Americans… We are so arrogant. So confident that we have the best country, the best people, the best government. We’re number One. USA! USA! USA!

But increasingly, we don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. Objectively, America is hardly the best at anything anymore. Our education system sucks, our health care system is unaffordable, our military keeps fighting… and losing. We shut down our space program, we outsourced our industry. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, our teeth are rotting… but hey, we’re still the best!

Bullshit. America has become a mediocre country at best – and things are not getting better.

We might once have been considered “great”. Back when our founders and greatest citizens were writing our mighty constitution and trying to create a system of government which could resist the tendency toward tyranny and treat all men and women equally, promising them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But we’ve fallen far, far away from our original ideals. Today, words like Freedom and Equality have about as much meaning as the nonsense names they keep creating for new drugs. We might just as well be chanting Farxiga! or Eliquis!

American’s don’t want Freedom and Equality, we want Comfort and Safety- these are the new ideals that we hold above all else. We want the freedom to sit on our comfy couches, to overeat and anesthetize ourselves with drugs, drink and digital distractions. Sure, we want equality for people like us… but anyone else; people from other countries, with foreign accents, darker complexions or with differing religious beliefs – well, they are potentially dangerous to our comfy, overindulgent, oblivious lifestyle. We want protection from them. We want safety.

Unfortunately, our desires for Comfort and Safety have made us vulnerable to the manipulative magic of today’s propaganda masters. Oh, I forgot, we don’t believe in propaganda… at least not in this country. No, no, no… you see, we have a FREE PRESS! The American media is owned and supported by independent corporations, so it would be impossible for the government to censor or manipulate The Press… it’s FREE! What we fail to understand is that  – these are the same corporations that spend millions of dollars to elect and control our politicians and that it is the collusion between the Corporate-Owned Press and the Corporate-Owned Government that makes our current state of media manipulation so powerful… and so pernicious.

Our false belief in the Free Press makes us susceptible to thinking that the media would never lie to us or create “FAKE NEWS”. We imagine their only desire is to keep us fully informed about what’s going on in our country and the world. So, if they choose not to cover things like the Trans Pacific Partnership, or the reasons behind the War in Iraq, or the true sources for ISIS and terrorism, or the true dangers of GMO foods, the new Surveillance State, the Bilderberg Group, the Bohemian Grove, 9/11 Truth…it’s because these are simply topics that the people aren’t interested in! It’s just business you see… simple supply and demand… the hidden hand of the market at work! That’s all.

We hold our media blameless for feeding us an endless diet of Kardashian Fast Food because they are just giving the people what they want. Meanwhile we have stopped expecting any real information. Gone are the hard driving exposés of the past, the investigative journalism that employed a small army of gutty journalists who tracked down stories of corruption or conducted unbiased,  in-depth analyses of the important issues of the day. As I write there is a civil war in Syria – one in which the United States is actively arming and training the supposedly “moderate” muslims who oppose the Assad regime. Why? Why are we once again involving ourselves in another country’s civil war? In the wake the most recent unjustified, 10 year war against Iraq, shouldn’t Americans be demanding to know why we are again engaging in the destruction of yet another middle eastern country? Not to mention risking war with their ally Russia?

But no, Americans don’t ask and the media doesn’t tell… because they don’t have to!

What Americans fail to understand is our lack of  intellectual curiosity is not simply some quirky national characteristic – it’s a trait which has been programmed in to us. Just as our obesity has been created by our ridiculous diet of processed, mass-produced foods, our flabby minds have been created by our equally processed, mass-produced information.

We can’t believe that we are the victims of propaganda – because the propagandists have convinced us it’s not possible. 

They fill our screens, our newspapers and magazines with the same scripted, corporate-approved drivel, while prohibiting, censoring and sanitizing a whole list of topics and events which they don’t want us to know, understand or think about. And if some inquiring minds decide to actually seek out information about things “we shouldn’t know about”, they are slapped with the “Conspiracy Theorist” label and vilified as purveyors of “Fake News”.

And sadly, the vast majority of Americans believe them.

Like lab rats answering a bell, we all immediately become slobberingly skeptical about any topic the media has deemed a “Conspiracy Theory” or now, “Fake News”.

This is how contemporary, state-of-the-art propaganda works people! They don’t simply force-feed you false information – that was the old Soviet/Pravda approach. No, the current forms of propaganda are far more subtle and comprehensive, involving not only information… but emotions.

