There are two camps in America that hold completely different viewpoints.

One camp, let’s call them the establishment, still believes that we live in a meritocracy, where if you get an education and work hard you can succeed in America. The liberal end of the establishment reads the New York Times, watches Rachael Maddow, and believes that Trump is the cause of all of our problems. The conservative end of the establishment watches Fox News, reads the Wall Street Journal, and believes that liberals are sapping our will with their insistence on political correctness.

The second camp, let’s call us the heretics, has come to believe that the conventional wisdom promulgated by the establishment is bullshit. Instead, we’ve come to believe that our reality here in America much more closely resembles the Matrix, where most of what we see and hear is manufactured to assure our consent. The Deep State/Ruling-Class/Powers-That-Be or whatever you want to call the real people pulling the strings behind the curtain have skillfully utilized their propaganda system, in combination with the years of dumbing down the populace through their public education system to create a powerful narrative that has become the accepted version of reality.

The problem is that some of us have woken up.

We’ve come to believe that the only reason we continue on our current trajectory is because a few sociopathic plutocrats have seized control of the dominant narratives we tell ourselves about what’s going on in the world by buying up the news media people use to keep themselves informed. Remember that Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, also owns the Washington Post, while providing the cloud computing for the CIA. This corporate media manipulates the ways we think and vote to ensure that we will continue supporting the status quo upon which the plutocrats have built their empire.

Not everything is an illusion–you can catch Fox News in moments of lucidity where Tucker Carlson agrees with Bernie Sanders on Amazon’s corporate welfare scam or read the most amazing New York Times articles on culture or science or the arts and it’s all good–it’s just that we’ve learned to be extremely skeptical of  “official” narratives concerning economics and foreign policy.

For instance, as we pass the ten year anniversary of the Wall Street Crash, we don’t believe the hype that everything is back to normal. We have observed that no bankers went to jail and that they got a bail-out while the rest of the country was left to slowly twist in the wind. Meanwhile, Wall Street is up to its old tricks.

What we’re realizing is that this isn’t simply an economic problem but a political one as well. The bankers own Congress and by following their economic prescriptions after the debt bubble has burst means falling living standards, rising inequality, and increasing political turmoil as a result.

Trump is just one of the more ghastly symptoms of this malaise.

In foreign policy, the dominant narrative is Russia-gate, which has been used to re-start the Cold War against Russia, and to dissuade Trump from keeping his campaign pledge of better relations with Russia and a less interventionist foreign policy. If we’re honest, we can recognize that for the establishment, Trump’s talk of a different foreign policy was anathema. For the establishment, it’s all about maintaining an all-American empire at any cost.

Russia-gate has also been an effort by the ruling class to make an example out of Trump to dissuade any future billionaire-ass-clowns from running for high office without permission.

Indeed, the establishment is growing increasingly worried about the heretics lack of trust and their corresponding loss of control of the narrative. This worry has been most pronounced in the epidemic of stories about “fake news.” The establishment has belatedly realized that they need to put down the “populist” opposition on the left and on the right to the spread of global capitalism and the gradual phase-out of national sovereignty that began with Brexit and continued with Trump, so they can continue their plunder.

The only positive we can report is that the awakening of the heretics has breached some of the boundaries between left and right, providing some small hope that we can transcend the divide and rule spell that the 1% and their professional lackeys have cast upon us.