The Great Disconnect: Why Americans Enable The Policies That Harm Them

THE GREAT DISCONNECT

Carl Sagan once warned of a world where people, unable to discern reality from illusion, would slide back into superstition and darkness. He spoke of a time when truth itself would erode, when those in power would operate unseen, and when the people—adrift in confusion—would mistake their own cages for freedom.

That world is not a distant nightmare. It is here.

There is something deeply wrong. Everyone can feel it, like a slow decay beneath their feet. Bank accounts empty faster than they fill. Rent rises while wages freeze in place. Grocery bills climb, medical costs spiral, stability dissolves. And yet, in a cruel inversion of progress, those at the top grow wealthier, more powerful, untouchable. The American Dream, once a promise, has become a taunt.

For the first time in modern history, Americans believe their children will have it worse than they did.

And yet—ask why this is happening, and the answers scatter into confusion. Some say immigrants. Some say laziness. Some say woke policies, or global elites, or government incompetence. A thousand explanations, all carefully placed to conceal the truth. The suffering is real, but its cause? Deliberately obscured.

The ruling class does not fear anger. It fears understanding. And so it engineers a world where people are too exhausted, too distracted, too misled to trace the line between cause and effect.

When more than half of Americans read at a sixth-grade level or lower, the consequences are profound. A public that cannot read deeply cannot think deeply. They are left with emotional shortcuts—gut instincts, scapegoats, and simplistic villains. They do not process complexity; they react. And reaction is controllable. It can be redirected.

A functioning democracy requires an electorate that can critically examine who benefits from their suffering. But an informed public is the last thing the powerful want. Instead, they need a population too overwhelmed to ask questions, too bombarded with noise to see the connections hiding in plain sight.

Once, there were institutions that exposed these connections. Journalism existed not to entertain, but to investigate, to reveal, to hold power accountable. Local newspapers covered local corruption. Regional outlets kept state governments in check. National publications conducted investigations that could bring down presidents.

That era is over.

In its place, we have infotainment, outrage-bait, algorithmic hysteria. Local papers have been gutted, their voices silenced. Investigative teams have been replaced by repackaged press releases. What remains is not journalism, but entertainment disguised as news—a machine that does not seek to inform, but to enrage, distract, and distort.

Truth has been monetized, manipulated, and buried beneath a flood of manufactured outrage. And in its place? Echo chambers designed not to challenge your beliefs, but to weaponize them.

A handful of corporations control nearly everything Americans see, read, and hear. Six conglomerates own the vast majority of media. Tech giants determine which stories are amplified and which are buried. And the billionaires who own these platforms are not neutral actors—they are power brokers, shaping reality itself.

Jeff Bezos, whose empire relies on government contracts, is careful about how his Washington Post covers those in power. Mark Zuckerberg, threatened with legal retaliation, has dismantled fact-checking on Facebook, allowing lies to metastasize unchecked. And then there is Elon Musk—who once styled himself as a renegade but has transformed his social media empire into a state-controlled propaganda machine.

These men do not just control wealth.
They control the narrative.
They control perception itself.

For millions, news no longer comes from careful reporting. It comes from networks that have perfected mass psychological manipulation. Fox News, OAN, Newsmax—these are not journalistic institutions. They are weapons of war, designed to keep their viewers in a state of constant fear, constant outrage, and constant blindness.

And they are spectacularly effective.

The formula is simple:

• Take economic despair and redirect it.
• Turn anger downward, never upward.
• Create an enemy, real or imagined, and make them the villain.

It is not the billionaires who shipped jobs overseas—it’s immigrants.
It is not the corporations hoarding wealth—it’s welfare recipients.
It is not the tax cuts for the ultra-rich that drained the treasury—it’s the “deep state.”

And just like that, the public is trapped in a hall of mirrors, fighting ghosts while the true architects of their suffering continue looting unchecked.

Nowhere is this strategy more devastating than in the greatest economic heist in modern history: the long con of supply-side economics.

Over forty years, fifty trillion dollars has been siphoned from the bottom 90% and funneled to the top 1%.

Not by accident. Not by market forces.
By design.

Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump all championed the same lie: that cutting taxes for the wealthy would create prosperity for all. They sold it as economic science. They preached it as gospel. But the tide did not rise—it receded, leaving the middle and working class stranded. The foundation of their deception? The Laffer Curve—a flimsy, unproven claim that cutting taxes for the rich would magically increase government revenue.

It never worked. It was never meant to work.

It was a justification for legalized theft, a cover story for the most successful upward redistribution of wealth in history.

And yet—through sheer force of repetition, the scam persists. Even as its failures pile up, even as inequality reaches feudal levels, the lie remains untouched, unquestioned, unkillable.

But the true genius of this con was never in its execution.
It was in its concealment.

By making economic policy a fog of jargon and misdirection, they ensured that those most harmed would never understand who was to blame. And when the pain of stagnating wages, of rising costs, of vanishing futures began to set in, they handed people scapegoats to blame.

Not the billionaires.
Not the corporations.
Not the policies that extracted wealth from the people like blood from a vein.

Instead: immigrants, minorities, social programs.
A rotating cast of villains, ever-changing, but always downward-punching.

And so long as people remain trapped in this illusion, the cycle continues.

History has seen this pattern before. Rome, before its fall, was ruled by oligarchs who used distraction and division to maintain control. The great tyrants of the 20th century knew that controlling information meant controlling reality. And now, in the 21st century, the world’s most powerful democracy is unraveling—not by foreign conquest, but by a deliberate campaign of engineered ignorance.

The great challenge of our time is not just political.
It is epistemological.

The ability to see through the illusion, to trace the line between cause and effect, to break the cycle of manufactured ignorance—this is the fight for democracy itself.

Because if they can keep you blind—
They can keep you powerless.

And if they can keep you powerless—
They can take everything.