Current propaganda techniques involve creating emotional environments that provide fertile ground for the mind-control programs.

One of Donald Trump’s most powerful and controversial campaign platforms was his promise to register all muslims in the USA. Now, anyone with any sense of American history has to wonder how such a bigoted concept could have found public favor, especially given our country’s proud and fundamental tradition of religious freedom. But it has, because our belief in religious freedom has been trumped by a 15-year campaign of fear-mongering propaganda – with the specter of Islamic Terror as its chief boogeyman.

To our eternal shame, Americans today fear Terrorism far more than they respect and love the ideal of Religious Freedom. That’s not because we have been victims of existential Terrorist attacks… but because we have been force-fed a propaganda campaign formulated to create an irrational fear of terrorism in our minds. This fear campaign has been used to justify 15 years of war in the middle east. It has allowed our government to conduct unspeakable acts of invasion, occupation, assassination, regime change, torture and ongoing drone strikes – all while supposedly religious-freedom-loving Americans simply looked the other way!

The government’s fear propaganda also made possible the dismantling of the Bill of  Rights. They made us so scared of the terrorist boogeymen who might be lurking in our midsts that we allowed them to pass police-state and surveillance measures which significantly decrease our rights  to speech, our freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and our right to due process. So, their fear-mongering too has allowed our government to conduct unspeakable acts against freedom – all while supposedly freedom-loving Americans simply looked the other way.

Why have Americans become so easy to scare? So easy to manipulate? So easy to deceive?

The propagandists love to tell us that the world is full of dangerous players who are hell bent on destroying America… and we believe them. This, in spite of the fact that we have the largest, most powerful military in the world by far. Consider this… The U.S. alone spends close to what the entire rest of the world spends on defense; $711 billion per year. The next closest is China at $143 billion. (And this doesn’t even include the $6.5 trillion in undocumented journal adjustments discovered in a 2015 Defense Department audit.)

We… The United States of America… are the most powerful, most dangerous beast in this jungle.

And yet the propagandists would have us quaking in our boots at the dangers represented by… who? Iraq… Iran… Syria… Korea…?

Please.

They are lying to us people! The news reporters, the politicians, the bankers, the corporate bigwigs, the billionaires… they lie to frighten us and to keep us misinformed. Their goal is keep us scared and stupid… and that’s what we have become.

And the worst part about this is that we have gotten so accustomed to their lies that we don’t even question it anymore. “All politicians lie.” we say. As though that’s simply an unavoidable defect in those who seek power. “The media is biased,” we say. As though we no longer expect – much less demand – truth or objectivity from journalists.

But the most damning thing of all is that MOST OF AMERICANS DON’T REALLY WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH.

We turn our back on information which challenges our pollyanna views about our country and ourselves. We swallow the programs of the media and government without bothering to question their underlying motives – much less their veracity.

Today, there are people who stubbornly believe that we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction – or the even more ridiculous idea that George Bush was angry at Sadaam for trying to kill his daddy! But here is really unfathomable part, even though most Americans now recognize that these were lies… we don’t care! We invaded and occupied a country! We killed millions of innocent people! We tortured enemy combatants!… and we’re all just OK with that?!

Shouldn’t we want to know why? Shouldn’t we demand to know the real reason our government started a war and laid waste to another sovereign nation? WHY HAVE WE NOT DEMANDED SOME LEVEL OF ACCOUNTABILITY FOR THE IRAQ WAR?

The answer is that as a country, as a nation of people, we have become stupefied.

There are powerful forces who have worked for decades to keep us misinformed, confused, distracted, divided… and most of all scared!

The powerful in this country like to keep us stupid and scared, because it makes us extremely easy to manipulate.

A courageous, fully informed, independent thinking American public would never put up with the shit we’ve swallowed over the past 50 years: Bush’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Reagan’s Iran Contra Scandal, Nixon’s Overthrow of Chilean President Salvadore Allende, The Tuskegee Syphilis Tests, Human Radiation Experiments, the CIA’s MKUltra LSD Behavior Modification Experiments, the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird propaganda program, the DoD’s Project SHAD biological and chemical tests on unsuspecting soldiers, The 1962 Operation Northwoods plan for a phony terrorist attack to be blamed on Cuba, the Gulf of Tonkin made-up attack of a U.S. warship to justify the entry into the Vietnam war, Libya’s viagra-fed rape squads, Iraq’s killing of baby’s in Kuwaiti hospitals.

