting. That's not to say that all vessen are evil. I mean, yeah, they do make Hitler a vessen in the show's opening credits, but that's not to say that all vessen are evil, just that they're kind of naturally evil. Nick's right-hand man is Monroe, who describes himself as a reformed blootbot. How do I stay good? Through a strict regimen of diet, drugs, and pilates. I'm a reformed blootbot. There are other nice vessen, usually ones based on prey animals like deer or sheep, but the language used to describe Nick's abilities is always framed as an ability to see latent evil. A grim is someone who can see into the heart of darkness. Someone who sees things other people don't understand. Like, I know the show tells us that not all vessen are bad, but if the only person who can see them is someone who can see into the heart of darkness, I'm not sure we're leaving a lot of room for interpretation here. For the most part, vessen are to be carefully watched. The writers of the show seem to feel that this is an uncomfortable dynamic, so they go to great lengths to show how much worse Nick could be. In the second season episode, The Hour of Death, Monroe tells him about a special genocidal maniac sect of the grims. Basically, death squads of grims would roam the countryside, lopping off heads, gouging out eyes, cutting off limbs, testicles, and then marking their kills with established under brand. Did you say testicles? See, the policing of an evil subspecies of human could be a lot worse. Hashtag not all grims. Hashtag grim lives matter. But this begs the question, could we say the same thing about Buffy and their vampires and demons, that they're kind of guilty until proven innocent? Yeah. Kind of, yeah. Angel and Spike are given spiritual or technological reasons to not be so evil, but the Slayer isn't a uniformed police officer like Nick. Demons aren't stand-ins for criminals, and they aren't living amongst us so much as they peek out from the underworld from time to time. And I think those distinctions make a difference. That and the fact that Buffy really doesn't want to be a cop. Well, now there's a thought. Have you ever considered law enforcement? And it's that kind of turning the police against an amped-up other that highlights how 9-11 influenced the spooky cop show genre. Yes, secret worlds existed before on the genre. And yes, our heroes policed those secret worlds. The difference is that by changing our heroes from outsiders to formal police, we conflate the other with criminal. And we assume that our police are up to the task of handling existential threats like demons and paranormal monstrosities. And here's the thing. There actually is an existential threat facing us today. And the police, they are preparing for it. Just not in the way that you'd want. Modern spooky cop shows, TM, tell us about a police force that is well-suited to deal with threats it doesn't yet understand, and that they're great at averting the apocalypse. An even more recent example of this is HBO's The Outsider, in which some small-town police are pitted against a serial killer monster. Like so many of these more recent shows, its monster was someone who could look like anybody, and use that disguise to prey on and eat children. Over the course of the show, we watch the detectives deduce the nature and abilities of this logic-defying monster and formulate a plan to defeat it. They handle that sh**. Of course, we know that the police are not equipped to handle a wide variety of problems. We know that police are often ill-equipped to handle domestic violence and mental health crises. Since 2015, nearly a quarter of all people killed by the police have had a known mental illness. Okay, so there are definitely things we can take off the police's plate. But what about that big stuff? What about that sinister, evil, apocalyptic, end-of-the-world type stuff? Sir Giles, got anything that could make this day any worse? How about the end of the world? Knew I could count on you. That's the stuff we need cops for, right? Stop me if you've heard this before, but... there's an impending climate catastrophe. In May, a United Nations report predicted a 90% chance that one of the next five years will be the hottest on record and a 40% chance that that year will already be creeping into the danger zone laid out by the Paris Climate Accords. Look, I'm not going to sit here and prove that climate change is real. There are lots of resources for that on the internet. We all know it's here. But what's interesting about climate change is that it's exactly the kind of existential threat to humanity that spooky cop shows, TM, depict. Its impact is not all that different from a parallel universe collision on Fringe, or from the Hellmouth being opened, or Lucifer being returned to form. But we have cops on the beat. Spooky cops, right? Right? After all, Joe Biden made climate change a national security priority. The military, law enforcement, they're taking this very seriously. So let's look at what they're going to do. Maybe that'll make me feel better. Well, the National Defense Authorization Act gives us a pretty good place to start. The $738 billion funding act creates a Climate Security Advisory Council and defines climate security priorities as, quote, national security