(Image: William Blake Title The Circle of the Corrupt Officials; the Devils Tormenting Ciampolo.)

For most Americans, and certainly for baby boomers, we remember the first major exposé before Congress during the Church Committee hearings, when William Colby, the head of the CIA admitted under oath that the agency had its tentacles in much of the American mainstream media and promulgated bogus stories for citizens to consume. This revelation shocked and saddened the public, because Americans had long placed their trust in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television networks. It was the first time many realized that forces working behind the scenes were manipulating the truth for their own advantage, and these forces were completely hidden from public view.

For investigative journalists, those hearings opened a Pandora’s box. Around the same time, Daniel Ellsberg’s release of The Pentagon Papers revealed the extent of deception behind America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. We learned that the narratives surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident were fabrications for going to war. As a result of those lies, at least 58,000 American soldiers died and over 300,000 were wounded. Even more tragic, more than 1.5 million Vietnamese, who were mostly civilians, lost their lives. The US left Southeast Asia contaminated with Agent Orange, a toxin that continues to harm human life and the environment to this day. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers became ill after the war, not only from PTSD but also from exposure to this deadly chemical. Once again, those we trusted – presidents, legislators, secular experts, and the media – deceived us. They denied any connection between exposure and illness just as they denied accountability.

The same pattern repeated itself decades later with the invasion of Iraq. The public was again led into a war built upon false narratives and largely perpetuated by the New York Times and its top journalist Judith Miller. Again, thousands of civilians died; the country was poisoned with depleted uranium, leaving yet another lethal legacy for future generations. Across history, countless examples reveal how special interest groups and lobbyists have infiltrated federal agencies in order to dominate the political system and control much of the media. Yet no one has been held accountable for the destruction and suffering that these lies and wars have inflicted upon innocent people.

Fast forward to the Trump and Biden years. Americans were told that the COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective” by the very same media and federal authorities they had trusted for decades. Few acknowledged that much of the science behind these assurances had been captured by private entities and compromised by conflicts of interest. Again, accountability was absent. 

The same was true for the tobacco industry cover up that funded misleading research and public campaigns to deny a link between smoking and cancer. In 2008, the major Wall Street banks’ reckless speculation, completely ignored or denied by rating agencies and public regulators, created a financial crisis that decimated people’s savings and left millions of Americans homeless. Yet few executives faced any consequences, which again confirms suspicions that the system protects power and not people. And then perhaps one of the most unconstitutional and egregious examples was the Cambridge Analytica scandal whereby social media manipulation reached new heights when private data from millions of Facebook users were used to influence elections. 

The average American remains deeply trusting. Americans believe that legislators, journalists, professional institutions, and public health officials possess greater knowledge and therefore act in the public’s best interest. But if our leaders in government, media, and industry have been consistently wrong, from the Korean War onward, why should anyone still believe them? Why do they refuse to admit when they are wrong?

No matter how respected someone may be in their field, if that person dares to challenge the prevailing groupthink in science, medicine, nutrition, geopolitics, or whichever party holds the White House, they are quickly labeled an outcast. They face censorship and ridicule, or even professional punishment. So why doesn’t the public rise up to question these narratives? Why have we grown so complacent?

We are now beginning to see that those who control the White House, Congress, and even the social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, have become handmaidens of the CIA, Homeland Security, the national security state, and the military-industrial complex. Yet unlike in earlier eras, none of these so-called puppet masters have been held to account. That, however, may finally be changing. James Comey’s perjury before Congress was recently exposed thanks to declassified documents released by Tulsi Gabbard. The curtain is beginning to lift on decades of corruption within federal agencies. Figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are now leading what some see as a revolutionary crusade for transparency and a systemic reform in our federal healthcare system.

But there remains a deeper problem and it lies in the silence of average Americans. In most cases, the mainstream media continues to defend those now being exposed and continues to reinforce the very institutions under scrutiny. This should serve as a wake-up call; we should not place blind trust in government agencies, the media, or even the scientific and medical establishments. The Pentagon and its allies operate within a self-serving hierarchical cabal, which has become insulated from accountability. Somewhere along the way, we lost the distinction between subjective belief and objective truth.

And now we are witnessing the cabal of corporate and bureaucratic power, which once controlled narratives from behind closed doors has been joined, and in some ways replaced, by a new alliance rooted in grievance, nationalism, Christian patriotism, and populist fervor. Under the Trump administration, ideology has become a weapon of identity to transform disinformation into a badge of loyalty. The same tactics once used by corporate lobbyists to manipulate markets are now being employed by demagogues to coerce emotions. Nationalism, cloaked in the rhetoric of fanatical patriotism, has become the new currency of control. Yet it serves the same ends to divide, distract, confuse and dominate. What was once the propaganda of corporate power has evolved into the propaganda of tribal belonging, which may be an even more volatile force because it falsely masquerades as freedom and liberty.

Life itself is not a science, nor should science ever dictate what life means to us. Credentials, titles, university degrees and institutional power do not confer moral authority or wisdom. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” To paraphrase, the purpose of propaganda is not to make people believe lies but to make them believe nothing. Propaganda and fear work together to dissolve a shared sense of truth. When citizens are bombarded by contradictions, falsehoods and shifting narratives, they eventually stop believing in anything at all. That loss of belief makes them more malleable and easier to control.

When people believe in nothing, they become vulnerable to believe anything. That is where tribalism begins, and where volatile separation and division take root. Those in power want you to believe only in them. This is why we see no massive peaceful marches to end wars in the Middle East or Ukraine. We have come to trust our unhinged ideologies and the political identities they represent more than we trust ourselves. Why can’t we look beyond our narrow belief systems to find common ground?

Propaganda has reached every corner of daily life. Consider that more than 100 million American adults are now clinically obese, and 74% are overweight. This is not simply a matter of personal choice. It reflects a failure of truth. The public has been misled about what they eat and how food affects their health. Never has a Surgeon General stood before the nation to declare that we must stop the insanity of industrial food and its devastating impact on our wellbeing. If we were completely honest with ourselves, we might begin to ask: What beliefs control our perception of reality? How often have we trusted, only to discover that we were wrong?

When you look in the mirror, who stands beside you? Is it the CEO of McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, the executives at Pfizer, or the heads of MSNBC, CNN, and Fox? Because without these figures feeding our complacency, many of us would finally break free from our comfort zones. It is time to stop pretending we are uninformed and powerless. We can no longer afford to remain passive in the face of deception and the nation’s growing tyranny.

History shows that breakdowns often precede breakthroughs. Yet today we seem to be racing toward catastrophe at accelerating speed. When all the assumed rules of how society operates no longer seem to make sense, collapse becomes inevitable. America, we have a problem.