Of course they can see what is going on. But they are brainwashed so badly that their view of reality is highly distorted. The average US citizen is constantly subjected to relentless propaganda. The US is a democratic republic, but some smart sociopaths have found the weakness of this form of governing. Enough people are so easily manipulated that it becomes information warfare. The people who control the propaganda control the minds of the people who control the government. Government propaganda controls the people who ostensibly control the government. It has turned into a de facto dictatorship in this way. There are a few different factions who struggle with each other to control the people, but they are all united in being hardline statists. On one hand we have the religious people, primarily conservative republicans. They are brainwashed with religion and patriotism. On the other hand we have the socialists, primarily liberal democrats, they are brainwashed by the subverted education system and a malignant desire to 'help others'. They are indoctrinated in so many ways. From the flags waving everywhere you look, people on every news station of television telling them how to think and interpret events, shows on television trying to mold them into an image, the preachers at churches interpreting the holy books for them, the institutes of education mixing propaganda in with the real knowledge they teach to them and more, the list of channels through which they are bombarded with manipulation goes on and on. They are human drones, programmed devices, and the programmers program them in such a way that they will give power to their masters. The Internet is a great tool for fighting this propaganda bombardment. Purely broadcast media is for brainwashing people, multicast is for educating people. But of course the government is even starting to spread their propaganda in sophisticated ways on the internet, using software that allows single agents to manage thousands of pseudonyms easily, to paint an incorrect and government favorable perception of public perception in public perception. Maybe it is impossible for us to stop this. It is only getting worse, the technologies and techniques they use more sophisticated. I become more and more convinced that violence is the only way to stop them. I think that the current government must be overthrown, and democracy abolished. In its place should be a totalitarian yet highly libertarian dictatorship. The people should not have any ability to use any process to remove the libertarian leaders from power. Nobody would have any rightful reason to contest such a political system, it would be the opposite of what is traditionally thought of as totalitarian. Statist totalitarianism is like Stalinism, Nazism, the current political system in North Korea, and to a large extent even the current government of countries like China. Libertarian totalitarianism is the exact opposite of this, there is a group in total power in that they cannot be removed from political power by the will of the people, but this group only protects the people from having their rights violated and being turned into slaves. Essentially the people must have choice removed from them when it comes to political things, and they must be forced into freedom. Normally you may think that people will naturally choose to be free and they do not require being forced into freedom. This may be true of an individual in a vacuum, but the issue is that people want to restrict the freedom of others. We must have a power structure put into place that can prevent the majority of people from victimizing the minorities. The current government slices the people into small groups and turns the large group against each of the smaller subsections it is composed of, and in this way they divide and they conquer.