infrastructure, and, quote, the security of allies and partners of the United States, and warns of, quote, ongoing or potential political violence, including unrest, rioting, guerrilla warfare, insurgency, terrorism, rebellion, revolution, civil war, and interstate war. Huh. Very little about actual climate change prevention. It's almost like making it a national security threat was not gonna help. Or, in the words of journalist Adam Johnson over on the podcast Citations Needed, They are talking about climate change as a risk to U.S. hegemony and economic order of our elites. They do not view it as something that can be solved or should be solved, per se, maybe mitigated, perhaps. But it's something that needs to pump more money into our security state, into the DHS, into ICE, into police departments, into National Guard units, to protect us against the pending chaos that this climate crisis will cause. Chief among the concerns surrounding the climate crisis are the influx of migrants and climate refugees. Not in a, we're worried about how these people will have their lives ruined, but more in a semi-sonic kind of way. According to the United Nations, there will be as many as 200 million climate-displaced people worldwide by 2050, and we're already starting to see the effects at the border today. Remember that migrant caravan that Republicans were freaking out about back in 2018, or the current border crisis that we're dealing with? Migrant caravans like that often come from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and the discourse around them often centers around how these refugees are fleeing violence. But according to Robert Albro, a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, the focus on violence is eclipsing the big picture, which is that people are saying that they are moving because of some version of food insecurity. That makes sense. About a third of all employment in Central America is tied to agriculture, and climate change is causing an increase in crop failures. American law enforcement is engaged in what author Christian Parenti called the politics of the armed lifeboat. The idea that countries with the resources, ability, and importantly, responsibility to tackle climate change are instead using those resources and abilities to protect elites and shoot down anyone else who wants to join the lifeboat. I want to emphasize that the goal of our work is to help Guatemalans find hope at home. At the same time, I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border. Do not come. A 2003 report from the Pentagon said, and I f***ing quote, the United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency. Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted, starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands, an especially severe problem, Mexico, and South America. In the past 12 years, the annual budgets for border patrol and ICE have nearly doubled. Joe Biden has yet to consider special protections for climate refugees who are currently excluded from a narrow definition. And what's more, the Air Force and Department of Homeland Security are running exercises to quote, effectively interdict and repatriate migrants at sea who are attempting to enter the United States during a hypothetical humanitarian crisis like a hurricane in the Caribbean. Oh, geez, yeah, that sounds really awful. But, um, I guess my question is, is that really on us? Like, what can we really be expected to do? Like, that's not really any of our business, right? Like, is it on Americans to fix the world? Well, I'd say that there's a pretty big difference between that and actively fighting refugees. When we hear that the police are on the case, we kind of just assume that the problem is being handled. Because in part, spooky cops are really good at dealing with existential crises like this. If you don't care about non-Americans, first of all, gross. But here are some local examples of how police and law enforcement address climate change and environmental disaster. Let's look at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Local police worked closely with the private security firm and military contractor, TigerSwan, to crush protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, and sound and water cannons in freezing temperatures to protect oil money. Internal TigerSwan memos even compared protesters to, quote, jihadist fighters. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, since 2016, over 226 bills have been introduced across the United States with the sole purpose of suppressing protest. As Laura Seichen and Lindsey Koshkarian write in their report, Quote, In the 1930s, when rampant drought wrecked the United States farming industry and economy, a number of states enforced their borders with law enforcement. The LAPD created a, quote, bum blockade on the border of Arizona. Colorado declared martial law to, quote, repel aliens. And Florida instituted, quote, a poverty quarantine. This is the insidious downside to the change in spooky cop shows. We're led to believe from these shows that the police, the government, the military, they can protect us. They're on top of existential problems like climate change. But under control just really means containing dissent and protecting fossil fuel companies