All of these are confirmed examples of incidents when the government LIED TO US in order to avoid any public protest or resistance to actions which were false, unethical, illegal, and antithetical to the ideals and traditions most of us hold dear.

They have lied to us to to justify wars, to conduct horrible experiments on us, to take down foreign governments. They continue to lie to us about ISIS and Russia, about Syria and Libya and Iran. They lie to us about vaccines, and surveillance, and immigrants. They lie to us about the Federal Reserve, and Trade Agreements, and Unemployment Figures.

How are we expected to truly know anything when we are fed this steady diet of misinformation and lies…?

We’re not.

In fact, we’re meant to know very little. We’re meant to be confused and unsure of ourselves – and thus always eager to accept any official story which conveniently offers a plausible reason and explanation for the chaotic evils which appear with increasingly frequency in the world around us.

The world doesn’t hate us because of our freedom… they hate us because our government attempts to impose its will on every other nation on the planet – and rains devastation and ruin on any nation or leader who dares to challenge them.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and now Yemen… all of these countries have received freedom in form of having their economies destroyed, their country reduced to rubble and their governments dismantled.

The power structure of America is controlled by an unholy alliance of Financial, Corporate, Military and Political players who each share an interest in maintaining a position of absolute dominance and control over the world’s financial systems, its currency, its economic and agricultural trade and its sources of energy. They understand that by controlling the money, the food and the energy… they effectively control the world.

And they desperately want to control the world!

But this is a criminal organization – a globally-organized crime syndicate. They don’t have any right to conduct military operations in foreign countries. They have no right to dictate that all oil must be paid for with their debased dollars, or run only through their pipelines. They have no right to make for themselves abstract legal structures and facades which put them and their corrupt activities beyond the reach of our legal systems. They have no right to purchase our judges and politicians so that the entire political and judicial system is bent to their will. They have no right to have turned our press and information system into their own Public Relations and Propaganda dispensers. They have no right to chip away at our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms – surveilling us, conducting illegal search and seizure of our bodies and properties, turning the police into a military occupation force.

They have no right to commit these crimes… and yet they have done so with hardly any opposition or resistance from we, the people.

And why?… Because we are living a lie.

Our entire society – our government, our “free press”, our democratic elections, our justice system, our currency, our stock markets – it’s all false… all an elaborately maintained facade meant to hide the truth that the entire system is geared to benefit a corrupt syndicate of money powers i.e., the billionaires, bankers and corporate, military and security institutions – who are our de facto ruling class.

These people have stolen our country from us! This out-of-control capitalist system has corrupted every facet of our government, every institution of our society. They have debased our political system so that the only policies that succeed are those that enrich and empower their cohorts – any programs, legislation, or ideas which might benefit average citizens are subjected to the slow death of political deadlock. They spend their excess billions lobbying (corrupting) legislators and electing compliant politicians on both sides of the aisle – and hiding behind a false Two-Party system which doesn’t actually divide politicians – only the people.

And worst of all, their propaganda ministers debase our traditions and twist the meaning of our most treasured ideals to convince us that their contemptuous foreign invasions, their rapacious financial schemes, their grasping theft of our wealth and our freedom – are all just part of our great democratic process.

All politicians lie, but in electing Donald J. Trump we have made President someone for whom lies and vast misrepresentations of objective, provable reality are so common that they are his first instinct. And huge portions of our population have become convinced that this charlatan’s vow to Make America Great Again is somehow more believable Obama’s similar promises of Hope and Change.

But what Donald Trump learned from the Obama administration is that a presidential candidate can lie to the American people, make outrageous promises and exploit  their greatest hopes and darkest fears… without any accountability or need to follow through.

Trump’s populist rhetoric was little more than a clever marketing strategy, a con which concealed his true identity as profiteer who now seeks to fill his cabinet with like-minded Billionaires, Bankers, Corporate Executives and Generals… Where previous administrations tried at least to maintain the appearance of legitimacy by filling their cabinet with bureaucrats who were secretly in the pocket of the elite… Trump has taken out the middleman, and put power directly in the hands of the Money Masters themselves.

So despite the horrific outcome of the latest election, regardless of the change in characters, the Money Masters are still in control… and the machine is even more firmly in place than ever.