that drive climate change in the first place. The police are focused on maintaining the status quo and preparing for that new reality in which they'll punish more people. Cops aren't trying to prevent the apocalypse. They're preparing for life in it. When we talk about how our media is pro-police, we're not just talking about when a show shrugs off police brutality or when it shows hyper-competent strike teams or when it equates racial minorities and criminals. Compaganda is an uncritical, pro-police message. And in this case, one that proposes an ever-expanding budget and scope for our policing institutions. What's that? We have a new problem. Let's throw the police or the military or the FBI at it. And in the process, let's make sure that we give them more money. You might think that it's weird to focus on climate change when so much of the defund the police movement has been about police brutality and racial justice. But these are not separate issues. We know that continued stress responses to threats like police brutality or air pollution can cause lasting strain on the human body. And in our society, these are often costs carried by the poor, who are disproportionately racial minorities. In the words of Lester Freeman, All the pieces matter. The best spooky cop shows always complicated the binary of good and evil. Buffy's Slayer understudy turns to the dark side and universally accepted institutions like government, the police, the military, and even academia are undercut. The X-Files was constantly about Mulder and Scully, two cops discovering that the call was coming from inside the house. But more recently, Fringe has the FBI solving issues from pure others like terrorists and alternate universe and the observers. Supernatural paints a black and white worldview and Grimm makes things even more basic by making good equal cops. There's something disturbing about seeing a genre that used to be defined by Buffy, a vigilante fighting others turn into cops fighting others. The genre has always been about demonizing enemies, but now those enemies are enemies of the police. They're criminals. And look, I understand the allure. Spooky cop shows, TM, help us make sense of a chaotic world. They boil it down into good and evil and provide a hidden secret reason for all the bad things we see. You see, crime isn't a product of complicated socioeconomic systems. It's actually that all of the criminals are demons. Thank God we have cops on the beat stopping them from overthrowing society. But I don't think that's something we should expect the police to do, because when we do, it turns out that they're not so focused on prevention, but instead on trying to make it someone else's problem. Now, when I put together big videos like this one or the MCU episode, I end up having to cut a lot of stuff out. Part of being a YouTuber is trying to keep stuff concise and get to the point and, you know, keeping people's attention. But I've decided to put a longer uncut version of this video up on Nebula, which is a streaming service created by myself and other video essayists and creative educational YouTubers. Their creators don't have to worry about demonetization or the algorithm, which is great for this kind of video especially, because any clip over a certain length gets flagged. And if you were watching this video on Nebula, you wouldn't be listening to this ad. You'd be watching a deep dive into the history of occult detective fiction and seeing this awesome Scooby-Doo Supernatural crossover clip. I mean, it's no accident that Buffy calls her friends the Scoobies or that Dean Winchester reveres Mystery Inc. That's the freaking Scooby gang. There are all sorts of other goodies in that video, too. More clips of blatant propaganda, more shows being discussed, what I know you're all most excited for, an even deeper dive into Bostonian architecture. The best way you can get access to Nebula is by signing up for this video sponsor, CuriosityStream. They're a documentary streaming service that's also super passionate about education, and we've worked out a deal where if you sign up for CuriosityStream, you get Nebula for free. Which isn't just me. It's all sorts of other great YouTubers in this space, like Second Thought, Just Write, Big Joel, and Lindsay Ellis. Plus, you'll have access to CuriosityStream, which has a documentary catalog with thousands of titles, including some awesome nature documentaries like David Attenborough's Ant Mountain, which was a super interesting watch. Right now, CuriosityStream is offering 26% off their annual plan. It's less than $15 a year for Nebula and CuriosityStream together, and it's a great way to support this channel. Just click the link in the description or go to curiositystream.com slash skip intro to get started. Next time on Coppaganda, we're going to be tackling Lucifer, which I almost included in this video when I was feeling especially psychotic, and then we're going to be hitting Twin Peaks and True Detective. If you want the inside scoop on those projects or to help me even more directly, you can swing on over to Patreon to support me there. We're also watching The Americans together and podcasting about it. It's a fun time. Thanks again for watching. 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